And so it is underway. A High Court challenge has been announced by Senator Bob Day of the Family First Party and Liberal Democratic Senator David Leyonhjelm to the constitutional legality of the electoral reforms that last week kept Canberra's entire political establishment up for hours.
The government's voting reforms, which passed in the Senate with the assistance of the Greens and Senator Nick Xenophon, mean that voters can allocate their own preferences above the line on the Senate ballot paper at any election after 1 July.
If considering below the line voting, electors will have to number at least six squares, a point designed to make sure the vote 'has a reasonable life upon the distribution of preferences'. This effectively puts pay to the idea of group voting tickets, ostensibly eliminating the micro-party preference game.
Day's fighting words centred on disenfranchisement, specifically of 3 million voters. 'The Liberal Party, Nationals, Greens and Nick Xenophon teamed up to get rid of independent senators and minor parties. We think that is undemocratic.'
Prior to the electoral changes, Leyonhjelm claimed that similar reforms to the NSW upper resulted in a 'default to a "one above the line" choice for vast numbers of people, which will mean everyone who votes for anyone other than a major party' will result in that vote's exhaustion.
A point of difference to the current Commonwealth change, however, is that voters in a federal election are required to number more squares than the mere single option in NSW.
The arguments by Day may well be considered dramatic, but they are significant enough to warrant a concern about what will happen in the highest court in the country. In point of fact, when 1375 votes went missing in the official count of the West Australian half-senate election in 2013, the High Court sitting as the Court of Disputing Returns declared the result null, necessitating a re-run.
This unfortunate turn in Australian politics also reflects the continued scepticism, if not outright hostility, of traditional party machines which spout the rhetoric of political gaming as if it were unique to micro parties. Labor's Gary Gray typified this when he expressed unhappiness at his own party's opposition to the voting reforms, suggesting it preferred 'ballot manipulators' and 'pop-up' parties.
"The notion of a 'deal free' environment that manifests actual voting intention is a patent fiction. Party machineries constantly make tactical decisions to preference individual candidates that have policies less opposed than others."
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