Few Australians really understand or care about the intricacies of counting Senate votes, making it even more important to get it right. For that reason Senate voting reform rushed through over a three-week parliamentary period and clouded by threats of an early double dissolution election is dangerous.
It looks like the move is aimed primarily at getting rid of micro-party senators just two years into their six year terms. No amount of rationality can remove that impression.
I understand the rationale behind these reforms. The introduction of optional preferential voting has been a long time coming at the federal level. The states have already seen the merits of this idea.
Unfortunately these reforms apply optional preferential voting to above the line party voting but not to below the line individual candidate voting as previously recommended by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters.
The reforms have been sold as eliminating those micro-parties which occasionally manage to get themselves elected on a tiny percentage of the primary or first preference vote. This motivation is reasonable when it is pure and uncontaminated by self-interest. Unfortunately that is not the case here.
It is not good enough just to react viscerally to the success of these micro-parties even if they have brought it on themselves by being too successful and too irritating for the established players, and despite the prominence of so-called preference whisperers gaming the system for micro parties by stitching together unlikely preference deals.
There is plenty of self-interest and hypocrisy on the part of supporters of the reforms (Labor has backed out at the last moment adding to the confusion). Preference voting of any sort encourages preference deals. So let's not be too self-righteous about the merits of our system.
Look at the broader democratic context. Successful preference networks among micro-parties have only been possible because the Senate vote share of the established major parties has fallen to such a very low level.
The anti-major party feeling among a significant minority of voters cannot just be condemned as mere populism. Much of it relates to the obvious internal failings of the big parties, which decide more than 90 per cent of our parliamentarians. All of our representatives in safe seats and most of our senators are decided not by voters but by major party pre-selection bodies whose processes are dominated and abused by the controllers of internal party factions.
Justice for voters as an inspiring rallying call for electoral