1
00:00:05,330 --> 00:00:22,309
So, can you lay out the sort of
political landscape in Australia for
listeners? People whether or not
they've been here a long time, what
other sort of options that people
have to go for political parties and
what do those political parties the
biggest ones at least represent?

2
00:00:22,940 --> 00:00:29,243
So, we're really a two party system.
Now, that's an oversimplification,.

3
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It's very similar to the U.S.,
Britain.

4
00:00:30,535 --> 00:00:57,049
Very similar to the U.S., to Britain
and yeah there are multiple parties
and in fact I say two parties, but we
have the Australian Labour Party,
which is on the left side of
politics, came out of the unions base
and still has a heavy association
with the unions, and then we have the
more conservative parties, the
Liberal and National parties, which
are not coalition and have been in a
coalition for a long time.

5
00:00:57,410 --> 00:01:07,579
So, while they are officially two
separate parties, we know already
that they are a coalition and that
the combined vote will be what gets
them into government or not.

6
00:01:08,150 --> 00:01:10,063
Can you explain what the unions are
or were when they originally came
out?

7
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Yeah. So, unions there they're
workers unions so, you know, various
work situations...

8
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They're groups, right? That represent
the interest of workers.

9
00:01:22,870 --> 00:02:24,440
Yes. So, builders workers, nurses,
teachers who typically there are
large numbers of people doing very
similar jobs. And so the unions are
representing those people in terms of
collective bargaining for conditions
and wages, in terms of providing
services to those people. So in
addition to just arguing about your
pay rises and those sort of things
they are also providing legal
services and often financial services
and those sorts of things to the
workers. So, it's a very worker
oriented organizational structure and
that's where the Labour Party, the
Labour Party came out of the union
movement and it's the oldest party in
Australia and so it's been around for
more than 100 years. There have been
conservative parties that have come
and gone, but the Liberal Party was
started in the 1940s so, it's still
reasonably old. Given that our
country as a single country has only
been around since 1981 since
federation.

10
00:02:24,684 --> 00:02:25,659
Still pretty young.

11
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Yeah, it's only 118 years old as a
nation, obviously, from a human
residential existence we've had, you
know, there've been humans living
here our indigenous populations have
been here for at least 40 some would
say 60000 years or more and Europeans
and then others have been here for
over 200 years. But we are a colony
of Britain for the first half of
that. And so we've really only been a
nation of our own since to 1981.

12
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So, if if Labour represents the
worker and it's a bit more... It's
closer to the socialist end of the
spectrum, right?

13
00:03:02,530 --> 00:03:17,680
It's that social socialist left
leaning party. The Liberal Party and
the National Party are more of the
capitalist business right wing
parties in the country.

14
00:03:17,830 --> 00:03:18,970
They sort of represent big business,
right?

15
00:03:19,391 --> 00:03:28,345
Represent big business. Yeah.
Typically it's a bit of a
simplification, but that's basically
where it sits. And then there's a
number of minor parties.

16
00:03:28,900 --> 00:03:29,900
Not for actual miners.

17
00:03:30,180 --> 00:03:48,460
No, not for actual miners, minor
parties, not miner parties, smaller
parties. Thank you for the
correction. The Green Party is that
came out of the environment movement,
but is now spread to more of
environment social justice those
sorts of things.

18
00:03:48,550 --> 00:03:51,128
And when did that spring up in the
90s and 80s or even earlier?

19
00:03:51,640 --> 00:03:59,714
The 80s, really and as a sort of
ground roots party and it was one or
two people that were really fighting
to get into politics at that stage.

20
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Was that Tasmania where it originated
from because of the logging of
forests there?

21
00:04:03,400 --> 00:04:11,093
Yeah, logging of forests and the the
damming of rivers because the island
state in Australia, Tasmania, has a
lot of mountains and therefore a lot
of rivers.

22
00:04:15,260 --> 00:04:16,454
And a lot of forests, right?

23
00:04:16,899 --> 00:04:31,089
And a lot of forest but a lot of
their, almost entirely, their
electricity comes from hydro
electricity or now it comes from the
mainland as well. So, whatever they
can't make having hydro they get from
coal burn in Victoria, New South
Wales.

24
00:04:31,240 --> 00:04:39,707
Because I think my earliest memories
of the Green Party were the all those
people chaining themselves to trees
and and trying to prevent the
bulldozers coming and taking the
forest down.

25
00:04:39,923 --> 00:04:53,405
Yeah and that's it. It came out of
the environmental movement in the
1980s and but now they're...Yes they
are still concerned about
environmental issues, but they're
more of the sort of the lefter side
of politics even than the Labour
Party.

26
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They take on all those issues, right?

27
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Social justice issues, gender issues,
more broad environmental issues
rather than just conservation, but
they're right into making climate
change issues are really clear...

28
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LGBTI issues, immigration issues.

29
00:05:12,130 --> 00:05:40,000
Immigration issues. Yeah it's more
the social justice sort of end of
politics, but they would say also
that what they are about is providing
an economic vision of the country
that was based around a fair go for
everybody, which ironically used to
be the Labour Party it was the fair
go for workers and the Greens are now
saying that it's more about lifestyle
and standard of living than it is
about work conditions.

30
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Everyone seems to use that phrase
though, right? That's a very
Australian phrase, give someone a
fair go, can you xplain what that
means?

31
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Oh yeah. I think it's probably comes
from that that idea that we would
like to think that everybody is
treated equal.

32
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And has the opportunity has the
opportunity to succeed.

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Has the opportunity to succed, has a
right to healthcare, education,
general services in the community,
those sort of things. I suspect
that's come out of our history of
well, the convicts, first of all,
from from Britain because we had no
other than, excuse me, in the
original settlement of the country
from Europe where there was a
definite class system in that you're
either a convict, a free settler or
you're a film part of the military or
the police.

34
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Was it in the structure too?

35
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Yeah it was structured that way.

36
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The guys at the top where the
military and the officers and the,
you know...

37
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The government.

38
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And then you had the free settlers
that were farmers.

39
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The free settlers that were mostly
farmers.

40
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Or workers.

41
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And skilled work people and then...

42
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Your slaves.

43
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Yeah, well yeah, convicts and look a
lot of the convicts, and we're
probably getting off the topic of the
election, but a lot of...

44
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I think it's important to talk about
that sort of give an idea of the
Australian culture, though, to a
certain extent and how we...because I
wanted to tie it into how we differ
from Britain and I our politicians
are much different compared to the
British ones where we're much
more...you're going to hear them on
TV and say things like give him a
fair go. How's it going mate? You
know, they're going to play up how
not upper class they are.

45
00:07:15,630 --> 00:07:18,190
To play out how Australian my class.
Yeah.

46
00:07:18,280 --> 00:07:31,029
Look,you know, realistically we
have... Financially they're always
going to be differences, but we don't
have a class system. That has
typically been for hundreds of years
in Britain much less so now than it
used to be.

47
00:07:31,097 --> 00:07:44,455
It originates from them, right?
Because we did have all of these
farmers and, you know, white convicts
that came out, European convicts that
then made up the bulk of the country.
So, you had effectively this majority
that were lower class.

48
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Exactly.

49
00:07:45,083 --> 00:07:47,570
And rejected upper class people,
right?

50
00:07:47,710 --> 00:07:55,019
Yeah and look the non indigenous
population of this country can only
go back to 1788.

51
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And most of us don't.

52
00:07:56,070 --> 00:07:57,252
And most of us don't.

53
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I've been asking around recently to
see, like I did that workshop
recently in Shepparton and it was in
a church with a lot of Australian
farmers and I was asking them was
like are many of you guys from
convict heritage? And they're like
no, no, more recent, British settlers
that came out in the late eighteen
hundreds and since then.

54
00:08:15,350 --> 00:08:18,215
Early nineteen hundreds even up to
the 1950s and 60s there was a lot of
immigration.

55
00:08:18,216 --> 00:08:21,389
Which is the same for our story as
well.

56
00:08:21,570 --> 00:08:38,039
Yeah. My father was an immigrant to
Australia in 1950 from Britain,
whereas my mother's family had been
here for much longer, extending back
160 plus years. They weren't
convicts, but they were in fact they
arrived just at the end of the
convict era.

57
00:08:38,159 --> 00:08:39,601
In the late 18 hundreds.

58
00:08:39,876 --> 00:08:41,742
Mid 18, 1853.

59
00:08:42,780 --> 00:09:06,330
And that was the Victorian gold rush
that they came at here for which we
can talk about in another exciting
episode of chats with Pete's dad, but
so, getting back to the differences
in the political system as well
between Australia and Britain as an
example and many other countries is
that in addition to having the
enforced compulsory voting we also
have a preferential voting system
which many other countries don't.

60
00:09:06,890 --> 00:09:07,875
Can you explain that a little bit?

61
00:09:07,876 --> 00:09:36,470
Yeah. So, a typical election in many
countries is you just vote for the
person that you choose out of whoever
is sitting in the election and it's
whoever gets the highest number wins.
Whereas in Australia you have to get
50 per cent of the vote in order to
be declared the winner. And many
times in the first count of the first
vote people don't get 50 per cent and
so...

62
00:09:36,750 --> 00:09:39,018
Because you've got more than two
people going for the seat, and the
votes are spread all across all of
them.

63
00:09:41,190 --> 00:10:13,024
So, in a typical election for the
lower house, and we can talk about
the lower house and the upper house,
which we call the Senate in
Australia. In a typical lower house,
which is the house that forms the
government and the prime minister is
the head of the government of the
lower house, you might have five,
six, seven, eight people who are in a
in a particular election and they are
all local elections so you're not
voting for a party, you're voting for
a person to represent your local
area.

64
00:10:13,319 --> 00:10:16,876
So, you mean you'll have your
liberal, your labour, your greens,
your national...

65
00:10:17,020 --> 00:10:42,320
And a few of the smaller parties and
some independents, anybody can run
for parliament. You don't have to be
a member of their political party.
So, you might have seven or eight
people. And so, when you or I turn up
to vote, whether it be by postal or
whether I have to turn up on Saturday
morning, I have to fill in in order
for it to be a legitimate vote. I
have to fill in, say there are eight
people, I have to fill my preferences
in from one three to eight.

66
00:10:42,790 --> 00:10:43,601
And if you don't, it doesn't count.

67
00:10:43,602 --> 00:10:45,564
If you don't, it's declared as...

68
00:10:45,909 --> 00:10:46,839
Your vote's turfed.

69
00:10:46,840 --> 00:11:16,828
Yeah it's gone. It's not a valid
vote. It's called an informal vote.
Now, an informal vote could be just
where you screwed up or it could also
just be you right as my father
apparently used to, used to just
write none of the applicants is
suitable and put that piece of paper
in, but so what happens with that
preferential system then is if the
first round of counting, in other
words, all of the first votes doesn't
declare a winner as somebody who gets
more than 50 per cent, then they take
all of the people who were at the
eighth ranked ones and go to and just
take them out of the equation and
then recount.

70
00:11:25,399 --> 00:11:26,592
Until you get a proportion of someone
gets 50%.

71
00:11:27,240 --> 00:12:18,309
Until you get somebody who's got 50
percent. So, effectively that's what
you're doing, is that they're
reallocating the votes of all of the
lowest ones in terms of what are the
second preferences. So, you know,
will in our seat down here there
might be, I don't know what the
actual number is, but let's say it's
50000 people that are voting in the
seat that we're voting for in this
region. If 20000 people vote for one
person, then they haven't got 50 per
cent, but they might only be a
thousand people who voted for the
eighth person on that list. So, those
thousand votes of those people there
they then go and look at who was the
person that they chose a second, will
give them the first vote. If we go on
and then it just so effectively
you're just dropping people out from
the bottom until you've got somebody
who's declared the winner with more
than 50 percent of the vote.

72
00:12:18,370 --> 00:12:22,791
So, why is that system favoured to
just taking the person who gets the
most whether it's by a margin or a
huge amount?

73
00:12:22,950 --> 00:12:27,752
Well, what it amounts to is... That I
think it's a fairer system, it's
obviously more complicated.

74
00:12:28,192 --> 00:12:31,469
Because you sort of...you're
calculating the overall will of the
people.

75
00:12:31,470 --> 00:12:49,720
Yes. Exactly. So, instead let's say
there are eight people here and and
rather than 20000, let's say that the
person who got the most votes only
got 10000 out of 50000. So, only 20
percent of people have voted for
them. And if we have that, well, the
first count is the only one we do
then a person wins with only 20 per
cent of the vote.

76
00:12:49,721 --> 00:12:51,128
Even if the rest of the people didn't
vote, put them at the bottom.

77
00:12:51,129 --> 00:13:09,700
So, 80 percent of the people didn't
want them to be there. And so that
preferential system where in the end
you get the person who the majority
of people wanted and either as their
first, second, third, fourth or fifth
or whatever it was, but the majority
of people wanted higher up on their
scale than anybody else.

78
00:13:09,820 --> 00:13:17,932
So, was this what happened recently
with Fraser Anning after he sort of
came into controversy on the news
they found that he'd only actually
gotten 19 votes or was that another
system?

79
00:13:18,650 --> 00:13:45,070
But that's a different, a slightly
different system because he's in the
Senate and the Senate is peculiar in
itself because the Senate is each...
As opposed to the lower house is
every seat so, every little area in
the country has roughly the same
number of people in it. And the
Electoral Commission shuffle the
boundaries of those to try and keep
them roughly the same.

80
00:13:45,100 --> 00:13:46,843
So, for example, here we're in
Corangamite, it's not Ocean Grove,
it's not Geelong.

81
00:13:51,270 --> 00:13:55,772
It's a wider Geelong area, excluding
the city of Geelong.

82
00:13:55,900 --> 00:13:57,540
In order to try and get the
proportion equal.

83
00:13:58,200 --> 00:14:25,570
Yeah. And so, we vote in that in that
seat. We elect one person and so on,
but in the Senate you're effectively
the Senate actually has
representation according to each
state. So, each state has the same
number of people in it, regardless of
the population of the state. So,
Victoria and New South Wales have ten
times the population of Tasmania, but
we have the same number of senators.
That's because we have a federation
of states. That's how our country was
created.

84
00:14:26,020 --> 00:14:27,647
And so it's more like today U.S. in
that sense is it?

85
00:14:27,826 --> 00:14:48,789
Similar, very similar. Yeah. And so,
in the Senate what you're doing is
that you can if you choose to take
the full Senate paper for the entire
state that you are electing in and
that might have 40 or 50 people who
are sitting in the Senate and if you
want to you can put your votes of
one, two, three, four, five all the
way down to 50.

86
00:14:48,940 --> 00:14:49,972
It tends to be the thing most people
skip.

87
00:14:50,650 --> 00:14:52,931
Most people skip because it's just
tedious and painful.

88
00:14:53,140 --> 00:14:54,914
In which case you let the party that
you voted for...

89
00:14:55,240 --> 00:15:16,519
You let the party that you voted for
choose and so, it's the above the
line voting or the below the line
voting and the below the line voting
is where you have to put a number in
every, a sequential number, in every
box on the paper above the line
voting is you just choose a party and
then that party will have registered
their preferences. And so, typically
what you are doing is voting for a
party.

90
00:15:16,690 --> 00:15:18,649
Yeah, not a person.

91
00:15:18,770 --> 00:15:33,421
And so, what happens then is that
it's the parties the vote that
determines the number of senators.
So, and we have 12 senators from each
state and there are a number of
others that are made up from the
territories because we don't we have
territorial arrangements in the
country, as well as states.

92
00:15:37,289 --> 00:15:38,570
We have states and territories.

93
00:15:38,600 --> 00:17:06,709
So, 12 senators and we typically have
half Senate election so we have an
election every three years where the
whole lower house gets re-elected but
only half of the Senate. So, in a
senator sits for six years a lower
house member sits for three years and
obviously you can keep getting
re-elected, but and typically we turn
the Senate over only half the Senate
at a time and say you're only voting
for six people, effectively, to get
in to represent your state in any one
federal election. And so, what
happens then is that typically the
majority of the votes will go to the
Labour Party or the Liberal National
Party because a huge proportion of
people will vote for one or the other
of those. And so, they will get,
typically, of those six, they'll get
two each and then the other two are
really up for grabs as to who's got
the next highest numbers of votes,
but what can happen because of the
preferential voting system and
because of the huge numbers that are
involved in there where you've got
them instead of being individual
people that you're voting for you're
voting for a party is that you get
these funny things that happen that
somebody can be... If you can for
instance finish second last in a vote
and then when the last person drops
out, their preferences get
reshuffled. And if you've got, if
it's second last vote gets a lot of
preferences in the last one, they
jump ahead of the next last person
and then next last person, and the
next last person and all of a sudden
you can end up getting in with a very
small number of votes.

94
00:17:06,740 --> 00:17:20,149
So, that tends to be one of the
biggest things we see on TV with
people sort of taking umbrage or
complaining about our political
system, right? Because sometimes you
end up with these people in high
positions who never actually got
voted by the public.

95
00:17:20,150 --> 00:17:20,255
Yeah.

96
00:17:20,381 --> 00:17:26,869
And we've had that more recently with
quite a lot of premieres, right? Not
premiers, prime ministers.