telsor said:
OK, so we go to proportional representation as a whole..
so we would now be governed by a coalition of libs/nats/clp along with a bunch of nutty right wing/religious groups...ff, one notion, CDP...( the parties mentioned would have over 50% of the primary vote on current figures ).
Are you suggesting that would be a better alternative?
Well - I just looked at the total votes, nationwide, so far... the site is
http://vtr.aec.gov.au/NationalTotal-12246.htm
Just some quick calculations with a 76 seat senate, nationally-based proportional representation. Result is that 70 of the seats go to parties fulfilling full quotas, without the need for preferences. The breakdown is:
Libs - 31
ALP - 29
Greens - 5
Nationals - 4
Family First - 1
Democrats - 0
One Nation - 0
The other six seats would go to preferences, and honestly the only parties outside the five parties with clear quotas that I could see winning seats are the Dems and One Nation. So the result - at least for this election - would be very close to the reality, without any of the CDP, CEC etc style parties getting in.
With only half of the preference seats, we'd again have 38 Coalition Senators, and Family First (perhaps also One Nation) again having the balance of power. Ouch.