The
Governor General has an obligation if not a requirement to act on the
advice of the Prime minister. A trigger exists and should be used to
call a double dissolution.
The government should introduce changes to the electoral act t remove anomalies in the way the Senate vote is counted.
The system in place was designed to facilitate a manual counting
process and in doing so has distorted the proportionality of the count.
We need to introduce a weighted transfer system with a reiterative
redistribution of preferences where the ballot is reset and restarted on
each exclusion.
The guiding principle being that ballot preferences allocated to
excluded candidates should be redistributed as if the excluded
candidates had not stood.
With a reiterative weighted counting system the government could
introduce a representative threshold of 25% TO 33% of the quota.
Above-the-line votes should be equally distributed across all candidates within the group.
The order of exclusion within a group being the reverse order of the
candidates in that group published on the ballot paper ballot paper.
This would prevent misuse and gaming of the vote by third parties and
give each party equal weighted representation. One vote one value
A further issue of consideration should be the abolition of the
"Droop Quota (X/(Y+1)+1" and replace it withe a pure proportional (x/y)
calculation of the quota.
Following these changes the government should proceed with calling a double dissolution election by the end of the year.
