It has been interesting listening to, and reading, people complain about the micro-parties like the "Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party" (who look like pinching a spot in Victoria despite only capturing about .5% of the primary vote) getting into the Senate. There have been calls for a reform of the voting system. However the system is not broken. It is just that the really small parties have found a way of exploiting people's laziness.
In a preferential voting system, you get to decide where your votes flow. You number all the candidates in the order you would prefer them to get in. That way if your first preference gets eliminated, your vote goes to the next available preference (i.e. whoever is next on your list that has not yet been eliminated). In the senate, even if your candidate gets in, a proportion of your vote flows to your next preference (a formula related to how many votes they have over the 'quota').
However in voting for the senate, the majority of people abdicate their responsibility to the party of their choice by putting a "1" above the line rather than filling in all the boxes below the line. This is understandable since there were 97 people on the Victorian ballot paper this year, more in NSW. However it means that the party chosen gets to direct the preferences whichever way they choose rather than whichever way the voter chooses. Many of the small parties preferenced each other over the other parties, and some of them managed to get the medium sized parties to preference them. So the Australian Motoring Enthusiasts got preferences from every party except the following:
Liberal/The Nationals
Australian Labor Party
The Greens
Australian Christians
Australian Democrats
Country Alliance
Secular Party
Socialist Equality Party
If you were in Victoria, and voted above the line, unless you voted for one of the above parties, your vote helped get Ricky Muir of the aforementioned party into a position where he is expected to win a senate seat. That is how a party which got 11770 of the approximately 2.3 million votes counted so far managed to get into a position to win a seat.
It is not that the system is broken, it is just that people don't choose to use it properly. Of course there is still the chance that the 800000 or so Victorian whose votes are yet to be counted (early voters, postal votes and below the line voters) might just edge Ricky Muir out. Or we might have preferred him to the other options available.
