Trying to rank the distasteful
I have been asked by multiple readers how to approach the task of preferencing distasteful parties, of whom there are many on the ballot. I worked through my ballot yesterday evening, so I thought I might as well set out my approach.
First, though, I want to emphasise some important aspects of voting for the House of Representatives and the Senate, which use different electoral systems.
For the House: you must rank all candidates. Do so in the order of your preference. There are occasionally strategic considerations, especially for a left-wing voter where a left-leaning party cannot win the seat and you would prefer a centrist indie to beat a right-wing Lib/Nat (see recommendation section of my teals review). But as a general principle, you can safely rank candidates from most liked to most disliked.
For the Senate, you have two options:
Vote above the line: you vote for parties. You must indicate at least six preferences, and then you can give as many additional preferences as you wish. This is the option that suits most voters. The further you preference, the more powerful your vote potentially will be.
Vote below the line: you vote for individual candidates. You must indicate at least twelve preferences, and then you can give as many additional preferences as you wish. If you want to express a preference (good or bad) for ungrouped independents, or if you want to adjust the order of candidates within a party's ticket, or if you want to mix and match candidates across party tickets, you must vote this way. The further you preference, the more powerful your vote potentially will be.
(for the electoral-act-knowers: yes, there are savings provisions for both the House and the Senate so that some ballots marked contrary to the instructions are counted where the voter's intention is clear, but I see little value in dwelling on these; mark your ballot per the instructions!)
Whether you vote above or below the line in the Senate, you need to decide if you will express a preference for all parties/candidates, or stop somewhere after 6 ATL/12 BTL. As a basic principle: you should keep preferencing on your Senate ballot as far as you feel able. To play a role in the outcome, you should include at least one of the majors or a more prominent minor party with a chance of getting to 14.3% after preferences (i.e. the quota for a Senate seat). For the left-wing voter, that means that if you don't distribute full preferences, you should at least include the Greens and/or Labor.
I am a completist. I will be voting below the line. And I will preference the lot. I took the time to mark my 2019 NSW Legislative Council ballot all the way to number 346 to put Mark Banasiak, lead candidate of the Shooters Party, in last place a fortnight after the Christchurch mosque terrorist attack by an NSW-born-and-raised gunman (I must wearily note yet again that Australia has never properly grappled with the fact it produced this ghoul and many Australians do not know the Christchurch terrorist was Australian even if they remember something terrible happened across the ditch—which some do not, to this nation's deep discredit).
But how to decide who to put last? And where to rank parties more broadly? I use three parties as dividing lines: Greens, Labor, Liberal. As the last paragraph should suggest to you, I also recognise the Loathing Principle: who do you despise so much that you are itching to put them last?
I ask two questions when I contemplate what side of the dividing line a minor party sits (with thanks to b_auspol for conceptualising the second in a recent chat). They are: is this party to the political left of the dividing line? And what is the Failure Condition of voting for this party in case they win a seat in the Senate? By Failure Condition, that is: if the candidate performs poorly or does things I do not like, how bad are the outcomes likely to be relative to other parties?
Let's use an example. I eat meat and see no ethical issue with this, but an Animal Justice Senator might put up a bill mandating veganism. This hypothetical bill, however, would never pass parliament, while the the AJP Senator's contributions to other legislation, based on years of experience of AJP reps in the NSW and Victorian upper houses, is that they will aim to pull Labor left on big issues of the day. So, the AJP Senator is better than a generic Labor backbencher; the core values of the AJP might not appeal much to me but their broader principles are left of Labor. Hence, AJP falls left of the dividing line and I will give them a better preference than Labor.
But, by contrast, Legalise Cannabis has poor quality control on their candidates. They might elect someone whom it is welcome to have in the Senate (hi Fiona Patten!). But also a Legalise Cannabis Senator could be an anti-vax or anti-wind-turbine freak (hi Sophia Moermond!) who in a tight Senate sinks important legislation. So, absent any other knowledge, a generic Legalise Cannabis candidate risks worse Failure Conditions than a generic Labor candidate, and I will thus preference Legalise Cannabis below Labor. And even worse is, say, a HEART candidate who wins a seat: if you're lucky they are just some leftover hippie but the Failure Condition is kids die because they stymie vaccination legislation in a finely-balanced parliament.
In terms of placing parties to the left of my dividing lines, it is a pretty small field these days between Labor and Liberal. I populate it with random independents, Fusion—whose failures this election have been disappointing, as I had in the past usually placed them and constituent parties left of Labor—and maybe Sustainable Australia. I think it is also important to know the alignment of your Labor and Liberal(/National/whatever Coalition party) candidates. I elevate Labor Left above Labor Right, and moderate Libs/Nats above hard-liners.
The even tougher decision is what to do about the parties to the right of the Liberals and their Coalition partners. There are many such parties this election. At this point, you need to make difficult calls about who is relatively worse. This is where the Loathing Principle comes into play: which party offends you on a visceral, personal level this year? Which bigoted candidate will you feel especially gleeful pencilling in last? I have at various elections made a point of putting last the Shooters as described above, Libertarians as the most hate-filled on the ballot, Citizens Electoral Council as dangerous conspiracy theorists, and Rise Up Australia for having a leader who claimed the Black Saturday bushfires were divine punishment for giving women bodily autonomy. If there is a party you truly hate—if you, for instance, really want Lyle Shelton to eat even more shit by putting Family First last—then do it. It'll feel good. Voting all the way below the line can be deeply satisfying even within the privacy of the polling booth.
More generally, trying to rank the parties is tough but here is how I view the relative evil. Parties that are racist want to exclude some of the community (or potential community in the form of prospective migrants). They can make gestures towards religion and purported Christian traditions but it's not often the core of their agenda. Parties that espouse fundamentalist Christianity (or another religion, but we have only so far had fundie Christian parties of various denominations) want to legislate their faith for the whole community. And they have a fringe interpretation of said faith that many fellow believers would repudiate. Plus, they are usually also racists. Ergo, I generally rate Christian fundamentalist parties worse than racist parties.
But then there are dangerous conspiracy theorists whose ideas have no basis in reality. They come in various forms, such as sovereign citizens and LaRouchean fantasists, and these people having any influence or power in society would be most destructive. They cannot listen to reason and will do things that harm even the members of their own racial and/or religious community as well as target out-groups in the most venomous ways. For me, they have the worst Failure Conditions; if I must, I would take a Pauline Hanson over a Lyle Shelton, and both over a Ralph Babet or Rod Culleton. So, I put conspiracy cranks below fundies or racists. And there are a lot of them today; hi, Trumpet of Patriots!
For these reasons, as a WA voter this time around, my bottom three parties are the Citizens Party (longstanding nutjobs with deeply unsound ideas), Trumpet of Patriots (unhinged Trumpists), and the Great Australian Party (delusional sovereign citizens whose ideas have no connection with reality and whose goals are dangerous). I am delighted to have the opportunity to put Rod Culleton last on Saturday.
