Re: Socialist Alliance vote in NSW

[Ben Courtice <benj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tom O'Lincoln quoted, on the Marxism list:

"In the legislative council, the state's upper house, it polled 5,029 votes
out of 2,560,482 counted. For those of you without calculators that is
0.0196%. In four of the seven lower house seats it contested, the alliance
got less than one percent. In two of the other three it got the 'donkey
vote'* by appearing at the top of the ballot paper. Its average vote where
this did not happen was 0.68%."


NSW has a relatively less democratic system whereby, to be a registered
party (and run with the party name on the ballot), you have to field a
certain number of candidates in the upper house (Senate). The NSW upper
house is elected in a PR system, rather than one-member-one-electorate
as most of the other (extremely undemocratic) upper houses around the
country are.

(Only Queensland doesn't have an upper house -- trivia moment!! -- my
great-great-uncle, and namesake, Ben Courtice, was one of the Labor MPs
who voted to abolish it after Labor got control of both houses at once,
having until then found the upper house a conservative impediment to its
rule).

The result of the NSW system is a big strain on our resources. Whereas
the upper house is technically more democratic, and a smaller percentage
of votes is necessary to be elected, it is obviously very hard to run an
election campaign across the whole state (the most populous state in the
country) when you are a small, new and almost unknown party.

I don't know if the NSW comrades would have otherwise run in the upper
house. In any case, it would be more instructive to see where we polled
best -- was it in the areas where we have branches and were running
candidates for the lower house seats? That would indicate that we were
having some impact after all.

On another note, in the working class and immigrant suburb of Sunshine
in Melbourne's west, Socialist Alliance candidate Maurice Sibelle
recently polled 6.5% in a local council ward of about 10 000 electors --
campaigning on stopping the war and more funding for community services.

It's still early days for the Socialist Alliance.

Ben Courtice