We have all heard the recent left-wing fad for protecting us all against “disinformation” – the hand-wringing about ‘truth’ being widely disseminated throughout the population. Various left-wing academics and Marxist lawyers are, probably as we speak, dear reader, thinking of ways around pesky things like ‘freedom of speech’. Except of course when they do it. Then it is OK and you must shut up and listen (you racist!).
One of my hobbies in life is psephology (the study of elections). I have a fine-tuned, almost encyclopaedic ability to rattle out voting figures and patterns for NZ, UK, US (name a county at random and I’ll give you the election results going back 30 years), and Australia. In all fairness, I must acknowledge my acquaintance: regular email correspondent and fellow psephologist (although he gets paid for it and has become a kind of ‘national treasure’), Antony Green – who is the expert on Australian elections.
A lot of twaddle beamed around the world during the last day or so says, “Pauline Hanson has lost her Senate seat”. Apart from being a bit bizarre, it is the ultimate in disinformation – like suggesting Chad has just won the World Cup – but, needless to say, OK when the left-wing media do it.
The Australian Senate is elected by STV. It normally takes weeks to count all the votes and preferences, and they don’t even start counting most of the Senate votes until this week – barely 30% across the entire country have been counted so far.
What happens is this: each State has 6 Senators and you need about 14.3% of the votes to get elected. This is known as the quota, and in Queensland this year it is somewhere in the order of 420,000 votes. If you receive that number of votes or more you automatically get elected. If you are under, then preferences of parties and candidates who are knocked out of the contest are distributed until all 6 Senators are elected.
The results so far in the Queensland Senate election are not in any way surprising; exactly in line with what I was expecting to happen. The Liberal/National party won 2 Senate seats outright, the ALP won 2 Senate seats outright, the Greens (no surprise to me, dear reader) have won seat number 5 more or less outright (14.1% of the votes).
The final seat – as expected – is decided on preferences, and Pauline Hanson is leading. It never crossed my mind (or hers, by the way) that she would win the seat outright (i.e. getting 14.3% of the primary vote). Once preferences start being allocated from minor parties and candidates I am expecting her to win the seat.
At this stage, very very few votes from Pauline Hanson’s 10 strongest electorates in the state have been counted. Not only that, but she’s actually polling quite strongly in places which are hardly fertile territory for One Nation: for instance, she’s about 1.5% ahead of expectations in her 5 ‘worst’ electorates.
The ‘Pauline Hanson has lost’ news story is silly and infantile disinformation, and they are going to look rather foolish when she inevitably wins.