Independents and Information

[4thofeleven]

Tejay Sener* responded to my post on the Secular party, pointing out that I am being to harsh on independents for not campaigning, as the cost of campaigning on a state level is generally prohibitively high unless one has access to funds on the scale of a major party (Eg, the Liberal party, who is now up to sending out new letters every day in my electorate warning me to vote Liberal or THE UNIONS WILL EAT YOUR SOUL!!!)

So, what's to be done? Parties receive campaign funding from the government if they get more than 4% of the vote, but that doesn't help independents and small parties, who generally don't get that much of the vote. But they're not going to get votes unless they can get their message out. Besides, I don't want to receive a deluge of mail from various crackpot candidates as well as from the major parties - I just want to know what every candidate stands for.

So, here's an idea - In local council elections, everyone gets sent a little booklet with a page on each candidate where they lay out their positions and policies, and give their preference suggestions. Why can't this be done in federal and state elections too? Have each candidate submit a few paragraphs on their positions, then put them in a booklet, and send it out to every enrolled voter along with instructions for how to vote and information on polling places. Everyone could then read it at their leisure and plan out their vote before the election, rather than wandering into the polling both and having to work out what the difference between the Socialist Alliance and the Socialist Equality Party is - or spending the week before the election desperatly trying to find information on all the candidates and their positions, if any**.

Granted, the major parties wouldn't get anything out of it, but beside being politically unviable, are there any problems I've overlooked?

* http://sener4senate.googlepages.com/
Sener's offering pretty much what I expect from an Independent - a website that lists his policies clearly and coherently, and lays out a clear argument for voting for him as opposed to the major parties. Of course, I may be biased, since I agree with most of his proposals ;).

** For anyone else who's going mad, matcha_pocky has a good rundown of the Victorian Senate candidates and their positions. Check it out.

Comments

[sener4senate.livejournal.com]

Dear David,

I think you have a good idea, and I'm sure many others have similar great ideas, re non-spam, equal introduction of all candidates platforms to the voter by some central organisation (eg AEC itself). In practice it may have teething problems (as parties/candidates try to manipulate the authority to better present their material), but I think those things can be bedded down with good guidelines.

However from what I have deduced, and I have to state here that it is my observation, and nobody from the relevant department has stated this to me, but I feel the AEC has been, like all departments, rationalized. That is their budgets cut, staff reduced, reach constrained. So assuming the booklet you suggest could be distributed to every household in Australia (not every voter), and assuming we have roughly 6 Million households, and that production plus distribution would be of the order of $5 each, the whole thing could possibly be done for at around the cost of ~ $30 M. This is a lot for the tax payer, but of course tiny comparable to what the incumbent government has been spending on their campaign using tax payers money. Estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars now.

So in summary I think your idea is doable as a preliminary introduction to the candidates.

Thanks, Tejay