Antony Green seeing libertarians everywhere

Like Frank N. Furter of Rocky Horror fame, Antony Green, the ABCs election guru, is not backward in his desire to show us his favorite obsession.  In Frank’s case, it was making a man with blond hair and a tan, in Antony’s it is minor parties.

The rise of minor parties has driven him to distraction to the point where he rails against them at every opportunity, real or contrived.  One of his serious bugbears is the success that some of them have had since they started sticking together and preferencing each other ahead of the majors in elections.

The thing that really gets right up his nose though, especially since the 2013 election of LDP senator elect, David Leyonhjelm is libertarians in general and the LDP in particular.  During the cold war the Liberal and National Parties saw reds under the beds, Antony is seeing libertarians every where, tens of thousands of them, running rampant across the entire political landscape that he knew and loved, like a plague of rabbits:

It appears there is a growth industry in libertarian parties. One of the consequences of the Senate's registered ticket vote system is that it is possible for multiple parties to occupy the same area of the political spectrum without hurting their chances of election. 

In every other electoral system in the world, the current batch of libertarian political parties would be cutting their own political throats by running against each other, but ticket voting allows multiple parties to swap preferences with impunity, having first expanded their pool of first preference votes by standing multiple parties. 

At the 2013 election, the Liberal Democrats, as well as the advantage of a name that could be confused with the Liberal Party, and the advantage of the first column on the NSW ballot paper, also boosted their chances with other parties feeding them preferences. …

What bastards!  Can you imagine the Libs, Labor, Greens, or Nationals being so unprincipled as to attempt to maximize their vote?

Not likely; they would be too couth and cultured to do such a thing other of course, than granting themselves an unlimited pit of taxpayer dollars via the electoral funding scheme that hands them funds in the tens of millions.  In addition to this, they have a mutual grooming relationship with big business, (You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours) that brings even more in via corporate sponsorship.

Antony is looking at single-issue parties and assuming that those who are based on wanting their cause liberalised are libertarian.  This is a common error, also made by ‘glass half full’ libertarians who see any party or person holding a policy that they agree with as a sign of them being libertarian.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  Most of the single issue parties tend to be quite authoritarian but feel that the government has gone too far in relation to their particular cause. Rather than questioning whether the government has a place in it at all, or in any of the other causes SIPs represent, they accept unlimited government authority as a fact of life and only want changes to what their own problem is.

Some treat the concerns of other SIPs with the same contempt and disdain that ruling classes have traditionally held for their downtrodden minorities in the past.  Few of them did the LDP any favors and most of them preferenced as part of the minor party coalition which the LDP were not part of, and away from us in strange and counter productive ways:

Shooters and Fishers; at elimination their votes went to HEMP, which has no policy on guns. Considering their leftist inclinations, they are probably opposed.  When Hemp was eliminated, SFP preferences played a large part in electing PUP which is definitely anti- firearms.

Sex ; their votes went to ALP.  Labor has no history of support for Eros Foundation (neither do we, but we have libertarian outlook which addresses most of their concerns)

Voluntary Euthanasia; went to HEMP which has no policy on VE.  We support it directly.

Wikileaks; votes went to HEMP after the Greens which has no policy on government transparency.  Assange claims to be a libertarian.  

Motoring Enthusiasts; votes went to Shooters then PUP.  Libertarian, ORP have directly supportive policys.

Fishing and Lifestyle; votes went to the Liberals, then to the Greens ahead of the LDP.

If Green were to take his job seriously, he would do a bit of basic research and discover what the term ’libertarian’ means, and do a proper analysis of the nature of the parties that he assumes fall into that category. After that he would issue an apology for his stuff-up.