Day: Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Rudd’s illegal immigrant death toll now at 63 – UPDATE (bring the spin)

Posted by Chief Blogger – 30 March, 2010

I’ve previously covered the number of people that have died trying to come to Australia to take advantage of Rudd’s soft new illegal immigration laws. The death toll has recently gone up to 58:

Senior navy sources said they had been told several refugee boats had set sail for Australia last year from the northeast of Sri Lanka, but had not been heard from since.

One vessel sank off the Cocos and Keeling Islands west of Christmas Island in November, with the loss of 11 lives.

“There is no possibility of rescue in the middle of the Indian Ocean,” a navy source said.

It’s ALP style compassion.

UPDATE

58 people have been lured to their deaths thanks to Rudd. So one might expect some remorse from the PM. But oh no, go ramp up the spin machine instead:

KEVIN Rudd has accused Tony Abbott of presiding over a policy dead zone when it comes to border security, saying the Opposition Leader is “100 per cent headline and zero per cent policy”.

Every single election promise Rudd made about border security has been broken. I am sure Abbott will have a full policy outlined by the next election that he will actually keep if elected.

MORE

That’s 63 as of May 2010.

FIVE suspected asylum seekers are feared drowned after they decided to swim from their troubled vessel using tubes and lifejackets.

Is South Australia a functional democracy?

Posted by Chief Blogger – 30 March, 2010

Hypothetical speaking, would a jurisdiction be called a functional democracy when a political party first, attracted the biggest popular vote, second, won based on a first past the post system and third, won based on a two party preferred system – yet still not be the elected government? What if this happened 4 times in recent memory? Also, what if government political staff tried to impersonate another political party as part of a conspiracy to trick people into voting for the status quo? Further, what if there was evidence of vote rigging and double counting? Would you still call this jurisdiction a functional democracy?

Zimbabwe, China, Latin America, the Middle East? No, right here in South Australia. Consider the irony. The very place that invented the secret ballot – the method most people in the world use to cast their vote – can’t even claim to be a functional democracy. From the ABC’s Antony Green on the recent 2010 election:

The Rann government suffered a 2-party preferred swing of 8.4% and recorded only 48.4% of the 2-party preferred vote compared to 51.6% for the Liberal Party, yet has been returned with 26 of the 47 seats in the House of Assembly, a majority over all other parties of five seats….

Labor’s victory is remarkable given that under the state’s redistribution laws, the boundaries had been drawn after the 2006 election to try and ensure that if the Liberal Party won a majority of the state wide 2-party preferred vote, it would also win a majority of seats. In the end the Liberal Party didn’t even get close despite generating a state wide swing large enough to theoretically win government.

So the South Australian Electoral Commission tried to ensure the party that won the election would actually win the election. What a novel idea – more like a sham. It obviously didn’t work, again. One must wonder if there is a conspiracy between the SAEC and the ALP to essentially disenfranchise the majority of South Australian voters. That is exactly what has happened. At least it is clear that the ALP has manipulated the idiosyncrasies of the South Australian electoral system, to the detriment of the majority of South Australian voters – who didn’t vote ALP – and to South Australian democracy.

There also seems to be a distinct absence of media scrutiny of the results. Imagine if this result had occurred in the USA. There would be wall to wall coverage by Fox News and associated affiliates. It seems the Australian media have gone back into their group-think mode, led by none other than ‘your’ ABC. One entry by the ABC’s election blogger in an obscure part of the ABC’s website does not constitute adequate media coverage of the issue.

How can the South Australian Governor call on Mike Rann to form a new government when there has been such an obvious violation of the will of the people and the spirit of democracy? Clearly the legislative arm of the state is broken due to the manipulation of electoral boundaries for political gain and an inadequate system of voting, when the people that win don’t really win. I don’t exactly know what can be done now. Some type of legal action to call the election result null and void would seem the next step, if that’s possible.