"No Vote" for any candidate box on all Australian Ballot papers

BETTER CANDIDATES, BETTER PARLIAMENT, STRONGER AUSTRALIA: The case for a “No Vote’ provision on Ballot Papers.

If our current crop of politicians were managers in a company you owned and instead of getting on with the job they are paid to do, they spent all day sniping at each other and jostling for promotion, what would you do? Fairly simple … you would fire them! Remember they are playing these games on our - the Taxpayer’s money - and are showing no respect for the people who elected them.

If you interviewed someone for the job and they said “I’ll tell you how I’ll handle the job once you employ me”, what would you do? You’d be an idiot to hire them. So why do we allow politicians (recently heard from the mouth of Joe Hockey) to tell us they won’t tell us their policies until they are in power and why do we allow politicians like the so-called independents to go against what their constituents want once they are elected and go unpunished? Why do we agree to parties putting up candidates that are no hopers, scoundrels, thieves and liars and giving us no way of registering our disgust other than to vote ‘informal’ * which helps no one. Currently we are forced to go with an ‘endorsed’ candidate that we may not even know or like. People Power CAN change that. By doing this we can make both the party and individual candidates be held responsible.

How you might ask? Simple: Help get enough signatures to get the Electoral Office to include a “No Vote” box that HAS to be counted on all ballot papers. If the “No Votes” are greater than any candidate then that seat stays vacant until the next election.

By doing this we can make both the party and individual candidates be held responsible. It will force parties to have a more transparent pre-selection process and even, possibly, take up Julian Leeser’s* suggestions on how this can be achieved. If a candidate is not elected they lose their deposits and the party has one less member - severe consequences for both.

We also need a “No preferences to be allocated” box so that political parties cannot do deals and give our votes away.

*See the Paper putting forward a case for introducing Primaries into our electoral system by Julian Leeser, Executive Director, Menzies Research Centre at http://hereticjournal.com/. This paper was first delivered as a speech to the Australian Liberal Students’ Federation Annual Conference July 2008. Interesting reading.