Today is Australia Day and as is often the case on days of significances, Google (AU) has a special header for the day.
This is the result of Doodle 4 Google My Australia a competition for school students.
Categories
Meta
.. and now it is time to turn out attention to the Senate
The ALP has a majority in the new House of Representatives, so Kevin Rudd is the new PM of Australia, but what about the Australia’s upper house, the Senate. For people on the left of Australian politics the Senate results are not nearly as good as the House of Representatives results.
The ABC is feeding the progressive Senate numbers into Antony Green’s Senate Calculator. Based on the calculations the numbers after Jul ’08 will be:
|
ALP |
Lib/Nat |
Greens |
Other |
|
| NSW |
3 |
3 |
0 |
0 |
| Vic |
3 |
3 |
0 |
0 |
| QLD |
3 |
3 |
0 |
0 |
| SA |
2 |
2 |
1 |
1# |
| WA |
2 |
3 |
1 |
0 |
| Tas |
3 |
2 |
1 |
0 |
| ACT |
1 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
| NT |
1 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
| Total |
18 |
18 |
3 |
1 |
| cont. |
14 |
19 |
2 |
1* |
| after Jul ’08 |
32 |
37 |
5 |
2 |
# Nick Xenophon * Family First
To get legislation passed the Senate the Rudd government will require the support of all the Greens, Nick Xenophon and Family First (or a Lib/Nat Senator must cross the floor, may be Barnaby Joyce)
Could we see Double Dissolutions?
Australia has a new Government
After more than 11 year of the Howard government, the Howard era is over. Even better it seems that Howard has lost his seat of Bennelong.
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Election Odds
We are only 7 days out from the Australian federal election and I have been wasting spending a significant amount of time reading election related websites/blogs including:
- The Poll Bludger
- Andrew Bartlett’s blog
- GreensBlog
- Simon Jackman’s blog: he is doing very interesting work on the betting odds of the election and the implied probabilities of who will win what. Being a geek, both maths/stats and election, I do like all data and graphs he has in the australian 2007 election analysis section of his site.
- Antony Green, the ABC’s election analyst, has built a cool Senate Calculator so you can see the possible implications of the senate preference deals by playing the what if game.
In 168 hours the polls will be closed and then the election night fun begins.
Posted in Australia, election
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2,000,000,000th photo on flickr
The TWO BILLIONTH photo has been uploaded to flickr and it was taken in Sydney 
Clarke & Dawe
via Pia Waugh’s blog
Selected episodes Clarke & Dawe’s political interviews are available on John Clarke’s site. In light of the fact that we are quite possibly witnessing the final days of Howard’s “leadership” I would recommend Deja vu 1995.
Why I will vote below the line in the Senate
On election day I will be numbering 79 boxes with with the numbers 1 to 79. Like 3-5% of the Australian population I will vote below the line in the Senate.
The Australian Senate is elected with a preferential proportional representation voting system. This is an extremely complex, and I would argue general extremely fair and democratic, system. The system requires the voter to indicate their order of preference of all the candidates standing in their state. The voter has the choice of two ways of how to do this: they can vote above the line by placing a 1 in the box for the party of their choice or below the line, by numbering all the boxes for all the candidate. If the voter votes above the line for a party, their preferences are distributed how that party specifies according to the Group Voting Tickets, not necessarily how that voter would have voted if they had voted below the line.
All parties have lodged their Group Voting Tickets with AEC, these show what an above the line vote is equivalent to below the line. The Group Voting Tickets are published on the AEC website as PDFs, on the ABC website in easier to follow HTML. Looking at these you can see where your vote will actually go when you vote for a particular party. It is very interesting to study where each party directs their perferences, in some cases it is based on ideologies, environmental preferencing environmental, left wing preferencing left wing etc, but in other cases it seems to be based purely on deals, two parties who do not share political ideas swap preference just to increase their chance of election. The problem I have with the latter is that people’s can end up electing a candidate who they disapprove of. Some people may say this is a problem of having a preferential voting system, would disagree in the extreme. I am extremely proud to live in a county with a preferential system, as I believe it is the fairest type of system. I think that the issues are: that the political parties decide the preferences not you the voter when you vote above the line and that with 70+ candidate it is difficult to vote below the line, that is why only 3-5% people do it. Greens leader Bob Brown has suggested a new system:
“Have people number the parties for the Senate in the order of their choice above the line, that’s a simple prescription,” he said.
“I will be putting that to the next government, we Greens will be moving for that, so that people make up their own minds.”
I agree with him, but at this election I want MY VOTE to goto who I choose, so I will be filling in all 79 boxes on election day.
Social Networks, Web 2.0 and Schools
Schoolboards: net dangers over-rated; bring social networks to school By David Cassel
The internet isn’t as dangerous as people think, and teachers should let students use social networks at school.
This article was posted on an education mailing list that I’m part of. I think it brings up many issues.
I can see the issue from two perspectives: I am, relatively, young and am part of the social networking generation and I am embarking on a career as a teacher, so feel I can see parts of these issues from both perspectives.
First off, this is based on a new study funded by Microsoft, News Corporation, and Verizon; all corporations who have a vested interest in promoting social networking.
Internet access in schools has always been an issue, I was in high school during the 90s when schools first got internet access, it was, and still is, protected by filtering software. This filtering software is never perfect, for example students were unable to access asx.com.au, the site of the Australian Stock Exchange, for the schools network. Teachers have a duty of care over their students, so I fully understand why schools and the authorities that run them have been so reluctant and cautious about internet access within schools. Within the physical bounds of the school, the kids are students who have to obey the school rules and the teachers have legal responsibility over them, I would include the schools network as part of the school. The school is accountable for what is in the school. Social network sites like myspace and facebook are obviously not part of the school’s network so the school have no jurisdiction over how students communicate.
I am personally a big fan of this whole web 2.0 thing. I check facebook (many times) every day. Do I think schools should be giving students access to likes myspace and facebook during school time? … may be not. Within a year in many, but not all, school students will be access these kinds of sites via mobile phone any way. I do think that web technologies need to play a part in schools. The most valuable web technology, I can see are wikis, I can see wikis being used as very effective collaborative tools and making students aware of these web tools. The use of wikis, blogs etc, within or outside, schools by young people will make them more web savvy, and I think that is what we want for people for whom the web is playing large part in their lives, so that they will act sensibly online as well as offline and it seems that most young people are.
Since I started this blog post, over a week ago, I have found two other related posts
- Just another bogeyman by Cassandra Wilkinson, part of Unleashed, ABC’s (au) federal election blog.
- Getting around school site blocks Robert Scoble post about how kids get around the systems installed in schools to block social networking sites