By James Vassilopoulos
With opinion polls showing the Coalition and Labor each scoring about 40% of primary votes, preferences will be crucial in determining which major party will form government after October 3.
The major parties cannot hope to win an outright majority on primary votes in the House of Representatives or the Senate because of their loss of credibility following two decades of wage cuts, worsening working conditions, and cuts to education and health.
A vote for progressive candidates like the Democratic Socialists, Greens or others will not, as Labor scare campaigns falsely suggest, help the Coalition get re-elected if it has placed the ALP before the Coalition in its order of preference distribution. If such a progressive candidate is knocked out of the contest because they have less primaries than the major parties, the votes flow to Labor.
Nor will a vote for a progressive alternative be a wasted vote. It will show the major parties that voters are taking a stand and rejecting the big parties' austerity and lies.
It is crucial to put the ALP before the Coalition because if the Coalition is re-elected, their policies and actions will be worse than Labor's. A re-elected Howard and Costello have more attacks on workers up their sleeve.
The Coalition's attacks on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, native title and immigrants make it more racist than the ALP.
Albert Langer, in an advertisement in the Australian on September 24 entitled "How to vote for neither", states that voters should show their opposition to the "rigged elections" by putting the "Coalition Tweedledum", the "ALP Tweedledee" and "One Nation Racist" equally last in House of Representatives seats.
It is true to suggest that the election process favours the parties of big business — the Coalition and Labor — because of the media attention they get and the millions of dollars in "donations" they receive. But it is wrong not to use elections as a means to propagate progressive ideas and to expose the illusion that many workers have that we live in a democracy.
Saying that One Nation, the Coalition and the ALP are all exactly as bad and should all be put last does not take into account that working people's lives would be relatively worse if, for example, One Nation was in government.
It also does nothing to dispel people's illusions in the ALP and convince them that a left-progressive alternative is the way to go.
It is important to put One Nation last on preferences, both in the Senate and House of Representatives seats. This alone cannot stop One Nation, but it will help deprive them of the advantages parliamentary seats offer.
The major parties, in subtle ways, may be making a push to win One Nation preferences. Although One Nation's official preference distribution does not discriminate between the major parties, there is evidence that One Nation voters are being wooed.
In the "great debate", Howard was asked if shop signs should be in English. "I think so. Desirably, yes, but if the odd one isn't I don't think we should get into a tizz about it", he replied. Hanson had already said that signs should not be in Asian languages.
Don't expect Labor to campaign strongly to defend ATSIC or increase the immigration quota. Expect it to talk a lot about jobs, the "battlers", stopping the GST and opposing the privatisation of Telstra.
Political parties' Senate preferences allocation can be revealing. The Australian Democrats do not differentiate between the Coalition and the ALP. They have a split ticket: in one the ALP is put before the Coalition, in the other the Coalition is put before the ALP.
The Democrats have put the Coalition before the Democratic Socialists, whose policies include free education, opposition to uranium mining and repeal of the Workplace Relations Act.
The Democrats have also put the Christian Democratic Party (Fred Nile Group) before the Democratic Socialists in all states and territories except Victoria. The Democrats must believe they have more in common with those parties than with the Democratic Socialists.
The Unity — Say No to Hanson party is standing in the Senate in three states. It has a direct preference swap with the ALP, which may channel anti-racist votes back to Labor.
It has also put the Coalition before the Democratic Socialists who, with the socialist youth organisation Resistance, organised the recent anti-racist secondary student walkouts. In Queensland, it put the Democratic Socialists behind the Christian Democratic Party.
The Tasmanian Greens are the only Greens group in the Senate to have a split ticket, not differentiating between Liberals and the ALP. The NT Greens have not put One Nation last on their Senate preferences, placing the Country Liberal Party ("the party carrying out One Nation's policies in government") last.
The preference policy of the Communist Party of Australia, which is running in two House of Representatives seats, is: in seats where the CPA is not standing "give your first vote to that candidate you judge to be the most progressive, be they Greens, ALP, Democrats, members of some other party or independent". The CPA then calls for Labor to be put ahead of the Coalition, with One Nation last.
In an odd move, One Nation has given its second preferences to the Greens in the NT and put the Greens above fellow right-winger Brian Harradine in Tasmania.