A proposed Australian leaker law will put journalists and whistleblowers in jail for 20 years

[Wanderfound]

@MalevolentPixy

The toxic dogwhistles from some of those party names… Maybe I am reading them from too NA a slant but “Non-custodial Parents Party”? shudders My MRA alarms went off like crazy.

A lot of the hyper-focused micro parties are actually feeder organisations for the bigger far right parties. Not just for people and money, but for preference votes.

This is a lower house election; the real swarms of microparties show up in the upper house ballots.

Thanks to the way that preferential proportional voting works, it’s possible for a party to elect a Senator with a miniscule primary vote if they manage to arrange preference flows from a large number of other parties. Obscure single issue parties tend to draw a fair number of early preferences from cranky low-info protest voters, and they make a substantial total when combined.

As a result…

In 1996 Glenn Druery was instrumental in the formation of the ORP, of which Malcolm Jones became president. In 1997 the party contested a state by-election,[1] in which Druery received 2.13% of the primary vote. The party subsequently contested several other federal and state elections.

At the 1999 NSW general election, Druery formulated a strategy by means of which preference votes could be harvested from a large number of small political parties.[2] He negotiated for independent and selected minor-party candidates to adhere to his calculated preference-swapping arrangements. As a result, three people were elected to the upper house with very low primary-votes, including Malcolm Jones whose share of the primary vote was 0.2%. Jones was forced to resign in 2003 amidst a corruption scandal and an ICAC inquiry into his conduct,[3] and party member Jon Jenkins was appointed to the casual vacancy to serve out the remainder of Jones’s 8-year term.

The Outdoor Recreation Party (ORP) are actually far-right crooks with a focus on gun deregulation and opposition to environmental concerns.