Australians can't stand sore losers. How did politicians miss the memo?
Australians don't like sore losers. We are a country that celebrates near misses, unlucky defeats or even unexpected successes (see: Steven Bradbury). Generally, we recognise that if you fall short, you should accept your lot and march on. Now, it seems there's an exception to this rule: federal elections.
Since the historic outcome of the May 3 election (historically good for Labor, historically bad for the Liberal Party), there has been a growing chorus of those who argue that because their team didn't win, preferential voting is to blame.
A feature of Australian elections for more than a century, preferential voting was originally a promise from then Nationalist prime minister Billy Hughes, gaining support within conservative circles after the 1918 byelection for the West Australian seat of Swan.
Labor's Ted Corboy, a young returned serviceman who had seen action at Gallipoli and in France, was up against the Country Party candidate Basil Murray, the Nationalists' William Hedges and an independent, William Watson.
Corboy secured 34.4 per cent of the vote, enough under the then first-past-the-post electoral system to make him the new member (and, at 22, the youngest person ever elected to the House).
Between them, Hedges and Murray gathered 61 per cent of the vote, but without preferential voting, they were left in Corboy's wake.
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The Hughes government, under pressure from his party and the emerging Country Party, moved quickly to introduce preferential voting in time for a byelection less than two months later (which was won by the conservative candidate). And that's how we've run House of Representatives elections ever since.
But the May 3 result has prompted an outpouring of sour grapes from those who reckon a century-old system put in place by conservative parties to maximise their electoral chances is somehow being used by Labor to keep the mob formerly known as the Coalition from power.
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