If it’s not the leadership omnishambles in the UK that’s holding our attention, it’s the indecisive election result in Australia. While that would be something in and of itself, we find ourselves with pundits eager to take some lessons from Australia, only to completely balls things up along the way. To wit, Kelly McParland writing in the National Post delivered this hot mess yesterday which manages to conflate every possible thing in Australian politics in order to prove a point – not necessarily a bad point – but went about it in entirely the wrong way. So, for Mr. McParland’s edification, let’s break it down a little.

First of all, the “six prime ministers in six years” has virtually nothing to do with the ranked ballots in Australia. The system of caucus selection of leaders there (which is how leaders should be chosen, as I’ve argued elsewhere numerous times) has gone to extremes, creating a culture of paranoia and betrayal. But that’s not the fault of the ranked ballots since it’s a different process. That parties will spill leaders shortly before an election in the hopes of having a more appealing leader is party politics enabled by the ability to have spills, rather than the ranked ballot effect. Conflating them is not helpful.

The ranked ballots themselves allow for more small parties to exist independent of “big tent” brokerage parties because ranked ballots discourage tactical voting – something McParland neglects to mention while returning to the Canadian canard that the Liberals only want ranked ballots because they think they’ll clean up by getting everyone’s second place votes. That has led to the need for the Australian Liberals (read: conservatives) to require a coalition partner to govern, which is a consideration to make if we want ranked ballots, but it is a giant conflation to mix this in with the stability of their system and leadership woes.

The problem of the Australian Senate is the bigger nub of the argument, but which gets lost in the rest of the McParland’s confusing mess. The Australian Senate is chosen by single-transferable proportional voting, and the system has been effectively gamed in the previous election so that a bunch of marginal players got seats and subsequently created a huge problem in their upper chamber, requiring more tinkering of the system to be forced through and the Prime Minister calling for double-dissolution (so that both chambers be elected at the same time – a rare occurrence usually reserved for political crises) in order to break the legislative deadlocks. Those tweaks appear to be causing even more problems with this election, but we may see how it all shakes out in a few weeks. (Note that these ballots tend to be the size of placemats, because of the way they’re structured with the enormous number of parties running). And while the problems with these marginal parties being given outsized powers of persuasion in the previous parliament are very valid points to make, it gets lost in the sea of conflations that plagued the rest of the piece.

So I get McParland’s point about electoral reform advocates needing to be careful what they wish for, and can even agree with it to a large extent, this was utterly the wrong way to go about it.

Meanwhile, here’s a primer about Australia’s lengthy counting process – so lengthy that their Senate preferential distribution process could take over a month. Closer to home, here are some of the ways in which the electoral reform committee plans to engage with Canadians.

Good reads:

• Jason Kenney will be making an “important announcement” in Calgary tomorrow. Expect a move to provincial politics.
• A deal on breaking down interprovincial trade barriers is being held up by Alberta, who wants more protection for public procurement.
• The head of NATO thanks us for our new contributions to Latvia (which he sees as open-ended), while we continue to be chastised about defence spending levels.
• Senator Mike Duffy’s defenders are grousing that Internal Economy is asking him to pay back expenses that he charged through his friend’s holding company.
• Marijuana legalisation will likely mean no growing your own, despite a Federal Court ruling around medicinal marijuana that allows for it.
• Manitoba wants to tweak the CPP deal with the rest of the provinces before it signs on, but it may not have the leverage to do so.
• An interim Senate committee report is calling for immediate actions to help Syrian refugees.
• The government is looking for a new Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, and possibly a new Lobbying Commissioner too.
• Jane Taber profiles Senator Nancy Ruth, who retires at age 75 in January.
• Mark Kersten from the Munk School of Global Affairs talks about the need for an International Justice Ambassador, using the ISIS genocide debate as background.
• Colby Cosh gives a good look at the issues underlying the dispute the Unitarian church is having with the CRA.
• Andrew Coyne balks at the Brexit naysayers from trying to apply their “referendums bad” logic to an electoral reform referendum.
• Stephen Gordon builds a convincing analogy of anti-trade activists as the modern-day Luddite, fearing the changes that make most people’s lives better off.

Odds and ends:

Here’s more about the renovations to the Government Conference Centre, including the price tag (which is lower than the original East Block plans).

The author of the original UK House of Cards talks leadership and betrayal.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/750151784467881984

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/750152153923067905

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/750152468231655424

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/750153067371245568