Mark Latham’s plan to expand the One Nation team in NSW’s upper house by quitting and recontesting his spot is “devilishly clever” and probably permissible, a prominent barrister says.
Latham outlined his plan in The Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday: to quit, fill the casual vacancy with another One Nation candidate, and then stand in the March election at the top of the ticket, increasing the party’s seats in state Parliament. He has sought advice from Parliament about whether it would be allowed.
Latham has one other One Nation colleague in the NSW Parliament, Rod Roberts, who also sits in the upper house. Both were elected in 2019 to eight-year terms.
Geoffrey Watson SC, a former counsel assisting the ICAC and a prominent integrity advocate, said: “I notice that Latham has said he wishes to take legal advice on it. My preliminary view is that it’s probably permissible. But it does involve a rather cynical manipulation of electoral laws.
“If the motivation for that is for personal advantage, then that could be a breach of public trust. But if the motivation is purely party political, the position is less clear.”
Latham said it was incorrect to say he had sought legal advice. “I’ve got no interest in Crikey,” he said, and added: “Watson is an idiot. I’m not taking any legal advice, that’s incorrect. I’m seeking reelection which is an expression of public trust.”
He said he had contacted the Parliament’s clerks to ask “about procedure, that’s all”.
Watson said: “Being called an idiot by Mark Latham is a badge of honour.”
Latham’s strategy appears to be double the number of One Nation MPs in the upper house. He would achieve that by keeping Roberts where he is, and filling the casual vacancy created by his departure with a candidate of the party’s choosing.
The next step would be to hopefully attract enough One Nation voters by virtue of Latham’s name being on the ticket to get two more seats at the March election, including the one he would occupy.
“That’s what his strategy is — and it would also mean he bought himself another eight years,” a state Labor MP said.
Unlike in the lower house, upper house vacancies do not trigger byelections.
President of the upper house Liberal MP Matthew Mason-Cox declined to comment.
Yet politicians keep saying why are the public ,losing faith in the political system,the only thing keeping the cracks becoming widened,is compulsory voting
Yet people keep voting for these half-wits who would barely be capable of counting their fingers twice in succession and getting the same answer………….
………..and certainly incapable of getting a job in the real world.
the number of votes needed to get a state senate seat is very small, there’s enough idiotic racists out the to fulfill that number
Latham is not in the Senate but the NSW Legislative Council, a much shallower talent/gene pool.
More like a puddle really.
At noon, in summer, on a tarmac parking spot.
Yeah but he is a smart dustbin and getting himself 8 years employment as our dustbin is a good gig
I should have said state upper house (I know the NSW upper house chamber is the LC, I meant that for any state in Oz that has an upper house the number of votes required is very small)
And what makes my blood boil he has an eight year term, perhaps he not a half-wit after all.
[Geoffrey] Watson [SC] said: “Being called an idiot by Mark Latham is a badge of honour.”
Glad I had finished my coffee before I read that line – my keyboard has had more than enough drenchings for 2022.
From spilt coffee, or from tears?
More coffee than tears. But yes – both have contributed to the drenchings.
It’s an update from Aristophanes – “To be insulted by such a person is to be garlanded with lilies“.
Yet another flaw/abuse/design fault revealed in the dog’s breakfast which has been too much part of the history of proportional representation in this country. Mind you, if anyone can make a case for state upper houses (using any voting system), good luck.
New Zealand has proportional representation, unfortunately we don’t. Which is why we have all this rubbish, scams, bribes and rip-offs. Preferences.
Aotearoa also has MME, like most of the civilised polities of Euroland.
AND Tazzy, which uses Hare-Clark, almost as pure PR as D’Hondt.
Hare-Clark in the ACT too, resulting in green-Labor coalitions while a right-dominated Liberal Party is unelectable.
Yeah – well after Zed no-one can be surprised at Libs’ continuing losses. He stuffed up at ACT level and then made himself the Lib Senate candidate. Took a little while of putting Zed last and eventually ACT voters worked out how to have one ALP senator (Katy Gallagher) and one Independent (David Pocock). Great to be part of a thoughtful electorate.
Perhaps the issue is not so much the type of voting system (and I agree PPR is better than single-member systems) but havibng a second chamber. Qld ditched ours decades ago and that makes for a simpler, more direct system. You vote, and you get a result. Upper houses are a gift to leeches like PH and JL et al.
What ‘fault’ do you detect in PR – that a vote by an uninformed person negates that of one who is well informed?
Democracy is mob rule and a mob obeying a leader is always less than the sum of its parts.
Nothing to do with levels of information, It is the flawed procedures dealing with members who resign or change parties under PR systems in this country. The Latham case would also appear to arise in part from the idiocy of having eight year terms rather than the same (four year) term as the lower house.
I am no expert on how PR operates in other countries, but we seem to have got a. few things wrong in how we operate it in Australia. Anyway, the case for state upper houses is close to non-existent. Well done, Queensland- you got that right.
PR is simple arithmetic – the inequity is entirely political.
No argument with that.
By way of defence of my views on state upper houses, during one of the IBAC hearings in Victoria, one (maybe two) Labor MLCs offered the gem that they sought an upper house (rather than lower house) seat (part of Adem Somyurek’s ethno-patronage racket) because “they didn’t want to deal with constituents”.
Methinks they are not alone in this view.
As Drastic has already pointed out, we don’t in general have PR in Australia. Preferential voting is not proportional, it favours two main parties dominating parliament almost as much as FPTP.
The real problem is that voting for representatives is inevitably corrupted and distorted in all sorts of ways to favour the wealthy, powerful and well-connected; which is presumably why the system is allowed to continue. It produces parties and they work primarily for themselves and their pay-masters, not for voters or the public. As anarchists like to say, if voting could change anything it would be illegal. An exaggeration, but not much of one.
To get a genuinely representative parliament that might try to work in the public interest we would have to stop this voting nonsense and simply fill parliament with a selection of adult citizens chosen at random. Instant proportional representation guaranteed, far less corruption and none of that tedious electioneering with all its nonsense and lying.
An interesting proposal!! We seem to be heading there in some measure already with the surge in Independents. Not sure how preferential voting favors the 2 main parties as I see preferential voting as removing the disincentive to vote for other than one of the 2 major parties, ie minors have no real chance so my vote will be lost unless I vote for the lesser of the 2 major evils. Also not sure what you mean by “preferential voting is not proportional” as I conceive of manipulated election boundaries as the cause of lack of proportionality – tho I may not be correctly understanding what you mean by proportional.
With preferential voting there will typically be two main parties who can rely on preferences returning one or other to power. First preferences going elsewhere do not matter much, all that matters on each ballot paper is which of the two main parties is placed ahead of the other. Labor and the Coalition know this and campaign as though no other parties exist. Also this is why so many opinion polls are presented as ‘two party preferred’, which would be a nonsense metric in a proportional system. The increasing size of the vote for other parties shows this hegemony is weakening, but it still remains a fair working assumption.
The system is not proportional because the results do not reflect the first party preferred share of the votes. When you compare the number of seats won with the number of votes for candidates of different parties there are big discrepancies. The Liberals and Labor do better than their first preference vote indicates, and the Nationals benefit from concentrating their vote smaller in fewer constituencies. The Greens get almost no seats in lower house elections despite usually getting about 10% or more of the vote. This is generally the fate of all the smaller parties with this system. It protects the biggest parties.
Didn’t former politician George Christenson receive an additional $100,000 by asking to be Dis indorsed? legal, but was it ethical?
That’s a lifetime of bar fines in Angeles City. Our taxes at work.
Gaming the system by resigning or tactically seeking dis-endorsement furthers distrust in politicians. All current politicians should be stridently denouncing such acts and disavowing any such recourse themselves.
[A rhetorical question; who (outside of the SKY-verse) would employ either at the managerial level equal to a state or federal MP?]
If you meant STV (not PR, which is more apparent in the Senate) benefiting Indies you are correct in all respects.
The Laberals hate it with a passion for that very reason.
Sorry Chris, this was intended as a reply to APRIL.
I used to think it’s a travesty that Qld doesn’t have an upper house. But I just look at the munted personalities in other state upper houses and think… no.
The hearings into the demolition of the PowerHouse museum and the event palace built on flood prone land in Parramatta with even less exhibition area than Ultimo might be considered one!
The case for an upper house? Just look at Queensland. An upper house allows voters to take out an insurance policy.
typical rightwing play – grab power by any means necessary
Of course the downside risk is the already chequered history of those filling casual vacancies for micro parties like One Nation. Especially One Nation. One doesn’t have to descend very deep into the fetid pond that is PHON before we get to such political luminaries as Brian Buxton, Rod Culleton, and Fraser Anning. If someone like that was appointed to a One Nation casual vacancy how long before they departed to join some other far right whack job outfit?