LET me say right at the outset that responsible voters (you) should not be taking instructions from anyone on how to vote, and certainly not those pieces of paper thrust in your face as you walk the horrid gauntlet of mostly well meaning volunteers lining the path from your car to the polling place.
I’m about to tell you who to vote for, but I’d much rather you thought about it independently. The reason I’m going to offer this advice — which is researched, carefully considered and well-informed — is because if you are going to insist on following someone’s advice I’d rather it at least be mine than someone else’s.
But not without trying to persuade you to think for yourself first…
If you really can’t be bothered doing some basic research into the candidates who have offered themselves as your representative in Parliament then you may have not been sufficiently educated in the privileges & responsibilities of our inclusive, pluralistic, liberal democracy. Almost none of us were taught this stuff in school, but we really should have been.
You may not appreciate the truly awesome power ‘we the people’ would have if we simply knew how to wield preferential voting, the currency craved by all politicians.
You may be confused by preferential voting, the system which allows you to number every box on your ballot paper beside candidate names in the order in which you would prefer them to get the job. I’ve explained this in detail in the video above. Unlike this article, it is non-partisan and therefore highly shareable.
To break the cycle of both major parties abandoning their traditional values and voters, and chasing voters ever further to the left with more and more radical policies like banned speech, abortion, euthanasia, critical race theory and anti-science gender theory, one simple thing is required.
Traditional voters have to become undecided voters.
I don’t mean ‘protest’ voters, although that may be sometimes helpful. I don’t mean ‘swinging’ voters with no discernment between right and morally reprehensible. By ‘undecided’ I mean voters who are genuinely open to the best candidate for the job not being from the party you might normally vote for.
The process of choosing your own preferences should include communication with every candidate to ask a few sincere questions and interview them for the job. Don’t just browse their website or compare their party policies as selectively filtered and regurgitated by old media. Faceless men pulling levers behind the parties have to be able to know hundreds and thousands of voters in every electorate are not interested in what they and the mainstream media collude to offer as ‘election issues’.
Voters can communicate that each candidate’s personal result will be largely affected by their positions on bad ideas both major parties are happy to adulterously pursue these days, such as liberalising taxpayer-funded abortion industry which trades in human misery.
Only a concerted and sustained, patient campaign by voters to make pro-abortion candidates as rare as pro-slavery candidates will change the political stock sold to voters who simply take ‘how to vote’ cards (HTVs). This can only be achieved by letting candidates and via them their parties know in advance their support for abortion will cost them your & your friends’ votes, donations and volunteer hours.
You can’t send this message by following someone else’s advice on how to vote, not even mine. You can’t achieve this by only voting for anti-abortion candidates first. We have to speak up, make our voices heard by communicating with candidates, and letting every single one of them know every single time which issues are deal-breaking vote-deciders for you and everyone you know.
So please: DO NOT FOLLOW ANYONE‘S HTV, including mine!
Instead…
• Interview your local candidates personally. Only if you can’t split the best of them should you consider their other policies, party and leader. You’re voting for a local candidate, not a party or leader.
• Choose your own preferences by ranking the answers they each gave you. Non answers should be regarded as deliberately evasive and therefore an admission you won’t like what they have to say, so they’d rather not make it easy for you to vote for someone else.
• Do everything you can to help the best person for the job (or the least terrible person for the job) beat all the worse options. Donate, volunteer, share your research with friends and family and enlist their support as well.
Okay, so if you really insist on following someone else’s thinking, here’s mine.
My worldview and objectives are pretty transparent. I have no party loyalty, but instead strategically consider my vote to promote justice, liberty & peace for all the citizens affected by my vote.
I am loyally devoted only to Jesus Christ and consider His Word the only infallible authority on wise public policy for all nations, communities and intersectional minorities who self-identify as competitors in the Victim Olympics.
I’m an undecided voter, looking for the best candidates to represent my position on ‘deal-breaker’ issues, which are informed by black and white positions detailed in Scripture. For example, human life is uniquely designed in the Image of God and is sacred — murder bad.
Premise One: There is no one worse for Australia right now than the Labor & Green parties. No one.
Premise Two: The Liberal & National parties (LNP) really don’t value conservatives.
There’s a concerted push to purge recent influxes of conservatives which validly threaten the hegemony from party membership. This is proof sincere party membership works! These conservatives have attempted to join after the appallingly leftist federal Liberal leader was replaced by the sometimes conservative Scott Morrison, and after Cory Bernardi self-destructed the Australian Conservatives party.
The LNP is content to win conservative support by being only slightly better than Labor. The shocking decision to re-endorse the remorseless Tim Nicholls and Steve Minikin who supported Jackie Trad’s reprehensible abortion liberalisation legislation suggests the LNP is much more comfortable with radical leftists in their ranks than centre-right conservatives.
Premise Three: The coveted prize in preferential voting is the primary vote: preference number 1.
With each primary vote, candidates in Queensland now receive $3 and their political parties receive $6 public funding. There are more than 3.3 million electors enrolled in Queensland, representing a total prize pool of about $15 million dollars or about $50,000 per electorate if you get about half of the votes. Parties use this to fund/reimburse their local and general campaign expenses.
There is zero funding for receiving a voter’s second or subsequent preference.
Premise Four: There is no such thing as a ‘wasted vote’ when you number every box.
Preferences ‘flow’. If the candidate you gave your primary vote (and $9) to is eliminated before the final two, your full vote (but no $) goes to your second preference, and so on if your second and subsequent preferences are also eliminated, until your ballot goes to one of the final two most-preferred candidates (or someone gets more than 50% of the preferences).
Conclusion
If you put a strong conservative candidate as your first preference (primary vote), and the LNP as your second preference, it would send a strong signal to the party’s power brokers that you won’t be taken for granted; that you want an LNP with unapologetically-conservative candidates and policies, or you will withhold what they want most of all.
It will also ensure your vote ultimately supports a LNP government or conservative cross bench — the best possible outcome.
How To Vote (finally)
This is a bit of a formula rather than listing an HTV for each of 93 electorates. It’s obviously general, so again, please do your own research on the personal convictions and courage of each of your local candidates.
1. Make sure you put the Labor & Greens candidates on the bottom of your ballot. They have the most tyrannical, illiberal, unjust, anti-human, anti-God, anti-science, immoral policies on offer from any party. Feel free to debate me on this when you can rationalise industrialised child-sacrifice.
2. In my humble opinion, the most serious contenders for sensible, pro-family, pro-life, pro-Christian, pro-justice policies are Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Katter’s Australian Party.
3. If you know anyone else on you ballot is conservative/pro-life, you can put them above the LNP.
4. Then put the LNP candidate.
5. Beneath the LNP put everyone else you don’t know or you know has more in common with leftism than conservatism.
6. Did I mention put the Labor/Green candidates last?
Party Links
Here’s where you can find out what each party has to say about themselves. Like resumes, they never have anything they think is bad to say. Nothing replaces personally contacting each candidate in your electorate to interview them for the job – please do that.
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Dave Pellowe is a Christian writer & commentator, founder of The Good Sauce, convener of the annual Australian Church And State Summit and host of Good Sauce's weekly The Church And State Show, also syndicated on ADH TV. Since 2016 Dave has undertaken the mission of arming Christians to influence culture from Perth to Auckland through Christian political events, videos, podcasts and articles published in multiple journals across Australia and New Zealand. [more]
