{"id":1546,"date":"2022-07-11T18:45:54","date_gmt":"2022-07-11T07:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/?p=1546"},"modified":"2022-07-11T18:45:54","modified_gmt":"2022-07-11T07:45:54","slug":"the-negative-political-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/the-negative-political-party\/","title":{"rendered":"The Negative Political Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/h2>\n

There was a sizable swing in the 2022 Federal election to the DNV (did not vote) camp as well as the \u201cinformal\u201d vote, though this is less marked with the revised updated results than with the early and incomplete result I used in my earlier post. I now calculate that the total number of people who did not vote or whose vote was \u201cinformal\u201d and thus not counted (I+DNV) increased from 13.19% in the 2019 election to 14.84% in the 2022 election, or in absolute terms 388,241 people.<\/p>\n

I think it is as important to take into account those who did not vote for a candidate or party as those who did. Not voting at all or not voting \u201cproperly\u201d (i.e. in the state approved manner) is also an expression of a political viewpoint which needs to be taken into account when trying to understand voter attitudes. I call this the \u201cnegative vote\u201d as opposed to the \u201cpositive vote\u201d which most journalists and academics consider when analyzing the results of an election. And the combined vote of the DNV (did not vote) and the \u201cinformal\u201d vote (I) might be termed the \u201cnegative candidate\u201d who stands for a \u201cnegative political party\u201d. This \u201cnegative political party\u201d did quite well in the last election, coming 3rd behind the two major parties and ahead of the Greens in the House of Representatives with a combined vote of 2,554,391 or 14.84%; and in the Senate similarly, also placing 3rd behind the two major parties and ahead of the Greens with a combined vote of 2,172,775 (12.62%). By my reckoning this makes the \u201cnegative political party\u201d a potentially powerful force in Australian politics.<\/p>\n

I have taken my terminology of the \u201cnegative political party\u201d from the brilliant and clever essay by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Bastiat called \u201cUn chemin de fer n\u00e9gativ\u201d (The Negative Railway) which was first published in his first collection of Economic sophisms<\/em> which was published in 1846. [English version CW3, p. 81; French version here<\/a>.] In this essay, he satirises the politicians and rent-seekers who want to force the railway company building a new line from Bordeaux to Spain to have as many stops as possible in order to benefit the local restaurants and hotels near the railway station who would profit by forcing the passengers to stop, change trains, and move their luggage, and possibly have to stay overnight. This, they argued, would increase work, wages, and thus increase the national wealth. Bastiat mockingly implies that if this were true, then the more \u201cbreaks\u201d in the line the better, so many in fact that the railway would no longer be a railway at all, as the passengers and their luggage would never get to their destination, but the \u201cnation\u2019s wealth\u201d would supposedly have been increased by these measures.<\/p>\n

[Note: In the edition I edited for Liberty Fund I included in the Appendix a witty piece by Mark Twain who noticed something similar when he was visiting Australia, in having to change trains in the middle of the night at Albury on his way to Melbourne from Sydney. See CW3 – Appendix 5. Mark Twain and the Australian Negative Railroad, 517.]<\/p>\n

The House of Representatives<\/h2>\n

Data source: the Australian Electoral Commission website for the 2022 election results<\/a>; for the 2019 election results<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the 2019 election in the HR there were the following:<\/p>\n