Well said Jarveg.....I am a swinging voter and vote for whoever...

Well said Jarveg.....I am a swinging voter and vote for whoever does the right thing by me in my electorate at a particular point in time. I have voted for all major parties over my voting life.

But it's a massive pain with preferences though.

I have voted Greens for a long time as they are all about the environment but have some really stupid other ideas, but I know there preferences go to Labor if the Greens don't get in, which in most cases they don't. I actually joined the Greens party at one stage but they had too many other crazy ideas.

But you really need to be careful where your preference vote gets directed once your candidate doesn't get in. It can be different in each and every electorate, its crazy.

I never understood how voting really worked until I was about 40 years of age when I found out how preference voting worked. I thought I understood when I was 18 but was not told how it really worked.

How is a run of the mill 18 or 25 year old supposed to know who is preferencing who in the zoo. When they don't give a toss about bloody voting in the first place.

It's all too hard for the layperson to understand.

In the recent Qld state election, parties had no consistent preference system in place across the parties and you really needed to drill down hard into your electorate to see who your candidate were actually preferencing.

This is just way too hard for the average Joe or Mary who just wants to turn up to their local school and vote for who they think they are voting for to get in, get a sausage to support the fund raising for the school and go home.

What the average voter doesn't realise is that when the dude they are voting for doesn't get in, they give their votes to another candidate who the voter may have no knowledge of.

When a party wins a state or federal election by a couple of percentage points due to the fact that this small percentage of the population don't know how the system works, it is not a fair outcome, it's deceit.

For example if Malcolm says it long enough, consistent enough and hard enough every day he is on TV that blue cows can fly & they are scared sh*tless of wind turbines cutting them into prime rib, if only 3% of the population needs to be convinced of this fact...... he will be the f**king prime minister and his party will make the rules for the next 3 or 4 years.

Bill Shorten parachuting Kristina Keneally into the Bennelong by-election is a master stroke. Let's see how this plays out. I hope Labor don't loose any MP's to section 44 though. KK is one smart & beautiful lady.