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If there’s one thing the left really hate, it’s when the right use their own tactics against them.
Voters are being urged to look out for “misleading” party names, as right-wing activists seek to funnel progressive votes to conservative parties in Victoria’s upper house.
The state will go to the polls on November 28, with 16 parties already registered with the Victorian Electoral Commission.
Victoria has a history of electing micro party candidates to the upper house due to the state’s complicated group voting system, but political experts have cautioned not all parties may be what they seem.
Oh, now they’re noticing? This has been going on for decades, but it was the left doing it so no one said a thing. Now, the right are using the left’s tactics against them – cue outrage from the taxpayer-funded left-wing propaganda machine the ABC.
Avi Yemini, a Melbourne-based YouTuber, who has heavily criticised pro-Palestine rallies and previously served in Israel’s military, this week announced plans to establish a “Free Palestine” party.
In a video posted to social media, he called for 750 Victorians to become members so as to register the party with the electoral commission.
No, Avi hasn’t suddenly joined Antony Loewenstein and George Soros in the kapo squad, donned a keffiyeh and grown a soft spot for Hamas. Quite the opposite. As he cheerfully explained in a video that’s already doing the rounds, the idea is to hoover up all those “useful idiots from the far left, to the fringe right, to certain immigrant cultures that have imported their hate” who’ll see the party name and tick the box in a tantrum. Then, via the state’s gloriously rortable group voting tickets, those preferences flow straight to the grown ups.
“We are going to flow our preferences on to parties that want to free Palestine – from Hamas,” he said, as the video showed a vision of One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.
“Consider this my civic service,” Avi says.
At least the right are up front and honest about what the left have been secretively weaponising for decades.
[Monica Smit], the anti-lockdown campaigner, in February announced plans to register the Save the Environment Party for the Victorian election to help parties that might “never get the types of votes we would get”.
“In the likely scenario that Save the Environment party doesn’t get any candidates, our group voting ticket can help One Nation, Gerard Rennick’s party, the Libertarian party, the Family First party,” Ms Smit said in a social media video.
“Save the Environment party – it’s a great name.”
On Tuesday, Ms Smit told the ABC she did care about the environment and denied the party was a front.
“The [group voting ticket] system is very flawed in my opinion, that’s why it’s been abolished in most other states around Australia,” Ms Smit said.
The usual suspects are, of course, clutching their pearls. Experts have been wheeled out to declare the plan “insidious” and “misleading”. Monash University’s Zareh Ghazarian warns of an era of “misinformation and disinformation”, as if those aren’t the left’s basic operating principles. Victorian Greens leader Ellen Sandell demands Labor scrap the “dodgy group voting laws” before the November election, lest “deceitful far-right political parties” buy seats in parliament.
Because nothing says principled outrage like a party that spent years defending its own preference-harvesting machine suddenly discovering the system is broken the moment the other side works out how to use it.
Don’t believe me? Just ask the terminally smug Glenn Druery, the self-styled ‘preference whisperer’.
For decades Druery has openly boasted about cobbling together micro-party preference deals to get candidates elected on a handful of votes, such as the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party, whose Ricky Muir was elected on just 0.5 per cent of the vote. Even less than Fatima Payman, believe it or not. Druery boasts of meeting with senior staff and politicians from both the Liberal and Labor parties.
But his proudest boast is bullying One Nation for nearly 30 years. “I like to think of what I do in working against One Nation as a community service,” he once told Lateline, miming a chokehold. “My hand on their electoral throat squeezing the preferential life out of them.”
So Druery, like Avi Yemini, is perfectly transparent about gaming the system. Unlike Yemini, though, he’ll weave his dark magic for whoever pays the piper, usually the majors or their favoured minors. Labor and the Greens have happily benefitted. Yet now that Yemini is doing exactly the same thing, only out in the open and against their interests, it’s suddenly an outrage to democracy.
The hypocrisy is even richer when you remember the Victorian Labor government’s own greatest hits. The Red Shirts scandal saw $388,000 of taxpayer money funnelled through electorate officers to campaign in marginal seats ahead of the 2014 election. Twenty-one Labor MPs were implicated. An ombudsman’s report confirmed the rort.
Police investigated and served subpoenas to Labor staffers and MPs – and, with total impunity, every single one was ignored. Not only did Labor’s apparatchiks simply refuse to show up and answer questions, no one was ever charged. Daniel Andrews emerged unscathed.
When the inevitable calls came to clean up the preference rorts that make such stunts possible, Labor simply… didn’t. They’re still ‘considering recommendations’ from an inquiry. Considering. So the system that let them win stays exactly as it is. After all, they’ve got an election to win in six months.
Yemini, by contrast, is telling voters exactly what his party is for: a Trojan horse to redirect protest votes to parties that actually want to win. He even says he can’t wait for the system to be scrapped, because then One Nation will pick up every seat they deserve on first preferences alone.
The left, naturally, would rather keep the rort in place so long as they benefit from it.
This is the same mob that spent years lecturing us about “democratic norms” while stacking branches, rorting public funds and engineering preference deals that would make a Tammany Hall ward boss blush. Now a right-winger has looked at their playbook, shrugged and said: ‘Great idea, thanks.’ Cue the fainting fits and screeches of outrage.
So, spare us the sanctimony. The left built this machine. They fine-tuned it. They used it without apology. Now someone else is driving it.
Suck it up and stop whining.
