There is no doubt that the recent federal election’s result was a political earthquake that will have deep consequences on Australian politics for decades to come. So far the media and parliamentary parties are engaged in extensive talk about two issues. The first is the inability to form government for days or weeks. The other one is the rise of the Greens and its holding of balance of power.
“The results of the federal election, which produced the first post World War hung parliament, came with positive outcomes in addition to the negative ones” said Jamal Daoud, spokesperson for the Social Justice Network. “Away from quick superficial analysis, any deep look at the outcomes would find deep changes of voters’ attitudes and voting patterns”
“Growing numbers of voters could finally cross the psychological barrier of fear from consequences of fundamentally changing voting patterns. This include voting informally in large numbers, especially in areas with high ethnic and religious minorities”
“We believe that all indications so far are pointing to the direction that the message of the SJN is getting through growing numbers of voters, especially Non English speaking and Muslims voters”
“Since the NSW 2007 state election, the network was asking voters to vote away from the three mainstream political parties (Labor, Liberals and the Greens), even if this means to vote informally when there is no strong independent”
Taking into account that the network is active mainly in NSW, we came to the above mentioned conclusions when taking into account the federal election result, where:
1- NSW had the highest informal votes among all other states.
2- The Greens got the least votes in NSW, comparing to Greens voting in all other states.
3- The high multicultural and high Muslims seats scored the highest informal votes in the state. Blaxland, Watson and Fowler (where Muslims presence is very high), scored informal votes between 13 – 15%. In the same seats, the swing towards the Greens was minimal.
“On the other hand and where there was no campaign similar to the network’s one, the Greens success in Melbourne seat was backboned on Muslim votes. The Muslims did not have the real picture and true information about the reality of the Greens regressive policies and stances. We believe that should the network have campaigned in Melbourne seat, the results there would have changed fundamentally”
“While we are in discussion with many organisations and individuals of possibility to campaign in the state seat of Melbourne in the coming Victorian election, the network will try to prove this fact when the voters go to the polls in March NSW state election”.
“The highly encouraging comments and offer of help from voters in different NSW seats, is another evidence of the growing support for the network’s vision”
“The network believes that all three mainstream parties have more in common than in difference on important issues. One of the most important issues for the voters is the growing Islamophobia and attacks on Multiculturalism”
While the network decided not to run candidates in the federal election for many reasons, we are most likely to run few candidates in the next NSW state election, March 2010.
One of the positive outcomes of the election was the emerging of Muslims and Non – English speaking votes as decisive ones in the Australian politics. But so far, all mainstream parties were successful in deceiving these voters by making more promises, with no real action to empower the community to participate in decision making process.
The network will continue its campaign on the issue of empowering these communities, by all means.
It is interesting also to note that the balance of power became double as a result of this election. The major balance of power was shifted from the Senate to the House of Representatives. This will have great impact on the stability of the government for the next few months/years. It would be interesting to see how the government would act under such circumstances.
For media interviews, Jamal Daoud can be contacted on 0404 447 272
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
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