We need a grown-up to lead the opposition

Tony Abbott wrote in the Sunday Age (19^th September 2010)

With more seats and more primary votes than Labor, the Liberal and National parties won the election but couldn’t quite form a government.

Is there anything worse than a sore loser? In what sense did the Liberal and National Parties “win” the election? Surely elections in our system are won by the party that can from a government afterwards. And that wasn’t Abbott and his Coalition was it?

But fair enough, if you want to claim that this government is illegitimate because Labor received fewer primary votes than the Coalition you are entitled to. But first you need to say something like this:

Our electoral system is deeply flawed because the number of seats a party wins in the lower house has little to do with how many votes it gets. It is to my party’s everlasting shame that we have repeatedly won government illegitimately when the Labor opposition outpolled us. This happened in 1954, 1961, 1969 and 1998. In 1998 we compounded our shame by claiming a mandate for the Goods & Services Tax which had clearly been rejected by the Australian people.

From now on the Liberal and National parties support a proportional representation system for voting for members of the House of Representatives. If we had such a system at the last election we would have gotten a result something like this:

Party	% votes	seats
Labor	37.99	57
Green	11.76	18
Liberal	30.46	46
Lib-Nat QLD	9.12	15
National	3.73	7
Family First	2.25	3
Independent	2.52	4

It is only now, having felt personally the injustice of our electoral system that I am spurred to action. I apologise for having done nothing when previous elections threw up unjust results. And I hereby revoke my admiration for previous Coalition Governments, some of whom I belonged to and others I merely looked up to. Most of these governments were illegitimate. They were formed despite the express wishes of the Australian people who time and time again gave more primary votes to Labor than to us.

Now if Abbott says something like this we should start listening to him. But if he keeps crying about having “won” this election we should tell him to go home and get his nappy changed.