On that occasion, it took two full weeks for the Electoral Commission to declare Labor’s Rob Mitchell the winner by just seven votes. More than a week later, after a full recount, the Liberal’s Fran Bailey was declared the winner by just twelve votes.  Labor appealed this result to the Court of Disputed Returns, which handed down its judgement more than seven months after the election had been held, ruling that the Liberals won by 31 votes (and ironically even that judgement originally indicated the margin was 27 votes, which had to be adjusted to 31 after the AEC provided clarifying information and notification of a clerical error in information contained in the original judgement).

No doubt the Courts would have ruled on the issue much more quickly in 2007 if government had then been hanging in the balance in the same way it is now. Even though our electoral system and our administration of it is light years ahead of the ramshackle farce that occurs in the USA (and is generally better than pretty much every other country on the planet), these sort of glitches are a reminder of how crucial it is to get these things right.

If we had had a knife edge seat this time which had also involved inappropriately handled ballot papers, which looks to have occurred this time in the fairly close but not knife edge seats of Boothby and Flynn, things could now be getting very ugly indeed. It is a reminder that getting things as right as possible takes time, and when results are very close, it is crucial that there is public confidence in the system.

Having followed some of the individual seat and booth counts in specific seats more closely than usual this time, I noticed a few not insignificant errors in the counts. Whilst some element of human error is inevitable, I do wonder if the strong demand for delivering results from each booth as quickly as possible on election night increases the likelihood of such errors.

This isn’t to have a go at the Australian Electoral Commission, which as I noted above, is possibly unmatched when it comes to managing the electoral process. But the reality is they have to employ a huge number of casual staff solely for the election, at least some of whom have no previous experience. Partly this is for the handing out of ballot papers during the day, but it is also these people who count the votes after the booths close at 6pm. Even one person not turning up on the day – which can happen just as often when the AEC employs casual staff as it can when McDonald’s use casual staff – can create a big headache at an individual polling booth.

All of us want to know the ‘official’ result on election night as quickly as possible – no one more so than candidates and their parties – but perhaps a bit less haste on the night might mean fewer mistakes that have to be picked up later. Anyway, whilst people seem to be gettng more and more edgy that the Independents still haven’t decided who they are supporting to form government, more than 10 days after the election, we should recognise that it is not really that long a period. As with counting the votes, it is better to take some time and properly assess all the information, rather than rush in due to pressure to produce a quick outcome.

It is almost 3 months since the elections in Belgium and the Netherlands, and as yet neither nation has managed to form a government. As yet, the sky has also not fallen in in those countries.

The current hung Parliament in Australia provides a real – and very rare – chance to get some long lasting improvements in the way our Parliament operates. I would much prefer to wait a few extra days to make sure these improvements were as good as possible, rather than miss this opportunity just because of unnecessary anxiety about the need to have an outcome as quickly as possible.

If there was a seat this time as close as McEwen was in 2007, we would be having to wait a lot longer in any case, so we should count our blessings that there are no knife edge contests this time and leave the people who have to make the decisions sufficient time to ensure they make one that is fully informed.

PS The title of this post derives from my googling the ‘more haste, less speed’ maxim. This showed some variants of the term were used as long ago as the year 1350.  The specific phrase I used for the title of this post derives from 1705, but won’t show up on a google search because the word ‘moderate’ was written as “mod’rate”.  The idea of mirroring   something written over 300 years ago appealed to me more than any concern over having an overly long or not very specific title to my post.

I think suggestions to provide more time for Private Members Bills and business (i.e. non-government legislation and motions), as well as reforming Question Time and moving to fixed three year terms are very good ideas.

There has also been a lot of talk of having an Independent Speaker in the House of Representatives. I don’t have any opposition to that idea, although I am not sure how it could be instituted permanently. There are only 4 Independents amongst the 150 newly elected  members of the House of Reps. One of the current 4 may be suited to the role, but that will not always be the case. Any Independent who is made Speaker in the current Parliament also has the problem that they will then not be able to vote on any piece of legislation (unless there is a tied vote, which is less likely with 149 people eligible to vote rather than 150).

This provision preventing the Speaker from having a deliberative vote is entrenched in our Constitution (in Section 40), so it would be hard to change. Similarly, our Constitution requires (in Section 35) that the Speaker be chosen from amongst the members of the House of Reps, so it isn’t possible to bring an independent outsider to be Speaker.

The tradition in the UK is for the Speaker to effectively cut all ties with their former party in order that they are able to be truly non-partisan. They are usually also unchallenged in their constituency, at least by candidates from the major parties,  during subsequent general elections. I don’t think this is really plausible in Australia, not least because we only have 150 members in our lower house, compared to 650 in the UK.

A reasonable compromise might be to see if a member of the Opposition is willing to be Speaker. This would probably need to be someone who is quite long-serving and respected – Philip Ruddock might fit the bill from the Liberals, or perhaps someone like Simon Crean, should Labor end being in Opposition. This would in effect take one vote away from the Opposition, which they might not be too keen on given how tight the numbers will be in the new parliament.

Whilst I agree a Speaker should be non-partisan, I actually don’t think it is likely to be too big a problem in the upcoming Parliament. In the Senate, the corresponding position is called the President, and that person by tradition always comes from the governing party. However, the Senate President is rarely as blatantly partisan as the Speaker in the lower house is, simply because they know their party does not have a majority in the Senate. If the President acted too blatantly in a partisan manner, they would run the risk of the Senate passing a motion of dissent in them, they costing them their job.  This situation will now also apply in the House of Representatives, at least for this term, so I suspect even if the Speaker does come from the governing party, they will be far more balanced in their rulings than many past Speakers.

I am astonished that there could even be a single political journalist in the country who could feel there is some justification for Tony Abbott to withhold approval for Treasury to properly assess his election policies, and for the people who have the burden of deciding who will form the next government to have access to Treasury’s assessment.

The very same Treasury Department and officials that Tony Abbott is currently suggesting are either untrustworthy or “couldn’t understand” his policies are the ones who will be required to assist in budgeting for and implementing those policies should Tony Abbott end up as Prime Minister.

The notion that the Liberal-Nationals are worried about a leak is utterly laughable. The election has happened, so leaks can’t affect the outcome. The whole point of the request from the Independents is that they can have access to that information, so even if someone did ‘leak’ any of it, it would make no difference, as they would be ‘leaking’ information that the Independents would see anyway.

The following piece by Richard Farmer outlines very well why this isn’t just another party political dispute. As he says, the Liberal-Nationals’ stance on this matter presents a serious governance problem for our country.  (The link to his original article is here, but you have to be a Crikey subscriber to view it – which means I am almost certainly breaking copyright laws by reproducing it in full here, so for my penance I strongly encourage you to subscribe to Crikey – which has its flaws, but is none the less an independent media voice at a time when we have so few).

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A real governance problem. If Tony Abbott means what he says about not trusting the Federal Treasury then this country really does have a governance problem and it’s nothing to do with how the House of Representatives operates. That the country basically has a public service capable of giving independent and impartial advice to whatever party or coalition is in government is the cornerstone of our democracy.

Apparently the Liberal Party, and presumably the National Party although I have not actually heard its leaders make a comment on the subject, now believes that the Treasury would not make an honest assessment of the economic costs and consequences of the promises it made during the election campaign.

It is hard to think of a more serious attack on the integrity of a group of public servants who are largely the same ones who served the Government of John Howard for more than a decade. The Secretary of the Treasury Dr Ken Henry was appointed to the job in April 2001 and appeared to have the confidence of his ministerial superior Peter Costello until the Coalition was defeated in 2007. Since then the most serious incident that might have undermined confidence in the impartiality and independence of the department was the treacherous way that the then Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull was secretly fed incorrect information by a mid-ranking official.

To the great credit of Treasurer Wayne Swan there was no over reaction to Godwin Grech’s madness. Dr Henry was not held to be responsible nor the whole bunch of Treasury officials tarred with the Grech brush. But now, supposedly on the evidence of one apparent leak casting doubt on the accuracy of Liberal costing of an election promise, the Treasury as a body is not to be trusted.

I fear that the Liberals involved — Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb — do not realise the potential for their tactic to undermine public confidence in the whole system of government. Hopefully one day not too far away they will apologise for their stupidity.

I was certainly pleased that the Greens managed to break the 20 per cent mark in the seat of Brisbane. This is obviously well above the 9 per cent I managed when I stood for the seat as A Democrat candidate in 1996, and is also higher than the best House of Reps result the Democrats ever managed to achieve in Queensland, which was 19.1 per cent in the seat of Ryan back in 1990.  The Greens look likely to poll about the same figure in Ryan this time around.

Looking at the individual booth results in the seat of Brisbane, out of the 40 booths (incl 2 pre-poll booths), 23 of them polled over 20 per cent.  Out of these, 11 polled over 25 per cent, and of these 4 polled over 30 per cent.  The Greens outpolled Labor to come in second in 3 booths (Ithica South (which is in Red Hill), Petrie Tce and Kelvin Grove) and came within 5 votes of topping the primary vote count in Kelvin Grove. To focus on the negatives for a moment, there were two booths below 10 per cent – which were Ascot at 8.9 per cent and the nearby booth at Clayfield, which polled a strangely low 2.9 per cent. (I’m more than used to polling low figures, so I’m not complaining about that per se, but it does seem strange that this booth is so markedly lower than all surrounding booths, and is the only one to actually go backwards from the last election, with the primary vote more than half what it was in 2007).

Whilst the Greens polled a bit lower in Ryan, it was actually far more successful when it came to outpolling one or both of the other major parties. Coming in second isn’t as good as coming in first, but with our preferential voting system, getting above one of the other major parties on primary is a crucial goal in being able to win the seat.

In Ryan, the Greens polled above 20 per cent in 16 booths out of 38, with 5 of those polling above 25 per cent, and 2 of them polling above 30 per cent. The Greens also outpolled Labor in 10 of those booths – mostly around Indooroopilly, Toowong, St Lucia and Milton – and won the Brisbane City election day booth (which is not based in the electorate, so it is similar to a sizable absentee booth).

Outpolling Labor in so many booths in that seat is partly due to the much weaker vote Labor achieved in Ryan compared to Brisbane, but it none the less shows that a rigid insistence on a two party mindset just does not reflect the reality in many parts of the state, or the country.

Counting will continue over the next week or so, with a number of seats potentially still in the balance. If you want to keep track of how those counts are going, I recommend you follow the Poll Bludger’s blog – the comments threads there usually provide a lot of up to the minute, well informed and sometimes insider details about the counts (as well as the usual helping of nonsensical drivel and dross that contributes a part of almost all comments threads).

I’ll be closely studying the results and developments over the coming week, and will try to keep leaving posts here outlining things I think are of interest or importance.

The anonymous post-forum feedback from the audience, gave me the most positive assessment – although I’d have to say I wouldn’t be much chop as a Greens candidate if I couldn’t win a debate about climate change. It is interesting to see leaflets now circulating in my electorate from both Labor and the LNP which each attack the other’s record on climate change and seek the number 2 preferences from people who are voting Greens. This is very reminiscent of Labor’s ultimately successful strategy at the 1990 election of openly asking for the 2nd preferences of Democrat and other environmentally concerned voters. It says to me firstly that both parties have basically conceded the ground on climate change to the Greens, and also that there is likely to be a sizeable primary vote for the Greens (which obviously I hope turns out to be true).

You can listen to climate change forum.