Hugh,

No, 75% of the votes are Not for lefties. Let me explain...

Each Representative gets a Seat in parliament. That Seat... is due to them winning their Area. As a result, their Area becomes known as a Seat. Each Seat (area) is supposedly made up of roughly the same number of people for State elections - close to 30,000 people.

In State election our ballot paper presents us our choices of which we can pick One (by putting the number 1 in a box next to their name) - or - we can number all the boxes in order of our Preference for who we want.

When votes are counted all the number ones are counted. If no-one has a majority (over 50%) afer the number ones are counted then the person with the Lowest votes has the Prefernces counted. Those ballot papers without a preference are discarded and the Preferences then are distributed. If no-one still has a majority, then the Next lowest ballots have their preferences distributed. And so on until one person has a majority.

Taken to the ultimate, you will always end with two parties - the winner and the runner up. This is termed "Two party prefered".

In my area, as you will have noticed, the Labor winner got a tad more than 50% of number one votes. So no point counting any more. But when preferences are taken into account and we end with a winner and runner up, they win with something like 70% to 30%. That is MY seat.

State wide, the lefties... the Main lefties that is... got around 47% of the number one votes. The remaining 53% of the votes went to the two right leaning parties, the green pseudo lefties, a religious party called family first, and independents.

The end result being, the lefties won about 60 seats, the two right leaning parties got around 24 between them, and a couple of independents who side with either party as they see fit, when the time comes. In short, the lefties won by a Mile. And even if the people become unhappy about them, it will be at least two more elections of a constant swing against the lefties for them to lose the dominant position they have.

Here's something interesting... In two Seats I used to live in, they are both Strong lefty seats with a 60/40 vote ratio on the State level. On the Federal level they are both Strong righty seats both with at least a 15%+ margin. Yes, the Federal Seats have slightly larger boundaries, but still incorporate those areas and other state lefty areas.

In my state, the righties were in power for 30 years straight up until the end of the 80's. They lost power due to revealled corruption. Since then the state has swung from left to right back to left again. And this is the fourth election this lefty guy has won. (It helps him that the roghty parties keep chopping and changing their leadership at the eleventh hour when an election is called, so no-one will vote for people they don't know.)

Yes, we canNOT Directly vote for the leader. They must win their Seat like all Pollies do. But we can Indirectly vote for them by voting for people in the same party who are in our respective seats. When enough of those people have won their seats, the party with leader we want, gains power.

Confused? Welcome to Australian politics. Made confusing so the plebs don't really know what's going on.

Oh... that's just the Representatives. The Senate is a whole 'nother matter with a Different election system.

Michael Ross