Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Australian politics

Peter Cain (politician)

Opponents are currently using Peter Cain (politician) to add dirt with a new "Controversy" section that occupies half the article (added 18 April 2024). I know nothing about the topic and am hoping people here will work out whether the material is WP:DUE and has WP:RS. I noticed this at AN. Johnuniq (talk) 02:43, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

I think we can agree that RiotAct is not an especially reliable source for an encyclopaedia, though all the Canberra Times sources are okay. There's also an issue with using primary documents (statements from the ACT government, rather than from a a news source). But the real problem is, as you say @Johnuniq, the ridiculous weight put on controversies. They don't even merit their own section, no more than a mention in my view, especially as these are simply accusations from those on the opposite benches. No investigative journalist has established any of it. Needs a solid trim. MatthewDalhousie (talk) 03:07, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Swing (Australian politics) and an example

2024 Dunkley by-election gives the swing as -3.57 for Labor and +3.57 for the Liberals. Not being familiar with the term, I consulted Swing (Australian politics) and was left confused — none of this appears to be relevant. (Eventually I found the 2022 election results from the AEC and discovered that the Liberals' two-party-preferred result was 3.57% higher than in 2022, and the reverse for Labor.) Does the Swing (Australian politics) article cover this topic at all, in a way that I didn't understand? If I'm understanding correctly, the Dunkley by-election article uses it to mean merely "change in these parties' TPP results from the previous election", and this meaning is absent from the Swing article. Nyttend (talk) 20:47, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

China coercion article

Dear Australian Politics people. Keen to have input in this discussion. It's about whether the time has come to gather an article on recent years of what some have called China's campaign of coercion. MatthewDalhousie (talk) 13:49, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Sankey (aka Alluvial) diagrams

2022 United States Senate election in Alaska Preference flow

So, in my opinion, the table with First Preference Percentage and the Two Candidate Preferred percentage is pretty uninformative. Just from those numbers, you might be left scratching your head as to why the person leading on first preferences ends up losing. Sure you can *imply* that the Greens vote went to Labor, One Nation vote went to Liberal, etc, but there should be something more explicit.

With minor parties surging, outright wins on first preference (i.e. a candidate receiving more than 50% of the vote, rendering preferences meaningless) are becoming more and more rare, with 133/151 (87%) seats being won on first preferences in 2022, way up from only 63/147 (43%) in 1993.

I was inspired to start making Sankey diagrams of Australian lower house seats (this wouldn't work in a visually coherent way in the Australian Senate because each state is effectively a multi member constituency) from an image from 2022 United States Senate election in Alaska (right). This image clearly shows that the Democrats overwhelmingly preferred Murkowski over Tshibaka and this got Murkowski over the 50% line.

I have made quite a few Sankey diagrams of various Australian seats here on Flourish. Would people support if I generated one for every seat (in a better format than Flourish, possibly Plotly or another custom designed one to best convey the information, the Alaska senate example is a good one) and added them to every seat page, with the data from the latest election, possibly via a bot since I'm not going to do it 151 times lol.

References

MarkiPoli (talk) 10:16, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

I'd be in support of that. It really is a useful diagram that shows in an instant exactly where the primary votes ended up in each count. It might get a bit complicated for seats with lots of candidates, but it's more of a rarity that seats get more than 10. Kirsdarke01 (talk) 06:53, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

I think they're absolutely gorgeous graphs, and highly useful too. I would 100% support adding them to all seats you wish :) GraziePrego (talk) 08:40, 8 June 2024 (UTC)