On Wednesday night, the House of Representatives passed a sweeping package of voting rights and campaign finance reform that, if enacted, would reshape the structure of American politics, expanding the franchise and diminishing the power of wealthy interests. The bill passed not long before midnight by a margin of 220-210, with every Republican voting no, joined by one Democrat, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi.
Crucial Voting Reform Just Passed the House. What’s Next?
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Georgia Voters Can Put an End to Mitch McConnell’s Grim Reaping | The Nation
anuary runoff races could flip the Senate and prevent the majority leader from obstructing another Democratic presidency.
Georgia Voters Can Put an End to Mitch McConnell’s Grim Reaping | The Nation
By Arthur Plottier More extreme-right senators in Canberra. Notably one Pauline Hanson. I am absolutely flabbergasted how people can vote for an individual that promotes social instability, racism and hate. So far on the AEC count she has over 112,000 votes in the Senate. The possibility of One Nation having one, two or three seats…
Source: It will be ugly – » The Australian Independent Media Network
You must be so glad you voted Liberal. #notfittogovern
Was Julia Gillard the most productive prime minister in Australia’s history?
How do we measure the effectiveness of a government? There are polls, both of opinion and at the ballot box, but these don’t really offer us any measure of effectiveness. You can look at the economy and measu1re the health of the populace – and these are both good indicators – but are not wholly under the influence of the government of the day.
One way might be to look at the ability of a government to pass legislation. Admittedly this is a quantity over quality approach, but it does offer us a quantitative measure of a government, political party or prime minister. Someone that gets a lot of legislation passed might be considered to be good at getting things done.
I took all of the Commonwealth of Australia Numbered Acts and assigned them to a prime minister, political party, and parliament based on the date of assent of the act. This isn’t entirely exact, as some legislation may be introduced under one PM and passed under another, though I believe it is a good proxy.
From this dataset, I counted the total acts for each PM, party, and parliament. Then, I determined the number of days in office for each PM, and the number of days each parliament and party governed. Using these figures you can calculate a rate of acts per day, which accounts for different lengths of prime ministers’ or governments’ terms.
The results? Julia Gillard had the highest rate of passing legislation with a rate of 0.495, followed by Bob Hawke at 0.491:
olddogthoughts 