Christian Kerr: Why Australia adopted AV - and is now beginning to shun it

Christian Kerr is a political reporter with The Australian.

As Britain debates adopting AV, Australian voters and political parties are quietly dropping the idea.

To understand quite what is happening, you need a quick lesson in Australian political history.

British politics is a three sided game, but in Australia it has been played with just two teams for more than a century. For most of this time these teams have been the Australian Labor Party, the ALP, and a joint squad assembled from the two main parties of the centre-right, the Liberals and the smaller rural-based National Party.

The Liberals and the Nationals work in coalition virtually all of the time, in both government and opposition, but this closeness has not stopped some spectacular fights for the same electoral territory over the years.

Australia originally conducted its national elections using first past the post, but in 1918 the forerunners of the Liberals and the Nationals introduced AV to stop Labor candidates getting up through the middle when they clashed. The six state parliaments gradually followed suit.

For most of the time since then Australian electors have had to put a number in order of preference next to the name of every candidate on the ballot to cast a valid vote. For most of the time the Liberals and Nationals have been the winners.

But in recent decades Labor governments in the two states where the Nationals are strongest and their rivalry with the Liberals fiercest, New South Wales and Queensland, have struck back. They have bought in a modified form of AV where electors, if they chose, can lodge a valid ballot without giving a preference to every candidate on the ticket or even cast what is effectively a first past the post vote. This has offered some help to the ALP.

Australian politics has also been complicated since the turn of the century by the rise of a new party, the Greens. They have their roots in the environmental movement, but are increasingly being captured by the hard left; deserters from the ALP, activists from the more militant trade unions and apologists for the old Soviet Union left politically homeless since the end of the Cold War.