Greens senator says he has had to prevail over the 'bent' electoral system of group voting tickets

The Greens senator Scott Ludlam says he is running the strongest political campaign of his life in Western Australia to match the big-spending Palmer United party and prevail over a “bent” electoral system.



Ludlam, striving to retain his Senate seat in Saturday’s rerun West Australian election, said the Greens had run an effective grassroots campaign that was very different in style from PUP’s strategy.

The businessman Clive Palmer’s party spent 11 times more on advertising than Labor and 14 times more than the Liberals last month, according to an analysis of West Australian electoral material by advertising monitoring company Ebiquity.

Ludlam told Guardian Australia that Palmer’s advertising blitz had been “annoying”, and questioned whether the resources magnate had a conflict of interest by campaigning against the mining and carbon taxes.

Palmer, the MP for Fairfax, had a nickel refinery in Queensland and was aiming to launch a major mining project in the same state. He abstained from voting in a lower house vote to repeal the carbon tax but the votes of his party's senators could prove crucial if the repeal was to pass the Senate when the upper house reformed on 1 July.

“He is trying to run Western Australia from Queensland, firing millions of dollars over here and preventing his candidates from speaking,” Ludlam said.

“He is effectively running on a policy of tax avoidance for his nickel refinery. Other than some hallucination on GST, the only party position he has in Western Australia is to get rid of the carbon and mining taxes. The man is a walking conflict of interest.”

Ludlam said he agreed with the criticism of the prime minister, Tony Abbott, of PUP’s advertising spending. Abbott had called PUP a “minor party that is a personality cult for one person".

Ludlam said there needed to be reform of the Senate electoral system, after a messy election last year that involved lost ballots, a recount and the eventual decision to run the poll again.

“I have run the strongest campaign in my life,” he said. “I am trying to get in on primary votes because of the bent system.

“Group voting tickets bear very little resemblance to the will of the voter, but we are obliged to do them.

“If people could vote one to six, or one to 20 or whatever it was, parties would no longer need a group voting ticket and the backroom deals would vanish. Half of the parties would disappear as if they were never there and we’d be left with micro parties, such as the Pirate party, which have a genuine platform.”

Ludlam said his campaign had raised more than $100,000 in donations since his widely viewed Senate speech, in which he castigated Abbott.

The video of the speech has been viewed more than 800,000 times on YouTube. Ludlam followed it up with a more conventional campaign ad, which Palmer praised.

“The speech certainly helped with fundraising,” he said. “But I can’t distinguish the impact of it compared with 139,000 phone calls and knocking on 25,000 doors. We won’t know until after the election.



“I don’t want to overemphasise the speech. We elected our first MP 30 years ago and we’ve got a strong base to work from.



“I’m really proud of the campaign. It’s been the strongest volunteer effort I’ve seen. We haven’t got big donations of the gas industry. It has been premised on person-to-person contact.

“Some people are fatigued or annoyed to be voting again, but not as much as I’d anticipated. People are very motivated when we explain how high the stakes are and how Tony Abbott could get his agenda through. That’s been very motivating.”

If PUP gained a senator in West Australia, to add to the two it already had, it would hold the balance of power in the Senate, in alliance with Victorian Motoring Enthusiasts party senator-elect Ricky Muir. This meant the government would need PUP votes to pass every piece of legislation opposed by Labor and the Greens.

Ludlam and Palmer had been involved in some lighter moments during the campaign. The Greens senator, dubbed DJ S-Ludz, did a DJ set at Perth nightclub Capitol while the PUP leader appeared on radio to sing a cover of Culture Club’s Karma Chameleon.