"Keeping The Bastards Honest", a book edited by John Warhurst on the Australian Democrats, has some interesting graphs which correlate party popularity with the popularity of the party leader. It points towards the Australian electorate voting on Presidential lines.
The book is a bit old, and only discusses the first twenty years of the Australian Democrats, effectively ending in 1996, so hasn't any data on the post-Kernot Democrats. The Democrats up to 1996 had several popular and high profile leaders, Don Chipp, Janine Haines and Cheryl Kernot. Clive Bean argues that his has been a considerable part of the electoral success of the Democrats.
The table above shows the party leaders, rated by voters on a scale of one to ten. It also shows the popularity of the Democrats side by side with the Democratic leadership, and the leaders of the two major parties. Clive Bean writes;
... for it is often how popular the leader is relative to the party's current popularity that is crucial in assessing whether a leader is an electoral asset or liability.
Chipp was more popular than both major party leaders - and the Democrat party, which translated into electoral success for the Democrats, however he was on the nose by the mid-80s. Hanes replaced him, but the electoral collapse in 1993 co-incided with the leadership of Janet Powell and John Coulter. Bean writes;
Calculations from other analyses [of the 1993 election results] suggest that the leadership factor probably accounted for at least 2 percent of the Democrats' fall of 7.5 percent in the House of Representatives election and possibly twice that.
So Bean is saying an unpopular leader can account for a 25% to 50% drop in party popularity and consequent electoral results. This places the Pittwater by-election in some perspective. John Brogden was the Liberal Party leader, and was ousted by internal divisions and disunity.
The Liberal Party went into the Pittwater by-election without any established leader, and with party disunity the mass-media story of the previous months. The Liberal Party suffered a 25% swing against them, leading to an Independent winning a safe Liberal seat with the primary vote.
The next graph shows the Democrats' leadership rating against their vote in the House of Representatives.
It appears that Australia has had a voting system where the electorate votes along Presidential style lines for quite a while. Major and minor parties are unduly reliant upon popular and stable leadership. While these graphs show the electoral vote going up and down with the popularity of the Democrats leaders, it doesn't explain why the leaders are popular.
Phoenix Eats Out is the restaurant review site for
Phoenix,
Scottsdale and
Old Town Scottsdale which lists the modernist and contemporary restaurants, taverns and bars in the greater Phoenix area.
This is the list of the most popular restaurants pages from phoenixeatsout.com that have been viewed the most;
My personal favourite restaurants in Phoenix are
AZ88,
Postinos,
Bomberos with
Grazie,
Humble Pie,
Orange Table,
The Vig,
Fez and others coming close behind. View the complete list with the photo-journalistic style images on
phoenixeatsout.com
Arizona is an outdoor state and has lots of hiking in the city and around the state. Phoenix is unusual for most cities in having several large mountains in the center of the city with great hiking. Anyone who comes to Phoenix has to do the
Echo Canyon trail on Camelback and the
Summit Hike on Squaw Peak or Piesta Peak. The views of the city, suburbs and surrounding mountains are wonderful from Camelback and Piesta Peak.
For more experienced hikers there is the McDowell Mountains in North Scottsdale that has several difficult and strenuous hikes in
Tom's Thumb and
Bell Pass. Alternatively, you can hike the highest mountain in Arizona. At 12,600 feet
Humphrey's Peak is a long and difficult hike.
Between 2004 and 2009 this site,
southsearepublic.org, was a constitutional blog based on scoop which focused on Australian and global constitutional issues.
One of the strongest aspects of it was the development of constitutions by those involved in the blog. These constitutions are the outcome:
The constitutions were built using principles from Montesquieu's separation of powers, the enlightnment's universal political rights and the ancient Athenian technology of sortition and choice by lot.
South Sea Republic started in 2004 as an Australian constitutional blog in 2004 based on scoop software. It was an immigrative outgrowth of Kuro5hin. The archives for each year since then;
The articles are ordered by views.
I am an Australian living in the United States as a permanent resident.
I am a software developer by trade and mostly work in Java and jump between middleware and front end.
I originally worked in the New York area of the United States in telecommunications before moving to Washington DC and
working in a mix of telecommunications, energy and ITS. I started my own software company before heading out to
Arizona and working with Shutterfly. Since then I have joined a startup in the Phoenix area and am thoroughly enjoying myself.
I do a lot of photography which I post on this website, but also on flickr. I have a photo-journalistic website which lists
the modernist and contemporary restaurants in phoenix. I have a site on the
Australian Flying Corps [AFC] which has been around since the 1990s and which I unfortunately
lost the .org URL to during a life event; however, it is under the
www.australianflyingcorps.com URL now.
The AFC website has gone through several iterations since the 90s and the two most recent are
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2004-2002) and
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2002-1999) which are good places to start.
