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Today I’m starting something new with the Tally Room podcast: a three-part history podcast looking at the history of OPV in Australia, rolling out over the next 3 weeks. This first episode looks at early debates on preferential voting and how it worked up to 1951. www.tallyroom.com.au/68638

In the next two weeks I will look at the Whitman government’s push for OPV in 1974, and Labor’s cooling enthusiasm for the reform as the flow of preferences reversed. I’ll also look at the “Just Vote 1” campaigning which started around 1999-2001.

The main theme of the podcast is pretty much all partisan figures, whatever their principled arguments, took positions that aligned with their partisan self-interest. And when that self-interest changed, their positions changed (albeit sometimes with a bit of a delay).