MARK ALDRIDGE

URGENT NOTICE TO ALL SOUTH AUSTRALIANS

SOUTH AUSTRALIAN MARCH 2014 ELECTION “FAILING ALREADY?”

The government and the opposition recently passed new electoral laws in a deliberate attempt to take control of the upper house, to ensure minor parties and Independents will not be able to run or compete at any level.

The changes include;

· A huge increase in the amount of nominations required up from 2 to 250.

· To exclude Independents from being able to preference

· A massive increase in costs up from $450 to $3000

· Other changes to empower the 2 party system at the expense of the free and informed vote of the electorate.

Questions to the electoral commission; Are these new laws legal, have they been assented to, when will they be in place, when we there be access to the nomination forms, are all remaining unanswered, only weeks out from when nominations must be lodged.

So let’s look at what I have to do to nominate;

To have my name on the ballot paper, with the right to be involved in the preference deals, I will need to run with a friend, 2 candidates will be needed.

The nominations needed (signatures with names addresses and dates of birth) will be a minimum of 500, yet I can’t start getting nominations until forms are made available, what if I only get 24 hours?

It is known that the electoral rolls are faulty, missing around 100,000 names, so I will need to get around 750 nominations to ensure I comply, but it gets worse, as each elector can only nominate one candidate.

So if an elector signs my nomination form, but has signed another’s as well, because all the minor candidates will need hundreds, both will seemingly be invalid, so how many will a candidate have to get?

Two candidates running together will need to raise $6,000 in the next few weeks, a massive imposition, when it is already near impossible to compete with the huge funding of the major parties, these changes are to wipe out the minor player ability’s to field candidate and produce electoral materials.

The other nasty change hiding in the new legislation is that Independents are no longer allowed in the primary ballot draw, so the ballot papers are now designed to promote the major parties, this does not support the concept of a fair go.

While these issues are indeed massive in their own right, one must question how the electoral commission can police the new rules, because with thousands of nominations to go through, where will they find the time, let alone ensure just accounting?

All of this because the government elected want to own the upper house, the house of review, they don’t want pesky Independent thinkers either questioning or exposing their legislative agenda, leaks to me expose the government are intent on undermining our civil and human rights, by the introduction of draconian laws akin to those coming out of QLD.

Now all of this may just piss everyone off, but they are the least of our problems, because the whole electoral conduct will in the most be totally dodgy.

The 2010 state election was found to be dodgy and to be honest totally invalid at law, yet no changes have been made to ensure all the dodgy practices exposed in 2010 do not happen in March.

Over 16,000 ballot papers simply went missing, thousands of postal ballot applications were found to be dodgy around 77,000 names were missing from the electoral rolls and the major parties handled tens of thousands of postal ballot applications, will this all happen again, or even get worse?

The Labor party were caught dressing up as another party and handing our dodgy how to vote cards, they were caught intercepting electoral mail and also ballot paper applications.

Polling booths were absent of important information and ran out of ballot papers, in fact the complaints were massive and so where the allegations of corruption.

I risked my own home to take these issues to the court of disputed returns, fighting for “Your right” to a just election process, only to find out that general elections cannot be invalidated at law, regardless of the count or the conduct, which is absolutely appalling.

The only way to overcome all these issues is to elect genuine representatives of the people, who will fight for democratic reforms, but these changes and dodgy practices are all about ensuring that does not happen.

The results of these electoral changes are to further empower the major parties, which will only result in increased attacks on our civil liberties and our once fine system of democracy.

I for one need your help and support, I have never asked for money in my 15 years fighting for your rights, but without your help, I will be out of the race, as will many other patriotic candidates.