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In the Q & A audience tonight: PUP candidates 1%

Updated: No fair? A man asking a question of Clive Palmer on Q&A turns out to be a candidate from his own party.

2013-09-17_1540Last night on Q & A (which almost turned into the Clive Palmer Show), Palmer was asked a question by an audience member, who turned out to be one of his own candidates.

“Clive made a point earlier, why are we in 2013 still using pencils and in America they at least have a computer system and other countries,” Tim Kelly asked.

“What is the go with the pencil and the paper?

As it turns out, the Flight Centre business development manager stood for the Palmer United Party in the seat of Sydney at the federal election.

“I’m concerned in 2013 we’re not using the technology to make it safe to give an accurate account.”

In answering Kelly, Palmer neglected to identify Kelly as one of his own candidates.

“The issue is, you don’t have to show your ID when you vote. As simple as that. You have to show your ID when you get on an airplane, you have to show your ID when you go into a country, but when you vote in this country you can come and vote 10, 20, 30 times if you like,” he said.

But on social media, questions were being asked.

 

 

“I did ask the whole panel their thoughts,” Kelly later wrote in a Facebook post. “Also Clive did not know I was in the audience prior.

“I told QandA I ran for Sydney and PUP,” he said, adding he was “just trying to get (host) Tony’s attention”.

“I had already disclosed to the ABC that I was a member of PUP and that I ran for Sydney,” he said.

ABC responds:

Q&A does not exclude rank and file party members from joining the audience or asking questions.

We do ask potential audience members if they are members of a political party (see the online registration form). During elections we also ask about candidacy but as the election is over that information is no longer required. However, we do ask shortlisted questioners about candidacy, and whether they are employed by a party.

Taking spontaneous questions from the audience is a regular part of Q&A, and last night during the live broadcast host Tony Jones threw to an audience member with his hand up. In this case, we were aware that there was a PUP candidate at the last election in the audience – Tim Kelly – but he did not disclose that publicly during the program, and so we did not know he was the questioner.

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Source: news.com.au

6 Responses

  1. Clive doesn’t have to say the question asker was his. If the ABC thinks it should be known they have to do so. But they allow people to ask questions without exposing their declared interests every week.

    Palmer is going on about voting conspiracy theories just to get attention and protect his ego if he loses Fairfax.

    The biggest voting scandals in developed countries have involved voting machines and electronic voting that confuse voters, have undetectable errors or be hacked and leave no trail. Ireland scrapped all their electronic voting computers because of problems, as have several states in the US.

    Pencils are cheap and reliable and the system has paper votes which form a record and can be checked. There have been miscounts in this election, but you just go back and recount the paper votes and get the correct result in the end.

    If you just assume Clive is always…

  2. The council elections down here in Vic where I am for the last 3 have been postal only for the last 3 (and I lived in 3 different locations for those). So could easily do the same for federal ones I think, if you’re on the electoral role they could automatically be sent out like the council ones.

  3. @ carolemorrissey

    It’s called postal voting.

    You mean, you don’t leave the house ever? You can get help for that.

    And, without getting all sanctimonious – people in other countries are dying to vote, and you’re worried about having to carry an umbrella. Spare me.

    And, when the electoral official asks those three questions:
    1. What is your full name?
    2. Where do you live?
    3. Have you voted before in this election?

    Your answer to these questions is a legal declaration.

    Finally – since postal, telephone and internet votes are unsupervised by electoral officials, there is no guarantee that they are completed without interference by family members or other people. (Free and fair elections, hmm). And, perhaps you could ask Professor Google if it would still be a “secret ballot” – I think not.

  4. I always think it funny when they ask if I’ve voted anywhere else. Like if I had, I would tell them. I find it ridiculous in this electronic age that we still have to leave our hoses to vote. Most things can be done on line these days, so why not voting. The last Council election here, it was absolutely pissing down with rain, and I don’t have a car. The last thing I felt like doing was going outside, but would have been fined if I hadn’t voted. You didn’t used to get fined for Council elections years ago, but someone in their wisdom changed that.

  5. Hanging chads anyone? I’ll take a pencil and paper any day of the week.

    And you can’t vote “10, 20, 30 times if you like” without the discrepancy being discovered. The AEC is able to determine whether the number of multiple votes detected would have affected the margin by which the candidate was elected.

    And if it was, you can bet we’d be in the court of disputed returns so fast it would make your head spin.

    And we never have.

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