The free public transport debate has long fascinated me, because many participants don’t take the side one might expect. Specifically, people you would describe as public transport “experts”, “advocates” or “supporters” oppose it, often very strongly - not only claiming that it isn’t a priority, but that it is actively bad, on two main grounds:

• “Free PT would mean less money for services”: Sacrificing fare revenue at the same time as increasing demand (due to price no longer being a barrier) means less money and more strain on existing services, so worse services and passenger experience.

• “Free PT is regressive and bad for equality because it primarily benefits wealthier people”: Public transport coverage is better in cities and in the wealthier, more established areas of cities, and used typically by white collar commuters. On this basis, free PT represents a handout to the wealthy who already enjoy relatively good public transport.

The problem is that these claims are wrong, bogus, and built on a foundation of bad research that generates wrong conclusions from conceptually confused thinking.

Worse, they stem from the same bad conceptual thinking that has poisoned welfare state discourse in Australia and worldwide for decades now, which we might call “means testing brain”.

Means testing brain

The conceptual problems stem from not making apples-to-apples comparisons, not considering both sides of “the ledger”, and muddying absolute quantities vs percentage quantities.

So let’s detour from public transport fares to the welfare state and consider the situation with old age pensions.

Many countries, Australia included, means-test benefits like old age pensions, meaning people with more than a certain “means” (ie income/wealth) are excluded from receiving it.

This is superficially appealing from an egalitarian and efficiency perspective: Don’t give government benefits/spend government money on those who don’t need them, ie those who have the “means” to do fine without it.

It seems like that gives us less government spending/lower taxes (the government saves a bunch of money not handing out money it doesn’t need to) and better “targeting” (more of the money goes to people who need it, and less to those who don’t).

But all this is wrong. The key missing insight is that the same total tax is being collected, just in a different form. Not getting paid a pension is the same as being paid a pension but being taxed that same amount. In both cases, I receive zero dollars.

So comparing a means-tested pension to a non-means-tested pension isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. To do that we need to look at the full system, or both sides of the ledger. Taxes and benefits.

Another way to think about this clearer is to decompose means-testing into two separate components: A universal pension, and the means test “tax”.

Expressed in basic mathematical notation, the total cost of each system (ignoring administration costs for the moment) is:

Again, for a given government expenditure, the amount of tax is the same.

In other words, the universal pension vs means-tested pension debate is simply a difference of:

• Distributional effects (winners/losers of 1 vs the other)

• Administration costs

It doesn’t reduce overall tax - it just shifts it and disguises it.

Means testing is just a weirdly-shaped tax with high admin costs

So if the distributional effects of means-testing were good, and the administration costs were low, it would be fine.

But sadly the opposite is true.

There are numerous problems distributionally:

• Non-payment of a benefit is a flat tax of an absolute+limited amount, rather than a percentage like a regular tax would be. Consider a billionaire like Gina Rinehart. Percentage-wise, not receiving the pension is a very low effective “tax” for her, but a very high “tax” for somebody with only just enough assets to lose out. With a regular progressive (or even flat) tax, Gina would pay a higher percentage, not a lower one.

• Regular taxes are raised from lots of different people, and lots of different sources, meaning lots of different people, retirees and non-retirees alike. But non-payment of a benefit is a “tax” only on retirees, and further, only on a subset of those retirees. Because the “tax” is less “wide”, it has to be “higher”, much higher. The effective tax rates, percentage wise, of real-world means testing are ludicrously high, much higher than regular taxes ever are or would be, and often over 100%!

• Administration costs are higher (means testing everybody is more expensive than simply handing out to everybody) which means more waste and less money going to recipients

• Administration is a barrier to participation, often to those worst off and least able to navigate bureaucracy.

If you’re still unconvinced by how much of a stinker means testing is, I highly recommend these two great reads:

• Universal Benefits Cost Less Than Means-Tested Benefits by Matt Bruenig at

• Means testing is a dog of a tax and it will destroy the welfare state by David Sligar

Public transport fare brain is just another variant of means testing brain

Switching gears back to the public transport fare debate, we see all the same conceptual problems.

• “Slashing fares would mean higher taxes” ignores that fares are already effectively a tax. Swapping out fare revenue for regular taxation wouldn’t be higher taxes, because saving on fares and administration costs would be an effective tax cut.

• “Free fares would benefit the wealthy” ignores that the wealthy would pay much more if the same fare revenue was raised via conventional taxation instead. This is doubly true for the very wealthy who tend to get around in limos, helicopters etc rather than trains and buses.

• “Fare revenue means more money for services” is wrong, because, per above, the same revenue can be gathered with regular taxation instead with lower administration costs. Free fares actually means billions saved in ticketing and enforcement costs that can be used to fund better services instead.

Fares also suffer from some even worse conceptual problems than pension means testing, distributionally speaking:

• At least with pension means testing, the worst off are at least theoretically eligible for the pension and excluded from the non-payment. With PT fares, even very poor people must pay, and even if they are eligible for concession rates, those concession fares can comprise a substantial percentage of their income.

• Whole vs parts fallacy. Just because PT is more prevalent in wealthier areas, and oriented around commutes to white collar CBD jobs, doesn’t mean that everybody who takes public transport is wealthy. Obviously, plenty of poor people take public transport, in particular those too poor to afford a car.

Free fares lower inequality and ease poverty, and Jago Dodson is flat out wrong

So the prevalent idea in Australia public transport discourse that free/lower fares are “regressive” and bad for equality is simply wrong. And based on a simple logic error: Ignoring the distributional outcome of the tax that replaces the fares.

As far as I can tell, this notion seems to have been popularized in recent years in Australia mainly by RMIT Professor Jago Dodson, with output like the following:

Free public transport is a bad idea: RMIT expert

5 maps that show why free public transport benefits the affluent most

It’s sad and frustrating that this misguided thinking has taken off and been popularized when it entirely lacks substance. Jago Dodson should publicly withdraw his endorsement of these ideas. They are doing great harm to the cause of public transport and socioeconomic equality in Australia.

Public transport is about transport more than distribution anyway

While free/zero-fare public transport is a win for equality and poverty reduction, and we should do it on this basis, we ought to remember what the fundamental purpose of transportation systems is: Moving people around efficiently.

And what matters are overall outcomes. Not every single component of every single system needs to increase equality. Consider healthcare. Universal healthcare is good, in spite of mostly benefiting older people who are generally much wealthier than younger people, and thus being bad for equality. That’s no reason not to do it.

If you are concerned about inequality and poverty reduction (and we all should be), then the levers to pull are taxation, the welfare state, labour relations and economic policy, not public transport fares. Happily, free PT is good for equality. But even if it wasn’t, that wouldn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t do it, because moving people around efficiently is the purpose and goal.

And so free public transport is good mainly because it is more efficient at moving people around! It gets people out of cars, it puts more money into services and infrastructure rather than fares, and it allows for quicker boarding/offboarding and quicker journeys with less hassle.

Free PT and EVs

The rise of EVs makes it particularly urgent in terms of getting people out of cars, or “mode shift” as they say in the biz, especially in a city like Melbourne where many people already own cars. This is because people make transport choices in terms of variable (ie per-trip) costs, not fixed costs.

EVs, unfortunately for people who want to see more PT use and less car use, have roughly zero variable costs, due to the often very low (or even negative) costs of charging. For public transport to compete on price, and not be relegated to a “luxury” option, it ought to be at least as cheap as a car for any given journey.

If EV journeys can cost roughly zero, that means PT not only ought to be free, it must be free if it is to remain competitive.

But most people miss the explanatory power of induced demand because of the limited, popsci, midwit version of it they’re usually taught or told.

If it were understood fully, it would completely up-end the way we build transport infrastructure - for starters, we would never build a freeway again, and probably even tear down most existing ones.

So let’s look at what’s missing.

The usual induced demand explanation

A lot of people, especially politicians, believe that we need more roads to “reduce congestion”. Induced demand is typically raised as an objection to this - and correctly so.

This recent Sydney Morning Herald article on traffic jams explained it as follows:

Forever spending billions building more roads or improving existing ones can do surprisingly little to ease congestion in the long run – eventually traffic, like water finding its natural level, catches up. Think of Sydney’s Parramatta Road or Melbourne’s Hoddle Street: however many new lanes they add, both arterials are full to bursting come rush hour. Moscow’s infamous Garden Ring, around the Kremlin, was once up to 18 lanes; now a modest 10 at its widest, it is still often gridlocked. “Roads are invitations to drive on them,” notes Schreckenberg.

In 1962, US economist Anthony Downs called this effect “induced demand”. Downs was among the first of a new breed of scientist-engineer-economist types who have made it their business to study traffic and deduce what might be done to make it flow more freely.

“The opening of a new expressway reduces peak-hour congestion on many previously existing streets because large numbers of commuters shift onto the new expressway,” Downs observed in the journal Traffic Quarterly. “At first, they are able to make much better time on the expressway. However, word of [this] soon spreads, and even more commuters shift from other routes onto the expressway. Gradually, the time required for commuting on the expressway rises as peak-hour congestion increases.”

This is exactly what happens - to the extent that additional road capacity speeds up journeys, they are more attractive to drivers, more people drive (“I used to take the tram to work but now I drive because it’s faster”, “I used to avoid peak hour because of the traffic jams but now I don’t need to”), and the traffic congestion is soon back to square one (at best) or worse.

Possibly the most viral piece of transport planning content ever is this clip from Australian TV show Utopia, which demonstrates the futility of adding more car capacity:

It’s a great bit of TV - very funny, while deftly explaining a a real problem.

Limitations of the usual induced demand explanation

But there’s something unconvincing about this as a complete explanation of the impossibility of ending traffic congestion. If all that happens is a one-off increase after new road capacity opens, then building even more lanes would probably work. Particularly in cities where most people already mostly drive, there’s only so much more demand you can induce.

Certainly a new road will create mode shift for cars, and that’s bad, but from a perspective of a politician or planner who does want a car centric city, it seems like building more lanes will eventually work if you commit to it - as long as you build enough to overcome that initial spike.

More cars are getting moved about, and moved about faster. Sure, there might be more congestion, but there’s more throughput.

With only this part of the explanation, the case for More Roads is at least arguable. Again, this is the part of induced demand that everybody talks about - it’s the conventional midwit understanding of induced demand.

Short term vs long term induced demand

But this aspect of induced demand is secondary to the main effect, which is longer term. It involves not only roads, but real estate. It’s about where people move to.

When a road is built, people move to the other end of it.

Short term, the behavior change is “great, now I can drive down the new road and get to work faster”. Long term, the behavior change is “great, I can move to the other end of that road and drive back down that road to get where I need to go”.

The other end of the road is typically further out of the city where housing and land is cheaper. Not only does the new road induce congestion, but it induces sprawl, which induces longer term congestion.

Instead of the original point of congestion-busting, faster journeys, the behaviour change does the opposite. Longer journeys are caused in two ways:

• Spreading out - things generally being further from each other

• Mismatch - the destinations people move between being in different streets/suburbs/towns rather than the same one

More concretely, somebody might move from an inner city neighbourhood which they are finding expensive to a cheaper housing development on the outskirts of the city, relying on the new faster freeway into down to drive back into the city for their job, to shop at Costco, to their old neighbourhood to visit friends and family, whatever.

Induced demand from the ground up

Note that induced demand is not specific to cars, and is not even specific to transport.

It is simply the basic Econ 101 observation that when the cost of something is lower, people buy more of it.

In the context of transport, we mean cost in the holistic sense of not only financial cost but time, comfort, safety, etc.

This aspect of induced demand is not merely a theory on why freeways are bad, but the mechanism by which cities develop. Once train travel became faster and more convenient, London spread out in a starfish pattern along the various train lines.

Today, people still plan their house purchases around transport, perhaps moving next to a train station for convenience, ensuring they have enough parking for their cars, or choosing to live close enough to the city to bike to work.

More roads means more cars, more train lines means more trains, more bike lanes means more bikes. All that is obvious - although many get the causality backwards. It is often claimed, for example, that “Australians love their cars”, and that is why Australian cities prioritize cars.

In fact, the causality fundamentally runs the other way: Australians cities prioritize cars, which makes people want cars because they are the only feasible/convenient transport option. The demand for cars is… induced.

The futility of freeways

Considered from this longer term dimension, the complete uselessness of freeways and faster roads is clear. These roads don’t ease congestion or help deal with sprawl, they create it. They are worse than useless. If only our politicians could reckon with this simple fact.

Faster roads don’t mean faster journeys, they just mean longer journeys. That’s why all the long term data shows that commutes haven’t got faster in decades even as road speeds have gotten faster and faster.

Of course, long train lines move people further from the city too - but train lines have an enormous capacity that can cope with it, and produce denser clusters around the stations rather than widespread sprawl. This is why we don’t characterize outer-suburban transit-oriented neighbourhoods and towns (like in the Netherlands) as sprawl the way we do with Australian neighbourhoods.

Cars are uniquely spatially inefficient and throughput-inefficient. That is why in spite of the generality of induced demand as a principle, it’s uniquely a congestion-causing problem for cars.

Induced demand, car parking, and the YIMBY movement

It’s not just about the car journeys themselves, but parking at the other end. Here too, more available parking at the destination means more people driving. And the flipside, if we want to reduce car dependency and sprawl, a great way to do that is to remove car parks, or at least, not build new ones.

Understanding of this is slowly spreading through government, and as such there has been some progress recently on things like reducing car parking minimums in new developments.

But this doesn’t go far enough. It’s still very standard, particularly in higher end developments, for each new apartment development to have a large basement car park with at least 1 car park per apartment.

The increased density a new apartments brings with it should add walkability and bikeability to the neighbourhood and reduce congestion - but with parking garages as standard, the opposite occurs.

This reduces quality of life for existing resident, and fosters NIMBY sentiment, undermining the case for further housing being built in the area.

Many NIMBY objections are actually about traffic and parking, sometimes thinly disguised. “Too many people” actually means too many cars, “reduced amenity” actually means “too hard to find a car park on the street. And when these apartments do induce more car activity by building new basement car parking, these objections are valid.

If the NIMBY movement is to genuinely foster support for more density, rather than simply supporting short term rubber stamping of what developers want, it needs to support not only the elimination of car parking minimums, but car parking maximums. Developers like Melbourne’s Nightingale have shown that apartments without car parking can be cheaper and very popular.

(It should also support things like mandatory footpath upgrades and pedestrianization of roads next to developments, which ought to get better rather than worse when a new development happens).

Which demand shall we induce?

Nothing is set in stone in cities. We can induce whatever demand we so choose. Sydney ripped out most of its light rail and built freeways, inducing car demand, now it’s building back new light rail and new metro lines to induce demand the other way.

A new bike path across the Harbour Bridge will induce thousands of new bike trips that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.

Induced demand builds cities, and the demand we induce is up to us.

So I’m going to lay the full case out here once and for all.

The core problem: Space efficiency

Cars take up a lot of space. They are uniquely space inefficient, which is why they are unique in the congestion they cause.

At a train station, this is particularly acute, because in contrast, trains are very space efficient. Even a very large car park can only fill a fraction of a single train.

The new car park at Frankston Station, for instance, has 500 car parks. The X'Trapolis 2.0 trains that will run on this line from next year, have a total capacity of 1241 (443 seated, 798 standing).

If we assume that trains run every 10 minutes from 6am to midday, this car park can fill at most 500 / (1241*36) = 1.1% of total capacity leaving the station.

Of course, Frankston is only one station, and there are many stations along the line. But even 10 similarly generous stations would only fill 10% of total morning capacity.

Even then, we can’t assume that each of these passengers is a boost to ridership.

Many parkers would have taken the train anyway

Many people say that train station parking boosts ridership by allowing those for whom walking/biking/PT to the station is impractical to still get to the station - without it, they would drive all the way into town instead.

But that’s an overly rosy assumption - many people parking at the station will be people who do live close by, otherwise could easily have got there another way, but drove simply because the free parking was available.

So many of the parks won’t result in a mode shift from long drive to short drive plus train. Instead, that building that park will merely create increased local car traffic - in other words, a mode shift from short walk/bike/PT plus train to short drive plus train.

Even worse than regular parking

Car parking is just generally a bad thing when there is far too much of it, as there is in Melbourne’s case. But at least typical high-demand parking usually has time restrictions and/or payment so that it turns over relatively frequently and one car doesn’t hog a spot all day.

But this is not possible with train station parking. These parks are aimed at commuters. Commuting is invariably an all-day thing, so a single commuter car park boosts ridership by at most 1 rider per day (unless commuters carpool, which most won’t).

Unless you leave very early, there won’t be a car park available

One arg you hear in response to this is that even if station parking is a poor way to boost ridership, perhaps we can argue that it’s still good to make the choice available.

Unfortunately, the choice still won’t be available, because station car parking in high demand areas fills up extremely quickly and early in the morning. If you need to a park after the station is full (which is most of the day), then you’re out of luck.

Sydney’s PT car parks have an API which allows precise tracking of this - the output of which you can see in this chart made by somebody on reddit (can’t find the original post, please get in touch if it was you for suitable credit).

Tallawong is a popular station on Sydney’s new metro line. You can see that car parks start rapidly disappearing after 6am, and are gone by about 7am.

(And a train with more capacity than this entire car park leaves this station about every 4 minutes.)

Unless you live the kind of life where you can leave for work at 6am, forget about it. Got kids to drop to school first? Forget about it.

Some underpopulated/underutilized stations may be less congested - but as soon as those stations have more catchment population and services, the same problems will occur.

And the more the line frequency increases, the less of a percentage ridership boost the car park can offer.

No reduction in local congestion or necessity of car ownership

When car parks are available, the cars driving to/from those car parks still create local morning/evening peak congestion on local roads from commuters going to/from the station.

In the morning, this will be reduced by the car parks becoming full early, although many people will try driving to another station, or drive the entire way.

And leaving a car at a station all day still requires owning just as many cars as a purely car-based commute, so building these car parks doesn’t reduce car dependency from the perspective of ownership.

Poor land use at the station

Let’s look at the aforementioned Tallawong Station. In the newly developed land at the station, we can see that about as much land has been dedicated to car parking as to housing.

So building the car parking makes the area around the station more car-dependent and congested, reduces the amount of housing available, and lowers the catchment population of the station via the reduced housing and sprawl.

All of this further reduces ridership rather than increasing as supposedly intended.

Perverse pricing - parking is free while fares cost

In spite of being expensive, these car parks are given away for free use. Meanwhile, those who take buses, trams and short train trips generally have to pay fares which are very expensive on a per-km basis.

The person who drives to the station gets free, dedicated all-day use of an extensive asset, while the person who buses to the station gets a mere bus ride, while both pay the same total.

Effectively, non station parking users are subsidizing car users to get to the station much less efficiently (and to slowing down buses along the way because the buses usually have to spend time sitting in car traffic thanks to lack of bus lanes).

This is just intuitively unfair, and on a purely practical level increases car overuse (that is, car use even when a bus would have been just as convenient).

A money sink for government

Building expensive infrastructure and then giving it away for free is obviously terrible for government’s finances. Frankston’s car park cost around $170k per car park to build, with ongoing maintenance costs on top of that.

When we compare this to building housing next to stations instead, we see just what a terrible idea it really is. If the government had paid a developer to build housing at the station instead, it would instead be making money from the sale or ongoing rent of the apartments, and be able to use that money to fund better walking, bike and bus infrastructure to get more people to the station.

In other words, this would result in more ridership AND more money.

Instead, we’re draining public coffers for the purposes of less ridership and more car dependency.

Why aren’t the private sector building station car parking?

If the government didn’t build station car parking, but there was still high demand for it, private interests are quite capable of building it. There’s no need for governments to compete in catering to this inefficient and unworkable preference.

And of course, it’s still possible to drive to a station and simply park a little further away in a regular parking space or car park.

The case for station car parking is so poor that anybody looking at it rationally can see that it is a stupid idea. However, cars exist in a special category in many people’s minds where only the upsides matter, and the downsides magically don’t exist. Politicians who like being driven around and like attending ribbon-cutting ceremonies are particularly partial to this sort of thinking.

The solution - housing, walking, biking, buses

Look at the streets surrounding any station with a large car park and you’ll see why people drive to the station even from nearby - the housing is sprawled, the streets are car-dominated and unwalkable, bike lanes and paths are nonexistent/dangerously inadequate, and buses are infrequent.

The solution is simple, the government owns lots of great land at and around train stations. Put housing it, make money from that, use that money to improve efficient ways of getting to the station.

In this post, I want to put aside the merits of the actual args. (Suffice to say, it’s certainly not an orthodox position by disability advocates that “disability doesn’t exist”.)

Instead, let’s look at the ideology and principles that these views spring from: They are perfect examples of labour-inclusive capitalism.

Remember that labour-inclusive capitalism is the idea that capital and labour aren’t inherently oppositional, or antagnostic, but that they should work together: That capitalism works best with labour inclusion, where workers and unions get a fair go and are thus willing participants who feel included in the process of capitalism.

Van’s conception of disability in the clip is emblematic of this. Not only is disability bad because it limits participation in capitalism, it’s defined in these terms!

We hear the example of somebody who is 55 and has “aged out of physical labour” - their disability is not that they have a bad back or any physical limitation per se, but that that limitation limits their workforce participation! Labour inclusion is harmed, capitalism is harmed, therefore it’s bad.

A UBI is ableist?

In the next part of the clip, Van is talking about barriers to participation, then suddenly veers off onto the topic of a UBI, calling it “ableist” and “exclusionary”. The sudden turn, and the use of these words to describe a universal payment seems strange, initially - but once you realize it’s driven from a labour-inclusive capitalism, it makes perfect sense.

It “structuralizes keeping people out of workplaces” (labour inclusion) and sabotages “the agency of having a job” (labour inclusion again!).

Where a left perspective sees employment as inherently exploitative and alienating, for the labour-inclusive capitalist, a job is agency, inclusion, and meaning.

Next, we are told employers will then be less likely to hire disabled people (out of pity), because of this UBI welfare safety net (because they’ll pity them less). Welfare here is a malevolent force - undermining the social contract between employer and employee, and thus the cause of, you guessed it, labour-inclusive capitalism.

This is a view that isn’t just a weaker version of somebody with more egalitarian or socialist views, it’s oppositional to it. Exploitation vs agency, universalism vs exclusion. These are oppositional, incompatible concepts.

A party united

Labor is often described as a broad church - and it’s true that its a big party with a wide range of views among its membership.

But among those that actually hold influence and power, and its aligned podcasts, labour-inclusive capitalism is supreme and dominant.

For those who believe in egalitarianism, or that freedom lies not in inclusion in the workplace but in liberation from its exploitation, labour-inclusive capitalism presents a problem.

Not only does a party of labour-inclusive capitalism work against the goals of egalitarianism, socialism, and universal welfare, but it teaches those sympathetic to those goals that better things aren’t possible.

Whether from inside or outside the party, Labor will never fundamentally be a party of egalitarianism until the dominant ideology of labour-inclusive capitalism is challenged. But the first step is simply to recognize it when you hear it.

So why are Labor so hesitant to raise it? Labor won the last election, Labor is in power in every mainland state/territory. Meanwhile, the Liberals are in disarray, polling badly, have future demographics stacked against them, and are also fighting off the teals.

So why don’t they seize the moment?

Only three possible reasons

Conceptually, if a political party chooses not to do something, it must be for one of three reasons.

1. They want to, but rightly believe it will harm them electorally.

2. They want to, but wrongly believe it will harm them electorally.

3. They genuinely don’t want to, because they believe it is actually bad.

Most discussion seems to proceed from 1 (“Labor can’t fix everything in one term”) or 2 (“Labor are too cowardly to do what’s right”), but far less often from 3.

This is very frustrating to me. As I discussed in a previous post, “What stops Labor moving further to the left?”, voter views tend to flow from party views, rather than the other way around. Party ideology thus has far more explanatory power than voter opinions.

But what is Labor’s ideology? Aren’t they centre-left? Isn’t raising Jobseeker a left idea?

The limits of the left-right spectrum

While the political spectrum is generally useful in terms of comparing parties to each other, it tells us little about internal motivation. When you ask somebody for their vision of society, they won’t usually say “centrism”, “far rightism” or any particular spectrum position, it’ll usually be a specific vision and principles.

Obviously, different people have a million different visions for society, and even on the same side of the spectrum, these differ widely in terms of policy, principles, and aesthetics.

A “centre-leftist” isn’t just somebody who has the same goals and vision for society as a “hard leftist” - it’s somebody with fundamentally different goals.

Think of Labor’s political and intellectual leadership: Are Albo, Jim Chalmers, Richard Marles, Wayne Swan and Paul Keating socialists, trying to move us leftward to full socialism as fast as they can, only tempered by the whims of voters? No.

Their view of society is fundamentally different from somebody who describes themselves as a socialist.

The three bucket model

Instead of talking about the major parties as centre-left and centre-right, I think it’s much more illuminating to divide the spectrum up into three worldview “buckets” as follows:

• Anti-capitalism (“left”)

• Labour-inclusive capitalism (“centre”)

• Labour-oppositional capitalism (“right”)

These three broad “worldviews” are defined by their attitude towards capitalism.

Capitalism is the ideology of the status quo (we live in a capitalist society and capitalist world) and so these three buckets are defined with reference to this status quo.

What is “labour-inclusive capitalism”?

Capitalism is power based on ownership (of land, company stock, etc).

Instead of thinking of Labor as a party that challenges that power (however mildly), it’s much more accurate to think of Labor as a party that likes (or at least, accepts) capitalism, but wants to bring labour (workers and unions) along for the ride.

This is a different sort of worldview to that of the LNP, who hate unions and see their roles as attacking and fighting unions to keep workers in their place.

Labor-inclusive capitalism is a different worldview, where capital and labour work together instead of fighting. Albo has said this quite directly many times, for instance:

I want to bring the nation together.

Because what guides me is knowing that we have to work together if we are to move forward as one.

I want to unite the country with my vision and plans for a better future.

One in which unions and business work together for the common interest.

Labor doesn’t want to challenge capitalism, it wants to strengthen it. Labor doesn’t support unions because they are battling capitalism, they support unions because they think capitalism does better when workers get a fair go such that they happily participate.

Labour-inclusive capitalism is perhaps best summed up by the slogan Albo repeated many times during the 2022 election campaign:

“No-one held back” is code for “the wealthy folk who run the place will not be restrained”, aka capitalism.

“No-one left behind” is code for “bringing working folk along for the ride” aka, labour inclusion.

Labour-inclusive capitalism and welfare

Welfare presents a tricky balancing act for labour-inclusive capitalism.

Consider Jobseeker. With no Jobseeker at all there would be likely be large scale homelessness and unrest. That risks instability (a threat to capitalism) and workers who aren’t just unemployed, but dead from starvation (which threatens labour inclusion).

However, raising it too high means the government would be providing income and stability, rather than employers (also a threat to capitalism) and might make workers less eager to find jobs (threatening labour inclusion).

Seen in this light, Labor’s current indecision on Jobseeker makes total sense. Their indecision is driven not by political cowardice, but the delicate optimization of the stability of labour-inclusive capitalism.

The same balancing act is at play with Labor’s housing policy. Housing affordability, if it gets even worse, could eventually threaten capitalism. So Labor wants to do something. But a big public housing build threatens capitalism (lower house prices, less rent/mortgage slavery, government intervention constraining markets), and so Labor’s housing “future fund” is designed to tackle the problem in the most capital-friendly way possible.

The ultimate labour-inclusive capitalism policy

Finally, think of what Labor often describes as its greatest economic achievement ever: superannuation.

If you’re oppositional to capitalism, superannuation doesn’t make any sense. It’s entirely inferior both from an efficiency and equality perspective to simply paying a higher pension.

So why does Labor love it so much? Because it’s the perfect policy for labour-inclusive capitalism! It doesn’t challenge capitalism, it supports it (by forcing workers to buy shares, and making them reliant on it for their retirements), but does it in a very worker-inclusive way (by forcing workers to have a stake in capitalism themselves).

So why doesn’t Labor say this more clearly?

Because this is a vision of capital and labour working together, Labor sees their job as placating both sides. Labor placates capital by convincing capital that labour inclusion won’t see them “held back”. Maintaining labour inclusion means placating discontent about class and capitalism, by superficially addressing progressive concerns, but in a way that doesn’t upset capitalism.

The myriad of quotes along the lines of “We know people are doing it tough out there, but we’ve got to be responsible about the budget” from people like Jim Chalmers and Katy Gallagher are classic examples: Placate progressive concerns, while also placating capital.

In this way, Labor can play the role rhetorically and aesthetically as a progressive party, while consistently resisting any change in that direction that would be of any threat to capital.

That means many progressively-minded people who keep voting for Labor year after year hoping for policy that meaningfully tackles, reforms or resists capitalism are being continually duped. Not only are Labor not making much progressive change, and not tackling the harms of capitalism, they don’t even want to. It’s time more people understood that.

Labor aren’t cowards, Labor aren’t constantly frustrated socialists. Labor are labour-inclusive capitalists who mostly like Australia the way it already is, and want to bring workers along for the ride to keep it that way.

The area around the grassland circle in the south of the park is downright magical. Surrounded by nature but with a city skyline backdrop.

But what about the rest of it?

When you explore the rest of the park, you notice one big problem. A lot of the park, and the park surroundings, is dead space. Obviously we want parks to be peaceful spaces, but much of it feels downright deserted. And when you take a look at the map, there’s a very good reason reason for this.

From the perspective of the everyday, casual user of the park, who just wants to walk through, hang out, or have a picnic, most of this public park is anything but public.

In fact, it’s downright hostile.

Here, I’ve mapped out the areas where an everyday user (who isn’t there for a specific activity like visiting the zoo or playing organized sport) can’t go.

Red denotes areas you can’t walk at any time. This includes the zoo, the golf course, the hockey/netball stadium, the tennis club. It also includes uncrossable boundaries, such as the railway line (which is entirely uncrossable except at the station!) and the large buildings on the corners (CSL campus/youth prison to the northwest, Children’s Hospital in the south).

The nearby Citylink is also another uncrossable boundary, preventing a large population to the west from accessing the park.

Then in pink are the busy roads. One runs right through the middle, which is so busy as to be practically uncrossable except at the single traffic lights in the middle, and other surrounding roads with considerable traffic.

In yellow we have sports fields. These are accessible when sport isn’t on, but not otherwise.

Unusable, unwalkable, unfriendly

All of this adds up to a space that isn’t very inviting. The north half of the park, in particular, is an unfriendly maze unsuitable for spending time in. Even travelling through is a hostile experience. One wrong turn means backtracking a up a railway line or walking around an entire zoo to get to where you want to go.

For people who live nearby, the park is even blocked off from convenient use in most directions. Crossing from North Melbourne means crossing the horribly congested Flemington Rd. Crossing from Flemington or Travancore via Flemington Bridge means navigating an overpass maze.

Royal Park is nice and walkable from the thin slice of Parkville to the east, but this has a low population, and another park on the eastern size, reducing the catchment population even further.

Live near the park in Brunswick to the North? Walking your dog requires crossing two busy roads, threading your way through a golf course, and either trekking to the other end of the park, or finding a sports field that isn’t occupied.

The preponderance of sports fields offer little rain or sun shelter (you can’t exactly plant a tree in the middle of a footy oval), and little public amenity. Need to use a loo? Tough luck: When sport isn’t on, the sports club lock up their toilets.

Transport: So near, yet so far

Royal Park is uniquely well serviced by public transport lines (Royal Park golf course is apparently the only course in the world with both a train and tram line running through it) but the train drops you off in a spot that’s really only useful for the visiting the zoo or working at CSL labs.

(And in spite of this, most zoo visitors seem to visit by car - the zoo is surrounded on all sides by mall-scale car parking.)

For casual visitors who might want to spend a day in the park, the fare structure is a further deterrent. Melbourne’s fixed price fares mean a one-stop trip on the train from Jewell station in the south of Brunswick to Royal Park is over $4.

Why not more like Central Park?

Royal Park is a precious piece of green space right next to Melbourne’s CBD. Why not allow more people to enjoy it? It’s big enough that even with triple the utilization, it would still feel very quiet and peaceful.

Here’s what I’d do:

• Surround it with higher density housing. Think Upper East/West Side vibes on all sides.

• Add housing in spaces within the park. This shouldn’t reduce green space, as there’s plenty of space in the park that isn’t already green, such as the zoo and sports stadium car parking (underground em, build lots of housing over the top).

• Pedestrianize the surrounding roads. Make it easy to get to via foot and bike. Rework the paths to avoid hard borders and dead zones.

• Shut down the golf course, and turn it into a beautiful public space.

• Turn the sports stadium into a public pool. Unlike a hockey field or netball arena, this would get used around the clock and attract families to the park.

• Reduce/rework the land dedicated to organized sports fields, to spread them out a bit more, and add more public amenity.

• Shut down the youth prison (children shouldn’t be in prison anyway), and rework the CSL campus to be a university-style public campus that the public can walk through.

• Elevate the rail right through the park, from Jewell Station through to Flemington Bridge (Flemington Bridge is already elevated, and Jewell is already scheduled to be raised as part of the Brunswick LXRP). Just connect the two.

• Close Elliot Avenue (the road through the middle) entirely, to combine the two halves of the park. Build housing in the newly created space!

Royal Park needs a vision

Melbourne’s sprawl problems are well known, and it’s been heartening to see the need for more urban density get more airtime. But “more density” is a very abstract thing. And density without green spaces and safe streets isn’t great.

Perhaps what we need are specific visions of specific spaces that can do density while offering increased access to beautiful spaces. New York wouldn’t be New York without Central Park. Why can’t Royal Park play a similarly Central role in Melbourne’s future?

The central problem is that it’s a topic that we talk about because we’re not allowed to talk about class.

Today’s capitalistic, highly class-based society puts people in arbitrarily different life circumstances based on accidents of birth or chance. Some have more wealth than they could ever possibly spend, some have nothing. But it’s considered impolite, or downright taboo to mention this, at least in mainstream circles.

Close proxies for class

There’s a lot of these other-than-class topics about, the most popular of which is “generational warfare”.

Do young people have it harder than their parents and grandparents? Or do they have it easier. There’s endless media coverage exploring this question.

But somehow these stories always avoid discussing class directly. While there’s changes in circumstances between generations, class was and still is the main determinant of ones circumstances: a high earning millennial with rich parents will still probably do great, in the end. And an out-of-work millennial with poor parents will always probably struggle.

But we’re not allowed to talk about it so bluntly. “Does a homeless person have it harder than Andrew Forrest or Mike and Scotty from Atlassian?” isn’t a headline you’ll ever see in The Age or any mainstream news. Class isn’t something to be challenged fundamentally - prevailing ideology treats the existence of class as more like a law of physics that can never be changed.

Nevertheless, the problems and unfairness linger. They affect people in very real ways, and with that comes the desire to talk about them.

So if you can’t talk about the thing itself, you can talk about something closely related instead. Because wealth generally increases with age, age becomes a rough proxy for class. Generational discourse has become a proxy for talking about class directly.

YIMBYism is just another proxy

Tackling affordability through redistribution would mean talking about class. No can do, but we can talk about supply.

A land tax to force wealthy landholders to pay for owning all the valuable land would mean talking about class. No can do, but we can talk about density.

Running a Marxism book group isn’t going to get you coverage in The Age - but running a YIMBY group is.

YIMBYism is an escape valve for class anger

YIMBYism provides a convenient outlet that avoids class issues. Angry about house prices? Instead of blaming the people who own all the housing and demanding redistribution, demand more property development! Are the local Greens demanding public housing? Write them off as NIMBYs!

Building more housing, and higher density housing, is necessary but not sufficient. No amount of increased housing supply and density will make housing affordable for somebody who has nothing.

Housing is intricately bound up with class, and you can’t fix housing without talking about class too.

YIMBYism makes a fine goal, but a terrible cause.

If Labor did move further left, the theory goes, they’d be punished at the ballot box next election. Australia is quite a conservative country, and voters are wary of radical change.

“If the electorate is so progressive, why don’t the Greens get more votes?”

The Greens only get a fraction of Labor’s vote. Clearly, if Labor moved further left, their vote count would drop similarly - a disaster which would hand power to the Liberals - a disaster for anybody hoping to achieve progressive change.

Right?

In fact, it’s not so simple. While this is the way that many, even most, people think about how the process of politics and policy formation, it relies on a theory of causality that is exactly backwards from reality.

Swimming the causality river

The underlying assumption built into the above views is that voters, generally speaking, start off with a set of views that political parties represent as best as possible.

Because a majority is needed to govern, parties will either seek representation from the left half or right half - thus the formation in most countries of two major parties, one more left-leaning, one more right-leaning.

Or, more succinctly:

Voters views —> Party views

In other words, the party’s platform is downstream of voters views.

But really, the reality is much closer to:

Party views —> Voter views

To think about the basic dynamic, let’s consider a single issue as an example.

A concrete example: Compulsory bicycle helmets

Australia is one of the few countries in the world with mandatory bicycle helmet laws, and the very first to introduce them on a national basis, in the early 90s.

But how did these laws come about?

Did voters views suddenly change, and thus force political parties to change their policies in order to avoid losing votes? No.

In fact, the change started with lobbying from the RACS (Royal Australasian College of Surgeons). That resulted in a finding by a parliamentary committee (House of Representatives Standing Committee on Road Safety) that helmets should be made compulsory.

Then, as this page on helmet law history recounts:

The government responded with a campaign to promote helmet wearing. In Victoria, the RACS did likewise, even putting a case for compulsory wearing to the Premier in 1982. Helmet manufacturers started advertising bicycle helmets that became their most profitable product. By the end of the 1980s about 30% of cyclists wore helmets.

In other words, political change started with the Government and the Premier - the political parties. The political parties then promoted their view, aided by manufacturers, whose advertising became much more effective by being legitimized by the view the government had previously formed.

Then, and only then, did a serious proportion of the public adopt pro-helmet views such that they wore helmets themselves.

As we can see, the upstream of opinion-forming is lobby groups, manufacturers, and political party insiders. Only once they have built consensus and promulgated their views, do the general public enter the scene.

Even from here, political parties, lobby groups, other figures of authority, and the law itself play the key role in establishing the “conventional wisdom”. Even schools play a role in teaching the law as the correct position.

Most people don’t think about compulsory helmet laws in detail. Ask most people and they’ll say “it’s the law for a reason”, “my parents/schoolteachers always told me to wear one”, and the like.

Why do voters think so differently about car helmets?

It becomes clear what drives this opinion-forming process when you ask a typical person about compulsory helmets in cars vs on bikes. Even though helmet wearing also has safety benefits for car passengers, just as it does for bike passengers, most people will consider the notion of enforcing compulsory helmet usage in a car to be an absolute lunatic fringe idea.

(Note that this is not a cute rhetorical point or troll arg for me. One of my family members suffered full loss of eyesight in one eye in a car accident, and it’s highly likely that wearing a helmet could have prevented this or at least improved the outcome).

The inconvenience is similar, the upsides are similar, but the public reaction is totally different - because one has been legitimized upstream by political parties, media, manufacturers, expert lobby groups, and other sources of authority, and the other hasn’t.

What do politicians think about compulsory bicycle helmets?

Most politicians don’t seem to care about this issue much - I’m not aware of any elected representative make a single public statement on the topic, ever.

If compulsory bicycle helmets are to ever to be repealed, it would start with the same process. Individual lobbying by interest groups, publicly stated support by elected representatives and their party leadership, and coverage of “the helmet debate” in the media is where it would start.

Again, public opinion would form downstream of this. Think of typical views people might form if they were swayed: “Oh yeah, I guess having to go find my helmet discourages me from biking to the shops”, “it’s much easier to run a bikeshare scheme without compulsory helmets”, “discouraging helmets does create health harm by discouraging cycling”, “most bike rider deaths are caused by larger vehicles, and helmets don’t protect much from those”.

All of these views would not only be formed largely from seeing them discussed in the media, but the social acceptability of expressing them would be enabled by political coverage. Whereas, at the moment, due to lack of advocacy from authority figures, these views are seen as irresponsible, or at best unorthodox, and thus not taken very seriously.

Most people have very malleable views

People with strong, firm, fixed policy views, people who think a lot about politics and policy, and people whose views map cleanly onto a left-right spectrum are rare.

This is true even among political insiders and MPs!

Consider a career politician who rose up from Young Libs/Labor/Greens and through the ranks. While they might have some intuitions or principles that made them join that first organization or campaign, rising the ranks requires a commitment to the party position, more than to policy in the abstract.

To the extent that this chooses people based on their policy views, it selects those whose views already closely match that of the party, but also those who are generally pragmatists and compromisers over those with very firm/fixed/principled views, and loyalists with a football team mentality over those who might be more self-critical.

Here again, views come downstream of consensus. The status quo is self-reinforcing.

The party consensus selects consensus-building MPs who re-enforce the consensus with themselves and with the wider public.

Public opinion as self-fulfilling prophecy

This effect is super-charged in Australia with a giant consent-manufacturing scheme called “the voting system”.

The predominant effect of single-member preferential voting is to cement the status quo. This happens by focusing electoral resources on a few swing seats (thus cementing the status quo in already safe seats) and, through preference flow, literally redirecting votes away from minor parties towards major ones.

Not only does this give minor parties like the Greens fewer parliamentary votes than they are entitled to, it gives them less media coverage, with fewer resources and fewer spokespeople - and thus less votes next time around.

So saying “if the Greens views were popular with the electorate, why don’t they win more seats?” has it backwards. The correct answer is “the Greens don’t win more seats, thus their views are less popular with the electorate”.

Other democratic institutions also play a big part. The constitution and Australia’s many layers of government slow down change mechanically, but worse, provide a chilling effect to talking about change in the first place.

Consider issue X

A party might think “X would require changing the constitution, or requires difficult agreement between state and federal, so it’s too hard. We won’t tackle X, at least this term.”

The party then stops talking about X. Then the media stops talking about X (it’s no longer salient).

Then, X runs some opinion polling. “Turns out the public don’t care about X. Awareness is very low of X among swing voters, they actually have a negative view of changing X”.

Then a conventional wisdom builds. “X is unpopular. X is electoral poison. Changing X is an extreme position.”

Wow, don’t those X skeptics look smart, astute, and realistic, compared to the naive dreamers who think X has a hope of ever being changed?

Once again, the self-fulfilling prophecy has come true.

Challenging the prophecy

So is this an emperor’s new clothes situation? Do we only need to dismiss the prophecy and usher in a progressive utopia? No - self-fulfilling prophecies are real, and they are powerful.

But the fundamental challenge is convincing those in power - political parties, media, lobby groups. Politics is a game of insiders, and the voting public are downstream.

Labor has agency. Labor can choose what to prioritize, what to neglect, which classes of people to focus on, what language to use, which past achievements and heroes to lionize and which to forget. These, in turn, play a big role in determining the views of the electorate. Not the only role, but a key one.

Instead of “Labor can’t move left because of the voters”, it’s much closer to the truth to say “the voters can’t move left because of Labor”.

Coalition and Labor federal and state governments have all used grants for infrastructure and services to ‘reward’ voters in government seats and ‘buy votes’ in marginal seats. This means worthy projects in other electorates miss out.

Of 19,000 grants allocated by the former federal Coalition government under 11 grant programs between 2017 and 2021, $1.9 billion went to Coalition seats but only $530 million to Labor seats.

Across a sample of programs in the three biggest states, government seats got more than $1 million on average, compared to just over $300,000 on average for opposition seats.

Pretty shocking stuff. However, I was surprised to see the report’s recommendations suggest solutions like more more transparency and removing some of the decision-making power from ministers, when there’s a much simpler, more powerful solution, already successfully implemented in other countries: Electoral reform.

A brief look over the Tasman Sea, for instance, would reveal that this problem simply doesn’t exist in New Zealand, thanks to New Zealand’s proportional voting system.

How it works in New Zealand

In previous posts, we’ve looked at how Australia’s single member electorates create a massive amount of wasted vote, which means some votes (and voters) are a lot more influential than others over the final result.

New Zealand’s MMP (mixed-member proportional) system, however, means that the geographic location or dispersal of voters doesn’t matter. Each vote for a party counts equally in determining the number of seats allocated to that party in parliament, regardless of where that vote is located.

(New Zealand still has electorates, but except in rare edge cases, electorate votes do not affect the number of seats the party is granted in parliament, only the composition. Also, sometimes parties with a low vote count are excluded from a proportional allocation of seats based on a threshold. These quirks aren’t relevant to the point being made here, and aren’t essential elements of the system, no nitpicking please.)

So why is nobody talking about this?

Australia’s wasted vote problem is nothing less than the root cause of pork-barrelling and sports rorts. Because any additional votes gained in safe seats are wasted (1000 additional losing votes or winning votes doesn’t change the final result at all), all the focus, both in campaigning and location-based funding goes into swing seats.

“Sports rorts” was a major, ongoing scandal at the last election, with a huge amount of coverage, but nobody ever connected this to its root cause - Australia’s terrible, non-proportional electoral system.

Solve wasted vote - solve pork-barrelling. It’s that simple.

That all changed last week thanks to an aftermarket e-conversion kit. It’s been such an eye-opening experience that I’m instantly convinced we should rebuild our entire society and cities around electric cargo bikes, and electric bikes more generally.

My cargo bike is now the perfect machine. For starters, just look at it. It’s beautiful.

But let’s look at the practical aspects:

Speed: It’s almost perfectly optimized for rapid transport in real city conditions. It’s faster than a car for almost every typical city trip in real traffic. Imagine a car with a slightly lower top speed but with the ability to skip queues at lights and access a whole separate network of roads than regular cars can’t go.

Cargo: Can carry two small passengers (humans or dogs) or one larger. Or a ton of cargo. Or your commuting briefcase.

Safety: This thing is way more stable than a regular bike, and has more presence on the road. Even as a very experienced bike rider, I feel more confident on this thing on Melbourne’s car-dominated roads. And it’s much safer for everyone around me to be driving a bike (even if it’s larger than most) than a car, let alone a giant SUV or ute or truck.

Laziness: A cargo bike of this configuration is fundamentally a tricycle - preschoolers ride them. Lots of people jump in their car instead of on their bike because they’re feeling lazy - This eliminates that hesitation. There’s way less mental load in bad weather. You no longer have to slog uphill. You just pedal lightly and barely have to think - so easy.

Comfort: The worst part of commuting to work on a bike vs a car is having to shower and change at the end, or stink out the office with sweat. That problem is gone thanks to the motor. The commute is now a leisurely ride where you don’t need to work up a sweat. You can wear a suit and hop right into a serious meeting at the other end feeling fresh. Bonus: You don’t need to even put your foot on the ground while stopped at the lights.

Unfortunately, in backward countries like Australia, you’re still subject to the idiocy of compulsory bicycle helmet laws. But if you live in a country without this sort of authoritarianism, you can let your hair breathe free.

Wet weather: The front cargo has a rain cover to keep everything dry. And the ample cargo space means it’s easy to carry wet weather gear or a change of clothes up front.

Health: Even though some purists might frown upon ebike riders as soft, cheating etc, you still get the health benefits of a nice easy workout. And you can always switch off the pedal assist if you want to. Also, you’re exposed to less air pollution on a bike than in a car.

Economics: This setup is a fraction of the upfront cost of a car, and a fraction of the running costs too.

Cupholders: I haven’t done this yet myself, but the whole ride is so stable you could easily add a cupholder for a coffee or Big Gulp.

“EVs” shouldn’t mean cars. Electric cars are a social and environmental disaster compared to electric bikes.

This all stacks up to one clear conclusion - electric bikes should be replacing cars for most regular commutes and city journeys. Based on my anecdotal journeys through central city/middle belt Melbourne traffic (large city of 5 million people), it’s overwhelmingly faster unless you’re travelling a particularly long way across the city or if it’s a rare day when there’s no congestion and a high speed road exactly where you want to go.

Why then, are we promoting electric **cars** as a key destination for the energy transition? Instead, the goal must be to get people out of cars and onto bikes.

The interests of carbon emissions, resource usage, efficient transport, safer streets, a lower road toall, and broader public health all favour electric bikes, not cars.

Anybody who talks about electric vehicles and means “cars”, simply isn’t taking climate change seriously.

The missing infrastructure

To fix this, we need the right infrastructure.

By far the main factor that stops people biking is unsafe streets. Melbourne has some great bike paths in places, but they’re disconnected and sporadic.

A top transport priority should be to connect these up and provide a safe “bike highway” journey from any A-to-B journey.

Most streets are dangerous, congested, and often downright terrifying to ride a bike down.

This must change. Streets need to be redesigned to favour bikes, not cars. Fully separated bike lanes, traffic calming, and modal filtering. Streets can be converted to fully pedestrianized or accessible to local car traffic only by removing car thoroughfares.

The missing e-bike charging network

One big disadvantage of e-bikes is that you need to return to “home base” to charge, which can give you range anxiety for longer trips.

I’d love to be able to pull up by a local cafe and charge my e-bike just as easily are electric cars can charge their cars while out and about.

Again: It’s absurd that this isn’t a top priority for government and city planners looking to tackle climate change.

We need more cargo bike parking

Cargo bike parking, while still easier than car parking, isn’t as nice as it could be.

Regular car parks don’t work because there’s nothing to attach your bike to.

Regular bike stands don’t work because the spaces are often too narrow or short, being designed for regular bikes.

Parking them on the footpath can sometimes be tricky and sometimes feels rude because they take up a lot of footpath space.

At least a motor means it’s no longer a strain getting them up the ramps of typical office building basement car parking.

It would be great to see city codes and building codes prioritize bike parking over car parking, and convert a bunch of car parking spaces into cargo bike spaces.

Lockable storage

The biggest limitation I’ve found to using the cargo bike for a typical shopping run, is that you can’t make multiple stops because the front isn’t lockable. Lockable cargo seems like a no-brainer feature and something needed for cargo bikes to become a widespread “SUV replacement”.

Cars are killing us, and here’s the solution

The solution to decades of harm and suffering created by car-centric cities is right in front of us. It would be a shame to waste our once-in-a-lifetime energy transition efforts on switching from one harmful type of vehicles (petrol cars) to another harmful type of vehicle (electric cars).

Electric bikes, and electric cargo bikes can fix our cities and help fix climate change.

he asked Antony to do his "research" for him

This is not correct. I asked Antony if he happened to know a particular figure. I didn’t ask him to do research at all.

djrobstep has a lunatic concept of "wasted vote" that for NSW includes every vote that doesn't land with the winner, every voter who chooses to exhaust their vote, and the winner's entire victory margin.

Each of these is quite obviously a wasted vote. I think everybody agrees that exhausted votes are wasted (they literally don’t make it to in the final runoff) so let’s cover the other two.

Votes that don’t land with the winner quite obviously don’t result in anybody getting elected. If that vote had not been cast, or magically disappeared, the end result would be identical - the same candidate would have won. Thus, that vote has no effect on representation.

Likewise, excess votes could all magically disappear and also leave the outcome unchanged. Win by 10 or win by 10000, none of those votes matter beyond the first winning one in terms of the seats allocated.

As I’ve noted before, this is intuitively obvious to anybody who has been involved in any kind of election campaigning in Australia. You choose target seats based on which seats you think you can help swing, and focus your efforts there. You ignore safe seats.

Why do you do this? Because additional votes in safe seats don’t change the outcome. But if you can flip a swing seat, that means a whole lot less of your votes end up wasted. Instead of finishing as (wasted) losing votes, they finish as winning votes. And because the margin of victory is usually smaller than a safe seat, less votes get wasted as excess winning votes too.

This stuff is just basic, obvious intuition that everybody who has thought about political tactics knows intuitively. And yet, somehow Kevin thinks it’s a lunatic move to point it out. Weird.

He actually explicitly states that the winner's margin of votes are "unrepresented" as if you can pick out of everyone who voted for the seat winner and say that this many people contributed to the win and this many didn't.

This is just a bizarre denial of the basic concepts of fungibility and winning margin.

Votes are fungible. If I pour 3 litres of water into a 2 litre container, I don’t need to know which particular atoms of water will overflow to tell you how much will overflow. Likewise with votes. To beat the other guy, you need to win by 1. Anything above that is excess. It doesn’t contribute to the win, because you’ve already won. If Candidate A beats Candidate B by 30000 to 20000, then 20001 of those A votes were required to win (any less and they wouldn’t have won, they’d have tied or lost), but 9999 were excess.

Again this is something that any sports fan can tell you. If your favourite team thrashes another team by 100 points, it’s certainly fun, but at the end of the day winning by 1 was all you needed, and the extra 99 don’t change the fact that you won the game.

This has its roots in methods used to detect gerrymanders in the USA (by comparing supposed "wasted votes" between parties) but he doesn't do that.

I did exactly that, actually. In my original “gerrymandering” post, I discussed the wildly differing amount of wasted votes between parties.

Instead he refers to the total of supposed "wasted votes" and claims on that basis to have detected a gerrymander.

The total amount of wasted vote is interesting for multiple reasons.

The more wasted vote, the more potential for unrepresentative outcomes. Near-zero wasted vote implies a highly representative outcome. An election with a high level of wasted vote, meanwhile, *can be* representative, but that is entirely dependent on how the non-wasted votes are distributed between electorates - that is, the geographic dispersal of voters throughout various electorates.

A result with high wasted vote but high proportionality is a coincidence of dispersal. Parties that are advantaged by that dispersal will tend to resist changing that system - keeping it in place on order to gain more seats than they would otherwise be entitled. Sound familiar?

Also, the total amount of wasted vote is in itself a measure of democratic legitimacy or mandate. 60% wasted vote means the parliament is literally not representing 60% of voters in a fundamental sense. That should deeply offend the sensibility of anybody who claims to support democracy.

the concept he's misusing without understanding what it is for is better referred to as inefficient distribution. It's for looking at cases where, eg, one party has a few big wins and a lot of narrow losses and hence gets ripped off by the system. It's not an issue here.

Of course it’s an issue here. If it were not, the results of the last federal election would not look like this:

Can anybody really look at this and claim the Greens aren’t being being “ripped off” here, with 12% of the vote but only 4 seats in 151?

Australians are often taught that their preferential voting system is something to be proud of. While it’s certainly a modest improvement on FPTP, is still suffers from fundamental design problems that subvert democracy and result in highly undemocratic, unrepresentative outcomes.

There’s a more detailed background in this post, but the short version is that while the preferential system helps stop votes being wasted in 3rd place or worse, the single-member winner-takes-all nature of electorates means that losing votes, and excess winning votes nevertheless become wasted votes, because they don’t receive any representation in the final result.

This means that most votes don’t get any representation in parliament at all.

This can sound unintuitive, but the underlying reasoning is familiar to anybody who understands the concept of “swing seats” in election campaigning. Parties don’t bother campaigning in safe seats because any additional votes they generate will likely be wasted.

This creates election results, again and again, that are indistinguishable from gerrymandering. The federal election saw Labor win over 50% of lower house seats with only 32% of the vote.

In the New South Wales lower house election, the situation is even worse than normal, due to optional preferential voting. Not only can votes be wasted by being losing votes or excess winning votes, they can also become “exhausted” votes - because these voters didn’t number every box, and because all the candidates they did number were eliminated in the “instant runoff” process, they receive no representation either.

I ran the numbers on the previous NSW election result: 11.5% of all votes were wasted via exhaustion, with a further 55.7% being wasted as losing/excess winning votes.

That’s a total of 67.3% wasted vote. In other words: More than 2/3rds of NSW lower house votes go wasted and unrepresented. And this doesn’t even include “partially wasted vote” where my first preference doesn’t get representation, only a much lower one.

That is a crisis of democracy by any reasonable definition.

What’s sad, is that the people that many Australians look to as election experts, don’t seem to care. In fact, they become very rude and aggressive when you make these critiques.

Australia’s in-club of psephology rude boys

There is an odd little subculture on twitter of election focused accounts and their followers. The main goals of this crowd seem to be:

• being smug about knowing how preferential voting works

• getting extremely mad if anybody uses terms they consider pejorative to Australia’s voting system (eg “wasted vote”, “gerrymandering”)

The main accounts involved here are the AEC official account, Antony Green, Kevin Bonham, and Ben Raue.

Here’s a very classic example:

I ask a perfectly reasonable question - for some reason (I guess the wasted vote mention), Antony is very pissed off by it and does a rude response. Cue hundreds of likes and “slay, kween” quote tweets from this subculture.

Quite a toxic dynamic. Antony Green and the AEC twitter account in particular have the official status and audience to highlight these problems - but for some reason, don’t care.

The stakes are high

Australia’s electoral system is bad. Its non-proportional, single member design subverts any sense of representative outcome or genuine creation of democratic mandate. It’s time our so-called experts acknowledged this, instead of being defensive about it for smugness points.

Recently, when challenged on willingness to negotiate with the Greens on climate legislation, Labor president Wayne Swan made this tweet, declaring that Labor’s election win gave it a democratic “mandate”:

However, there’s a conceptual problem with this that a lot of people have missed.

Because of preferential voting, winning a seat doesn’t equate to a mandate.

For example, suppose I support the Greens, and I vote Greens 1 Labor 2. Labor wins the seat over the Liberal candidate, thanks to my 2nd preference.

Electorally, my representative in parliament is Labor (they won my seat, thanks to my vote). But the party that actually represents my views is the Greens - they were my 1st preference.

To look at mandates in the house of representatives, you can’t look at the seat result - you need to look at first preferences, or the primary vote.

When we do, we see that not only does Labor not have a mandate from a majority of voters, they actually have less mandate from voters than the LNP.

How embarrassing.

And there’s another problem. While primary vote is the closest thing we have to knowing voters true preferences, many voters don’t put their true first preference first.

This is because of a phenomenon I like to call “preference short-circuiting”.

This is when a voter might, in the abstract, prefer the policies of a minor party, but knows that party isn’t going to win the seat. Instead, they put their preferred of the two favourites as number 1.

For instance, many Kooyong voters will have preferenced Monique Ryan first, because they knew that was where their preference would eventually flow anyway.

This also happens because many voters don’t understand the preferential system well, and think that a number 1 vote somehow has more power than a vote that comes from redirected preferencing.

In other words, voters vote based not only on their preferences, but often on their predictions of who will win too. This obviously favours the major parties, who are the likely winners in most seats.

But it means that the primary vote of the major parties likely overstates their true democratic mandate. Thus Labor’s democratic mandate is not only less than 50%, it’s less than 32% - Not much of a mandate after all.

Although I worded this tweet a little provocatively, I was making a serious point: Lack of proportionality results in unfair outcomes. This affects minor parties most (The Greens got 12% of the vote and 2.6% of the seats, One Nation got 5% of the vote and 0% of the seats) but major parties too (Labor won more than half the seats while receiving fewer total votes than the LNP bloc).

Why does this make people so mad?

While a lot of people understood the point of the post (mostly those who support proportional representation), a ton of people didn’t. While many were just drive-by nitpickers and pedants (who assumed I was completely unaware of preferential voting), a lot of people, including many people generally regarded as election experts, such as Antony Green, Kevin Bonham, and Ben Raue, seemed to miss the point of the post, and, in particular, objected to the use of the word “gerrymandering”.

So I thought I’d write this longer form piece as an explainer on the issue.

Understanding the problems that preferential voting doesn’t fix

One challenge with this issue is that many Australians are under the belief that preferential voting is already the best possible voting system. As Eleanor Robertson notes:

It’s certainly true that preferential voting is better than many other systems. “First past the post” voting, as used in the US and UK, is terrible.

Any vote for a candidate that isn’t a frontrunner is risky, and likely wasted. Preferential voting reduces that problem. The preferencing process converts every race into a head-to-head contest in which every vote participates.

While, again, this is an improvement over First Past the Post, multiple problems remain:

• Because each division is represented by a single member, it’s winner-takes-all. Once the outcome has been determined, some votes remain in the losing pile of the head-to-head contest. Those votes receive zero representation. All the representation (1 seat) is awarded to the winning pile.

• Winner-takes-all also means that winning margin doesn’t matter. Win by 1 vote, or win by 10000, the result is the same: 1 representative. These votes (all votes beyond a margin of 1) also receive no representation.

Political parties understand these realities well - it’s why they don’t bother campaigning in safe seats. Convincing an extra 1000 people to vote Party A in a safe Party A seat is a waste of time, as is convincing 1000 people to vote Party A in a safe Party B seat if it still results in a loss.

Election experts have a term for such votes: Wasted vote.

For each head-to-head race (remember, preferential voting converts each seat’s votes into a single head-to-head race involving all valid votes), the wasted vote can be visualized as follows:

All the excess winning votes for Party A, and all the losing votes for Party B, are wasted.

This is almost always more than half the total votes! In most Federal elections, it’s around 60%.

Even with preferential voting, more than half of all votes are wasted and are awarded zero representation!

Another way to think of this, is that preferential voting prevents votes from ending up wasted in 3rd place or worse, but not in 2nd place or 1st place.

The problems don’t end there. Even if your votes still counts through preferences, your first preference still doesn’t get elected. Suppose you preference parties A, B, C and D, and party C gets elected thanks to your vote. While you helped get more representation for C instead of D (which you hate!), your favourite party, A, still doesn’t get any. The optimal outcome, more representation for A, didn’t happen. Party C might be barely any better than Party D, in your eyes.

Minor party voters know this well. They probably chose a minor party out of dissatisfaction with a major party - but their vote ends up just going to back to the major party anyway.

I’m not aware of a specific term for such votes, but we might call them “partially wasted votes”.

Wasted vote is the cause of non-proportionality

It’s wasted vote (including partially wasted vote) that causes the outcome described in my tweet.

The Greens get less than 12% of the seats because a lot of their vote was (fully or partially) wasted. Labor gets a majority of seats from 32% of the vote because so much of their opponents’ vote was wasted. Remember: 60% of the votes in that table don’t flow to any representation.

Astute observers will note that while some parties lose out a lot from wasted vote (UAP and One Nation in particular), some parties benefit, like the Nationals and the Teal independents. More generally, wasted vote favours major parties.

Why do some benefit from wasted vote while others lose out? One key factor determines this: Geographic concentration.

Having your voters concentrated in a particular seat confers great advantage. Nationals win rural seats because their voters are concentrated heavily in those seats. Teals win wealthy middle-urban seats for the same reason. UAP and One Nation are geographically dispersed (after all, racists and idiots are everywhere) and so lose out.

(While we might detest those parties, one can’t claim to be committed to democratic and representative outcomes and support this denial of representation).

Stop to think about it, it seems bizarre. To win an election, what matters is not just how many votes you get, but where those voters are. Why should that matter in determining a national result?

There are no neutral electorate boundaries

It’s well known that the boundaries of Australia’s electoral divisions are chosen by a neutral party - the AEC, through a transparent process. This works well, and is obviously a good thing.

But the AEC choose electoral maps within the context of the country’s chosen electoral system.

Because geographic concentration (or dispersal) play such an overwhelming role of determining election outcomes, the very existence of these divisions plays a huge role in the outcome.

We think of a “neutral” map of evenly-populated, evenly-shaped areas as unbiased. But it’s anything but. Any such layout will inevitably produce demographic concentrations that favour certain parties.

Major parties benefit because these concentrations group enough of their voters together to make it a strong seat. And rural/well-off urban concentrations benefit the Nationals/teals as we just discussed.

That means these parties have a strong self-interest in opposing any political change that might get rid of these boundaries in favour of a neutral arrangement, such as larger multi-member electorates, or the one giant electorate of a purely proportional system.

Put another way: By resisting electoral change, these parties are engaged in the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage. This is called gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering is the manipulation of wasted vote

When imagining a classic gerrymandering scenario, we think about a boundary being moved to include a town full of favourable voters, for example.

But why does this work?

What’s fundamentally going on here is the manipulation of wasted vote - the gerrymanderers in this scenario are trying to move their votes from being wasted votes in the neighbouring seat, to non-wasted winning votes within their own boundary.

In other words, they are trying to use wasted vote to their advantage, even if that might mean a less democratic result.

Considered from this perspective, it becomes much clearer that Australia’s house of representatives is gerrymandered itself.

The major parties are engaged in an ongoing project of wasted vote manipulation to maintain their electoral advantage.

Not only is it reasonable to describe this as gerrymandering, it’s a conceptual mistake to think otherwise.

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