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Unfortunately, voting is compulsory here - everyone has to vote.

This means that the poorly educated and ill informed (who tend to be the poorer people) cast their votes.

Many of these people know virtually nothing except that the Labor Party is meant to be the party for the poor.

So they vote Labor.

Without compulsory voting, we'd have a lot less Labor governments.

In the specific case of Victoria, the way we wound up with our most recent Labor government was quite interesting.

All the polls indicated that the Kennett (Liberal - actually conservative, the name of the party is an historical relic) government would be returned comfortably.

Many people therefore voted Labor as a 'protest' against a few Liberal policies - they wouldn't have voted Labor if they though Labor would get in - but they wanted to send a message to Jeff Kennett, that they weren't entirely happy with his government.

The election turned out to be a lot closer than the polls indicated.

Even worse, on the day of the election, my local Member of Parliament - an independent who had been a member of the Liberal Party and who supported them on most issues dropped dead. He would have been elected.

The end result wound up being

Labor 41
Liberal 39
National 3
Independents 3
Undecided (due to death) 1

The Liberal and Nationals had a coalition agreement so it was functionally, 41 to Labor, 42 to the coalition, with 3 independents.

If the Member for Frankston East hadn't died, the Liberal party would have retained power in coalition with the Nationals and at least two of the four independents. 44-41 with two left over.

We had to had to have a special election to fill my local seat.

The problem was that we (that is the Liberal party - I am a member) had been quite happy to let Peter McLennan win. He was an independent but he supported 99% of our policies and he was almost certain to win - whereas it's a working class electorate, which we would have a hard time winning ourselves.

So the candidate we'd selected for the election wasn't someone really likely to win - she's a nice lady, and I hope she'll get into Parliament at the next election, but she was really running in this one just to gain some experience of campaining.

How we had to have the special election - we decided to go with the candidate we already had and try to win with her.

But the big local issue was a freeway we've been waiting to have built for over twenty years.

Labor promised that if elected, they'd build the freeway.

And a significant proportion of voters believed them.

Labor now held 42, to the Coalitions 43 with three independents.

And one of the three independents - with a personal hatred for Jeff Kennett - made it clear she would never support the coalition. That made it a tie. A second had been elected on only one issue - diverting water from farms to a river - and Labor promised to give him what he wanted. The Coalition said they'd only support it if studies found it was a good idea.

The third independent was now irrelevant - even if he joined the coalition, it wouldn't have made a difference.

One death on one day changed everything.

Total votes cast for Labor: 1,289,696
Total votes cast for the Coalition: 1,330,928

It's not the overall level of support that counts - it's where you get it.