There's a
state by-election coming up in my seat of Brisbane Central soon, caused by the retirement of Premier Peter Beattie.Neither the Liberal Party nor the National Party will be running a candidate (probably due to appalling Liberal infighting and the lack of resources that brings)
The main contest will be between
ALP candidate Grace Grace (Secretary of the Queensland Council of Unions) and Green Anne Boccabella.
Interestingly
the Greens are actively courting the conservative vote.This is perfectly logical on their part, but I wonder what it will do to their activist base?
Anyway, the reason for this post is: what do people think is more important in a case like this?
1) Damaging the ALP as a party of Government (and therefore voting Green)
2) Damaging the (more and more conservative) Greens (and therefore voting ALP)
3) Voting informally or for a smaller party with no chance of coming first or second (we have optional preferential voting in Qld state elections)
I'm leaning towards casting an informal vote, but I would be interested to hear what people think. This would also be a useful thought experiment to work out what we would do if we ever had a chance to be influential in an inner-city Greens v ALP contest.