"Just how emboldened would these types become with Labor in Government?"
Victoria is the model of what will happen with the rest of Australia.
Queensland is 4 steps behind Victoria!
"Unions fund the Labor Party?"
The Labor Party is the political name of the Unions!!
As Unions, Labor hides behind the Training and WPH&S umbrella! for its funds!(actually a crude form of the mafia)
"Why Labor are against(and wrong on) the Senate voting reform!"
A vote for the ALP for example, would elect its first candidate on the Labor ticket but when the party falls short of enough first preference votes to elect a second, it must rely on the preferences of voters whose first preference had not been cast for the ALP at all. Equally, this applies to other names on the ballot paper. In this sense, not all votes are equal - the votes of some electors go directly to installing their favoured candidate, while the votes of others fail to add up to a quota and thus get redistributed until someone else has accumulated a quota.
Labor's election strategists will have worked out how best to achieve this second spot by harvesting preferences, and in the event of it being unattainable, how best to frustrate the Liberals, for example. The result is deals with others for high preference positions on their pre-registered preference flows.
That complex arrangement is simply not known to the voter at the time of voting.
Finally, in reality a lot of people are not in the Unions because of other work place agreements.
Such as some of Public Service, but the personnel will still vote Labor!
Actually Labor has millions of voters who vote Labor, but are not in Unions.
And then there is the secret army!!
That secret army's not so secret anymore, particularly if you live in a marginal seat.
These are the people who are doorknocking all over Australia to persuade voters to put the Liberals last on their ballot papers on July 2. They arrive at your door, usually in pairs, dressed in colourful T-shirts, to get you to sign up. They know, of course, that many progressive voters would never put the ALP first either, because of its dismal stance on refugees.
There are 30 marginal seats and groups of at least 100 doorknockers in each seat. On a good day you might get one in two householders answering the door. I watched some of these campaigners in action and it's definitely not a task for the impatient. I'm naturally nosy but I might struggle to have these conversations with perfect strangers.
