Chris Watson

Instead, the next three years were very unstable, with governments changing a number of times, and the Protectionists fell into third place in 1906.

Prior to that 1906 election, Protectionist leader Alfred Deakin made another attempt to introduce preferential voting, specifically CPV, in a pitch to Labor leader Chris Watson as an attempt to isolate George Reid's Free Traders.

"Have you thought of the exhaustive ballot, compulsory voting for every candidate? The lowest dropped out and his votes divided until someone gets a majority.

With this, our candidate and yours could not do each other anything like so much harm, and one or others of us would win in several Reidite constituencies.

I mean, obviously in this period, both the Democrats and Republicans were both like our parties, right? And the British Labor was like 20 years away from forming a government.

So Chris Watson became prime minister for four months in 1904, and it scared the shit out of anyone with money in the country.

Yeah.

Um, and George Reed actually, who loathed the protectionist, he's the head of the free trade of the big, big fella.