Koumei has... missed a lot of stuff let me fill in some details.
We do Hippie Punching Too
Koumei wrote:But they cop a lot of flak because ...
They cop a lot of flak for being "hippies" the "punch a hippie" reflex ingrained heavily into complete idiots by decades of right wing propaganda is now so deeply ingrained as to be vicious, senseless and hair trigger. The Greens would like to save some trees? They are hippies they need punching they will be punched on every issue for no reason and the hippie punchers will align diametrically opposed to every Greens policy for no other reason than to try and punch more hippies no matter how hard the punching hurts themselves.
Lago should be familiar with this phenomenon it is pretty much global and pretty damn similar in its raw stupidity.
Unlike You we have minor parties, it's totally cool, sort of
Then there are all these other parties that nobody really gives a toss about.
And this in passing is actually a
really important point that touches on the political prospects and horse race question Lago posed.
Australia has minor political parties. We have independent elected representatives at basically all levels of politics and also numerous political parties other than the big two many of which have LESS public support and actual elected representatives than many single individual independents.
See importantly we have a
really rather nice electoral system and you CAN in fact vote for third parties without throwing your vote away.
But it is not that simple.
We have, especially at a state level in NSW a plethora of stupid usually conservative bullshit parties.
We seriously have parties like the "Fishers and Shooters Party" a party for morons who actually believe their "rights" to kill random animals in the wilderness are in fact so important as to trump
every other issue they might vote on. We have sporting recreational vehicle parties, we have a dozen little racist asshole parties and parties that are little more than a motherhood statement for a name with a single front man and a Post Office box.
Many, MANY of these parties
are not actually legitimate real political parties. They were founded with NO intention of ever winning ANY election. Many of them were NOT even founded with ANY intention of even gaining political power with which to influence parties that DO win elections.
Many of them are created
in bulk batches by conservative party operatives as a way of catching fringe conservative (and long time "I vote Donald Duck" nutter types) votes and syphoning them via the preference system DIRECTLY into the pockets of the major conservative parties, primarily the Liberal National alliance.
Which is certainly an interesting quirk of Australian electoral politics.
On the other hand third parties in Australia have real political power and clout. Especially at the federal level. The Democrat party for instance used to be "The third party (other than the Nationals who don't count)" until they spectacularly sold out to John Howard, took the blame for his massively unpopular tax, had serious bitch fights with BOTH their most popular members (and best prospects for future or even PRESENT party leadership) in succession and then as a basically direct result of their actions disintegrated rather promptly into nothingness.
Meanwhile we have the Family First party. A party formed by a crazy evangelical "third wave" cult called Hillsong Church, a scary scary nasty bunch. It was a faky manufactured party. They would bus Hillsong church members all over the country to pretend to have local crowds, the whole shebang. They were manufactured exclusively to gain control of a swing vote in a close senate and leverage it into massively disproportionate power. They succeeded.
Politics in Australia suddenly started seeing a number of small but often nasty, and insane bits of legislation being passed off as gifts to the Family First crowd. Like for instance our federally mandated extra large cup size in Australian porn. (Yes, Really)
This lead to the formation of another remarkably influential minor party in Australian Politics. The Australian "Sex Party". A party formed largely by sex workers and their advocates dedicated primarily directly to the downfall of the Family First party. They too did pretty damn well at their intended goal. And succeeded well enough that if they stick around by the time the Greens are close to major party status the Sex Party may well be the like minded minor party they form a coalition with to take government.
Yes. That's right in the distant future Australia COULD in fact be ruled by a 'Green Sex' coalition government.
Two Major Parties? Sort of...
SPEAKING OF WHICH. We do not in fact have just two major political parties in Australia. And I am NOT talking about the rise of the Greens.
Because here in Australia our
conservative party has been sufficiently on the defensive against Labour that they were
forced to form a coalition with the next biggest conservative party in order to actually win, well, any elections, for a very long time.
And while that has changed a bit they ARE still the "Liberal-National" coalition and not an actual single political party.
Now the Liberal party are a somewhat... odd... conservative party historically. Sure they are basically the ramshackle thrown together remains of the prior political era's aristocracy party rebranded for the more modern era of the 19th century (in the 20th century). But their... ideological excuses initially and briefly ran more towards libertarian craziness with a strong favoring of the rich mans rights ahead of anyone else.
The National Party was a party founded well before the Liberals essentially as a political front for the mobs of red necked thugs hired to beat the shit out of starving unionizing sheep farm laborers. No. Really. Their ideology was based on banjos, shot guns and a distrust of foreign devils, edumacation and city folks. And as such they have actually remained remarkably MORE true to their ideological roots than the Liberal party which is basically just the "Greedy stupid aristocrat party" these days.
The alliance was uncomfortable for many many years. But the liberal party NEEDED the National party for pretty much EVERY government they held and often by a large margin. Deals were struck, "the farmers" got stuff, often crazy fucking stuff.
Then along came Telstra and One Nation.
So on the one hand John Howard and the Liberal party stabbed the Nationals in the back. They pulled out a MASSIVELY unpopular privatization program for our national telecommunications network. It was... massively MORE unpopular "in the country" because those guys knew they would be the FIRST TO BE SCREWED, and hard, and forever by privatization. After all telecommunications in the outback are ludicrously unprofitable. Howard rammed it all through. And the Nationals, in allowing him to do so,
utterly decimated their own electoral support.
Around the same time, it's hard to say because the telstra thing was going for YEARS in various ridiculous "maybe if we cut it into pieces and hide it in tiny lollies" phases, the One Nation party arose. A redneck party MORE red neck than the party founded for rednecks who liked to beat up sheep shearers.
One Nation basically picked up all the dissatisfied red necks fleeing the Nationals and ate them for breakfast. In another country it would have been a scary moment in a potential rise to facism.
In Australia with our rural redneck population being pretty damn isolated, scattered and small it was probably never going to be a facist revolution, but it was
ugly for a while. Ugly, and hilarious, I mean "Pleaz Explain" but yeah, ugly.
One Nation didn't instantly win every election that hadn't even happened yet forever and the supporters, disappointing, confused and rapidly distracted by small shiny objects dispersed.
Then John Howard leader of the Liberal Party adopted massive portions of the policy and rhetoric of the One Nation party. He ran entire campaigns on basically beating up a giant racist panic about foreign devils on boats then promised horribly punitive punishment for refugees coming to our nation.
Some people may dispute this but during the ABC election coverage major Liberal party figures (I think the one it might actually have been fucking Tony Abott himself) responded on national TV to the accusation of the lifting of One Nation Policies for political advantage with "Well you are just jealous because WE succeeded!".
At elections which were looking dangerously close Howard saved his quivering whining ass, saved his party, got the racist vote locked up and got it locked up
for the Liberal party directly. And this last is important. In the PAST the NATIONAL party was the distasteful front man for the racist red neck vote. The liberals pretended to be above that and lamely wrist slapped the Nationals for speaking out in various racist ways but then shared in the benefits of racist electoral support through a coalition.
But NOW they no longer NEEDED the racist redneck front man party. Well, not much, and if the nationals couldn't get things done when they were strong they were getting dick all done now!
The results of all this remain up in the air, many nationals went independent, there was much talk of abandoning the coalition, elsewhere talk of merging it, no one seems to know what the fuck is going on in Queensland previously the one place were it used to be more "National Liberal" than "Liberal National".
The Ministerial Incompetence Defence
Speaking of the racist anti refugee bullshit. It is a MAJOR shaping issue in Australian politics. You guys do it too, so does Britain and France, but Australia fucking OBSESSES over this.
The full story is pretty scandal ridden and insane. But the most important thing to come out of it was that as the source of arguable ever second ministerial scandal to plague the remarkably scandal ridden Howard regime it was one of the prime grounds upon which the Ministerial Incompetence Defence was tested and proven.
See Australia doesn't just let our politicians go totally fuck nuts. There are rules ESPECIALLY for Ministers and Prime Ministers and so on.
Things about lying and about ministerial misconduct and crap. And the thing is John Howard and his top ministers
kept getting caught out in serious and obvious cases of misconduct. Time and time again documents, phone records and witness accounts by major public servants indicated various forms of serious ministerial misconduct.
Heads SHOULD have rolled. A lot. But see as it turns out Ministerial
Incompetence is actually permissible. So whenever Johnny or one of his henchemen was AGAIN up in front of an inquiry they need only pull out "I must have forgotten", "I do not recall" or the even simpler "I don't know" in response to everything. This became such a wide spread cop out that it became a joke.
Unfortunately it was a water tight joke that CAN still be used to this day. I think it is a major sleeper of procedural politics in Australia and those that shrugged and laughed it off haven't seen anything yet. After all we would only need Tony Abbot come to power, a man who a minister that in fact somehow survived ACTUALLY being OPENLY in defiance of parliament for some extended time in order to see a return to the days of "I do not remember ever seeing those incriminating documents".
We keep having late night back room coupes and waking up with a new prime minister/premier/whatever
Labour thinks it needs to take measures to appeal to the crazy racist demographic of the country.
Well. Some of labor. Did you know we had a major coupe in federal politics a while back, shortly before the last (for labor disastrous) election the then labor prime minister was overthrown in the middle of the night and replaced with a puppet of the far right "political strategists" (actually political incompetents but they think of themselves as masterminds).
The thing is WHY that happened. Now it is widely touted that the Mining Tax is what brought Rudd Down. In a time of economic disparity where most Australian's are struggling but the mines and miners are raking it in, when Mining Companies are more hated than ever before, amidst an economic crisis in the offing... During the
ideal political climate to put through
a fucking vital mining tax the Labour Party hard right "strategists"
shat their pants in terror at the "vote losing" strategy of taking money from one of the most hated segments of Australian industry and putting it into everyone else's pockets.
BUT. Actually while that IS true, Rudd had just come off the back of a major labor party meeting where he had given a speach about
refugee policy. Basically he said the detention camps were barbaric and more importantly
a total political loss for labor and the ONLY way to kill the issue was to shut the camps down act responsibly, marginalise the racist vote and take away the giant racist wooden leg propping up the failing conservative coalition.
The Labor "Strategists" shat their pants even further and basically over threw him in the depths of that very same night. Pretty much the FIRST comment out of Gillards lips was that she "didn't think it was racist to be concerned about boat people".
She proceeded to very nearly lose the unlosable election against the most unpopular political opponent she could have hoped for. Brilliant strategy... you "strategists".
The Current State Of Affairs
But Koumie didn't mention that the result of our last federal election was so close between the major parties that neither could form government. They needed to round up independents, and the Greens, to do so.
Which meant labor won because NO ONE wanted to deal with the mad monk. The most conservative nut bag asshole red neck independent involved basically said "I cannot possible deal with Abott and COULD deal with labor, but I want to punch hippies at any cost so I am dealing with NO ONE" then
everyone else promptly cut their deals with labor and formed government.
And deals WERE cut. And the Greens got themselves some actual real concessions. Which is probably good news for labor because come the next election the ONLY vote winning ANYTHING they have visible gotten done has in fact been in the form of those very concessions. Well. That and the broad band network.
And the next election is going to be
interesting the Greens have proven themselves a major power. As a third party actually
getting shit done is a MAJOR step on the road to replacing a failing major party and ALL THREE major parties are struggling in Australia! The Nationals are just short of dead. The Liberals have yet to seriously recover since the massive hit they took from the John Howard work choices embarrassment. And Labor has shot themselves in the foot SO much and seems SO intent on doing it AGAIN AND AGAIN that they are losing state governments like red shirts on an alien planet and can barely hold federal against the most unlikable liberal party leader next to an
actual literal slimy rotten no good snake.
Other Stuff
there are seriously Australians who don't think Global Warming is a real thing, even though you can fucking measure it on a year-to-year basis in this country. Presumably they don't have a memory.
Seriously. These people are crazy. I mean it's fucking hot hear. 2 extra degrees means vast regions of the country become uninhabitable. Even modest projections are claiming that Perth will soon be uninhabitable by humans without airconditioning. Not to mention also out of water. As in like
drained every drop of aquifer for as far as modern engineering can feasibly reach.
As for our economy... well, I'll put it this way.
Er. No.
I mean, sure may have helped. But the point about the Australian economy is two fold.
1) We are in the midst of a resources boom. We are a "mine things out of holes in the ground" nation. We are booming.
This means MASSIVE stimulus to our economy, unfortunately targeted largely at mines and miners, meaning we have a "two economies" problem where the Miners are raking it in and EVERYONE ELSE in Australia is living in an economic crisis. But
without an adequate mining tax that will REMAIN a problem.
2) We did the right thing.
More so that almost ANY western nation we DID do stimulus and we did it better than basically anyone. It has been good, large and persistent. And it REALLY HELPED. The labor government took the political risk that Abott never would have and actually remained in deficit to do it. They are now probably ending that policy a little to soon, but LESS too soon and LESS ending it than most other austerity obsessed basket cases of the western world.
The secret hidden point three on the list of 2 however is that
our own local housing bubble crisis is yet to fully break. We STILL have serious housing price issues. And it STILL deforms our economy and hurts people, and it is
still gonna bust one of these days.
Are we like the only part of the British Empire still intact?
Considering most of the other ones are only now independent parts of the "former british empire club" or "Commonwealth" and WE are still an actual honest to god subservient colony, well, sure, close enough.