Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi #7

[Kieran McConville]

There's one huge argument for compulsory voting that isn't often noted (well, by me, until this second): elections that hinge on 'getting out the vote' also hinge on suppressing the vote.

 

[Axver]

So, 161 years after the first elections for Victoria's Legislative Assembly, an Aboriginal woman has won a seat.

And Northcote has finally been seized from the ALP by the Greens with a massive swing. Looks like over 13% at this stage.

Brunswick and Richmond will be next, at the state election in 2018. Inner Melbourne is absolutely a Green stronghold now. And now the Liberals are considering a plan to stop contesting the inner Melbourne seats, viewing it as a waste of resources on seats they can't win.

There's one huge argument for compulsory voting that isn't often noted (well, by me, until this second): elections that hinge on 'getting out the vote' also hinge on suppressing the vote.

Yeah, true. You see this with all the bizarre roadblocks to electoral access that some American states have.

To be honest I've never been one of those "I don't care how you vote, just VOTE!" types. If National voters stay home in New Zealand, good. I'd rather you not vote than vote National. Or ACT. Especially ACT.

 

[Kieran McConville]

So, what, was this some kind of by-election situation?

Actually speaking of the Greens, there's real talk of the Labor deputy leader losing to them in next weekend's election. It's probably their most likely foothold, to be sure. I'd observe that the same dynamic that often kills One Nation stone dead on the day does the same for the Greens. In neither case is their support completely negligible.

 

[Axver]

Yeah, an ALP state MP died in August, so her seat went to a by-election. Problem is, Northcote was marginal at best anyway and she'd been holding onto it at previous elections on the basis of her personal popularity and name recognition. Even then she might not have held it in 2018, but at a by-election the ALP was definitely fucked - even though they did dodgy deals with Animal Justice and the libertarian tosspots.

Inner Melbourne will probably look very green after the 2018 Victorian election. And I'm not sure the ALP will retain Batman at the next federal election either. Wills is probably safe (though it'll be close) and Melbourne Ports will be an agonising three-way contest that could go any way. The Greens are running very well in Melbourne. They've built name recognition for their candidates even when they haven't won seats. Samantha Ratnam will go to Canberra sooner or later, mark my words.

And yeah I've seen that talk about Queensland. I still can't quite imagine a Green state MP there, but I'll be watching that seat closely on Saturday night for sure.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Yeah, it sounds like the future lies with the Greens in Melbourne. Maybe Sydney, maybe some of Brisbane in time (although we shouldn't conflate state and federal outcomes).

We have actually had a Greens state MP, in Indoroopilly, but the person in question defected from Labor while in office then lost a subsequent election, so.

 

[Axver]

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about the Indooroopilly defection. An especially surprising lapse for me, given that was my state electorate the one time I voted in Queensland! I voted there in 2006 for the Greens, and my preference for Ronan Lee is what got him over the line - and then he goes and defects to them over a year after I left.

It's funny how Melbourne City at a council level is likely to remain fairly conservative because landowners who live outside the council area can vote in elections. It will always produce more left-wing results at state and federal level than local, which is perhaps counter-intuitive. After all, in Moreland (the council area covering leftie suburbs like Brunswick), there's a socialist councillor and the aforementioned Great Green Hope of Sam Ratnam won two quotas in her own right in South Ward - as in she got literally two-thirds of the first preference vote. That was my ward, and fuck I loved it.

But at state level Brunswick is in ALP electorates. I thought the federal seat of Wills would fall in 2016, and the Brunswick booths were thumpingly Green, but it runs too far north and that swung it to Peter Khalil. At state level, Jane Garrett is vacating the field for 2018, perhaps recognising she probably won't hold it for the ALP. Without her name recognition I think it's definitely going Green.

 

[Kieran McConville]

I think a lot of places can swing differently depending on whether we are talking local, state or federal. Parts of my city have been Labor before (state level) and probably will be again. Federally it's just your bog standard Liberal heartland (but, shot across the bows, don't take the anti-gay majority for granted, it's slim). Locally, councillors are not elected on a party basis. Results can vary, some alright folk, some less alright folk.

I'm mildly curious to see if the Citizens Electoral Council are running someone this time. Feel like One Nation have sucked all the oxygen out of that room, but you never know.

 

[Axver]

I love how the CEC just keep bouncing around despite the fact that nobody likes them. I don't think they even care who else is running, unless they can make a grotesque leaflet about how that person is advocating genocide somehow.

The 2001 Queensland state election delivered Peter Beattie a bunch of Gold Coast seats. I think seven? And some of those victors held their seats until the 2012 wipeout. But yeah, at the federal level McPherson and Moncrieff have always been in the hands of the LNP or its predecessors, and that's unlikely to change in a hurry.

Though this reminds me of one of my favourite only-in-Queensland sort of political silliness. The seat of Gaven on the northern Gold Coast has been filled by ratbags from the get-go. The dude elected there in 2001 is the MP that Peter Beattie forced out of the party in 2006 after he kept fucking off to spend months on end in Thailand. At a by-election, Alex Douglas won it for the Nats, then lost it later that year back to Labour. He got it back at the next election as an LNP candidate... then became an independent after a dispute with Campbell Newman ... then joined Palmer United and became state leader... then quit and sat as an independent again. Oh yeah, and his uncle is Bob Katter.

 

[Kieran McConville]

I see quite a lot of flakiness around the edges at state level, don't know about other states, but the number of LNP and Labor people who were elected in recent years and didn't even last a term without defecting from their nominal party for one reason or another, is not negligible.

Or being pushed. I don't think that was fair, the business with Billy Gordon. It was a chickenshit kneejerk move on the premier's part.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Could I just add my cordial irritation at the way the 'LNP' name has become a shorthand for the coalition, particularly federally! Apart from Queensland, and the contingent it sends to Canberra, there IS NO FUCKING THING CALLED THE LNP. It's the Liberal Party (or the National Party).

 

[cobl04]

Awesome news. I hope that this will be a continued momentum that will result in more power than the underwhelming 2016 results.

 

[Axver]

Or being pushed. I don't think that was fair, the business with Billy Gordon. It was a chickenshit kneejerk move on the premier's part.

How come? It seems he had done the dodgy by more than enough people.

Could I just add my cordial irritation at the way the 'LNP' name has become a shorthand for the coalition, particularly federally! Apart from Queensland, and the contingent it sends to Canberra, there IS NO FUCKING THING CALLED THE LNP. It's the Liberal Party (or the National Party).

Nah I don't mind this. It's shorter than typing "the Coalition" when you want to group both parties together! For Queensland I read LNP as "Liberal National Party" and for Canberra as "Liberal and National Parties".

 

[Kieran McConville]

How come? It seems he had done the dodgy by more than enough people.

The guy wasn't flawless it is true, but the way it was handled at the time just reeked of avoid-controversy-at-any-cost, in fact of guilty-before-the-verdict. The most serious, and most current, shadows hanging over him concerned domestic violence (I assume he wasn't asked to resign for breaking and entering in the eighties), and the story wasn't exactly clear-cut. It's possible the premier knew more than the Queensland police did, but the impression was of blinking at potential Courier-Mail headlines. Not a profile in courage.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Nah I don't mind this. It's shorter than typing "the Coalition" when you want to group both parties together! For Queensland I read LNP as "Liberal National Party" and for Canberra as "Liberal and National Parties".

Or COALition, amiright?! High five!

 

[Axver]

The guy wasn't flawless it is true, but the way it was handled at the time just reeked of avoid-controversy-at-any-cost, in fact of guilty-before-the-verdict. The most serious, and most current, shadows hanging over him concerned domestic violence (I assume he wasn't asked to resign for breaking and entering in the eighties), and the story wasn't exactly clear-cut. It's possible the premier knew more than the Queensland police did, but the impression was of blinking at potential Courier-Mail headlines. Not a profile in courage.

Fair call. I think Palaszczuk wanted to look strong on domestic violence and willing to take a principled stand even if it cost her politically, but I can definitely see how it would've appeared to be a fear of Courier-Mail headlines.

Or COALition, amiright?! High five!

Definitely the "wake up sheeple!" of Australian political discourse.

Also, there's now an unsavoury anti-semitic undercurrent floating around the section 44 debate online. The amount of people who've latched onto all Jews having a "right of return" to Israel as a disqualification is insane. (It's not. Those who return can choose permanent residency or citizenship.) And they post about it by sharing pictures of the politician in question alongside some super-cliched image of rabbis, menorahs, or whatever. I'm willing to bet these are the same wankers who read Independent Australia and write "COALition".

 

[Kieran McConville]

Yeah well, there's plenty of racial animus to go around, specifically the folk who jumped on the high no-vote in Western Sydney to have a shot at teh immigrants.

I've been reading too much of the below-the-line Guardian politics section. It's woeful. Most people there are opposed to the COALition and Mr TURDbull, so you'd think they'd be my kind of people, right? Wrong.

And don't get me started on all the fuss about spending $100 million on the postal survey. The survey was a shitty move for all sorts of reasons, but the money is irrelevant. $100 million isn't even a statistic in the federal public spending of this country. Also, it's mostly churn (where do people think that money goes? Wages, purchases of products and services). It's just idiots buying into the neoliberal narrative even as they oppose its standard-bearers.

 

[Axver]

That jump at Western Sydney migrants is especially absurd given the high votes for yes in multicultural electorates elsewhere. The main correlation is religiosity, not immigration.

And surely you know that the comments section on any given website is a dumpster fire.

Spending $120 million unnecessarily, just to settle a factional shitfight within the Liberal Party (after spending so long deriding the ALP for its factionalism), is pretty egregious. But you're right that in terms of the federal budget it's a drop in the bucket, and I'm sure someone somewhere in the printing industry is glad the survey happened.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Some comments sections in some limited places are high quality. But yeah, I guess I'm having a slow month and occasionally fall into that channel-flipping mentality.

I'm actually Tim from Altona, guys.

 

[cobl04]

I've watched this about 15 million times.

 

[Kieran McConville]

I'm starting to wonder if this government will even last out the year.

 

[Axver]

They've cancelled a week of the lower house's sitting. GEE I WONDER WHY.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Because they're fucked.

 

[Axver]

"We're gonna lose a major vote on the floor so we're proroguing parliament."

DEMOCRACY.

 

[Vlad n U 2]

I can't even muster up any surprise.

 

[Kieran McConville]

hey, all the Zimbabwe talk reminds me that it is exactly thirty years, almost to the month (I think; certainly the same time of year, a stormy week in early summer) since Joh's week-long standoff in the executive building came to an ignominious end (his party having sacked him).

Let's hope Mugabe goes just as gracefully (!). Actually I still wouldn't be surprised if he ends up against a wall somewhere, but probably not. Probably worse than the gross wealth accumulation, the corruption, the cronyism, the worst of his legacy is to make Ian Smith look better.

 

[Axver]

I, for one, am going to miss Mugabe nationalism: appropriating everything for the "nation", i.e. you and a few good mates.

 

[Vlad n U 2]

Zimbabweans are incredibly good with memes, I have found.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Mugabe is right!!!!

 

[LuckyNumber7]

Who is this Robert Mugaybie fellow you all speak of

 

[LuckyNumber7]