I don't like Tony Abbott and I don't like many of Liberal's policies. But things like that Don't Be A Fucking Idiot blog really piss me off. I saw so many left-wing friends sharing that on Facebook as if it was a tome of honesty and the antidote to the LNP's certain victory. But it was incredibly biased and left out all of the shit policies the ALP has.
I really don't see what was particularly inaccurate about Don't Be A Fucking Idiot and it even acknowledged that the ALP had some pretty poor policies - just not as indescribably shit as this wretched government we've just elected.
Let's face it - this country will not burn to the ground with the Libs in power.
It pretty much will if Tone is given free range on his approach to the climate. Seriously, do you want a Great Barrier Reef? Australia needs to act pretty quickly and pretty substantially on climate change. The ALP were half-arsing it, but at least they were sort of trying. The Coalition do not even begin to comprehend the significance of the environment and are openly dismissive of science that does not provide the conclusions they desire.
Let's talk about some other things, like how Adam Bandt retained his seat of Melbourne, and how fucking awesome Melbourne is. How the Senate is going to be made up of all these ludicrous nobodies.
I assure you, I'm not shutting up about these for the next three years.
I saw a lot of people on Facebook post about how they were voting for Clive Palmer. His campaign has been very good - all the ads and so on have not mentioned anything about the fact that he's a mining magnate who will be terrible for the environment. He's become popular on the back of his goofy personality.
When you offer everything to everyone you inevitably get the populist protest vote. The interesting thing will be to see whether he retains it. Some populists crash and burn when they fail to deliver the much-vaunted riches they profess to see just over the horizon. Others effectively blame everybody else for the failure to deliver and just become more popular. I am concerned Clive, if he has the willingness to stick around the political arena for more than half a minute, could become the latter. Since he won't actually have much influence in the House and can be relatively easily dodged in the Senate, he could still be blaming the other parties in three years, and with the very effective line of "I've been to Canberra, I've seen how this mob work, elect more PUP candidates if you want change".
Also, on the NBN... (which is admittedly an issue I know next to nothing about)
The left paints the Lib's NBN as backwards, which flabbergasts me given Turnbull is a successful businessman, is smart and is the minister for communication. I also follow a right-winger on Twitter is a technophile and he passionately supports the Lib's NBN... so surely it can't be that bad?
Your right-wing Twitter dude is in about 1% of technophiles. There's a reason every ISP and IT consultant in the country is flipping their shit about FTTN replacing FTTP. There really is no competition; if we half-arse the NBN to save a few bucks in the short-term, we will only have to spend
even more to re-do the system in a few years' time. It's actually cheaper to do the job properly the first time, no matter what bollocks the Liberals try to spin. If you think this policy is entirely Turnbull's or even largely his, you're kidding yourself. Here, good technological policy long since became subservient to a particular economic ideology that involves slashing public expenditure. The suggestion that major Liberal backers such as Murdoch/Foxtel are not keen on FTTP and have leaned on the party to promote FTTN to help protect their business model is not entirely baseless either.
Basically, if you are going to develop infrastructure, you aim to introduce the most comprehensive system possible. Any good project manager will tell you that you need to future-proof it and allow for demand far beyond the present. FTTN will barely even meet
present demand, let alone future usage. In essence, the Liberals want to do with the NBN what successive Victorian state governments have done with the railways - run 21st century trains on 19th century track and alignments. The ALP's NBN is visionary and forward-thinking; it will serve Australia well for decades. The Liberals' NBN cuts corners to simply meet present demand; but then again given the profound lack of vision and imagination the Liberals show with most policy, it's par for the course.
Are the Sex Party really all that left wing? To me they're like a milder variant of the 'let's privatise everything for no reason at all' Liberal Democratic Party.
Their social policy speaks to a lot of left-wing issues and they've very carefully articulated little or no economic policy specifically because they know expanding their civil libertarian perspective to economic libertarian will alienate their inner city progressive support base, as most progressives support large government with a strong public sector. If they don't fade away, one day they will have to articulate an economic policy and the protest vote they get from some progressives will go straight back to the Greens.
