Turnbull remains a gutless moral coward: https://www.theguardian.com/austral...rate-liberals-push-for-marriage-equality-bill
Vlad, I do wonder what news organisations you like, since you usually preface a link with a comment about not liking the organisation.
Turnbull remains a gutless moral coward: https://www.theguardian.com/austral...rate-liberals-push-for-marriage-equality-bill
Hey! I've always said I've liked the Australian section of The Guardian!
Still hangin' in there with the plebiscite, huh. What's stopping them, if it's so frigging important?
Had to love the breathless reportage yesterday of what The Census Tells Us About Ourselves. Given the circumstances in which last year's census were undertaken, I assign it very, very, very little credibility. Another item for the memory hole...
Not to mention most of the 'revelations' fall into the 'who gives a shit' category. For me at any rate.
So what happens in this situation? I mean, filling the spot he is vacating? I should know, but I'm a little fuzzy. It is within the purview of the government in his home state, yes?
I’ve made this point before, but I’m constantly reading articles about the rising share of “protest” votes going to “minor parties” in which the set of minor parties excludes the National Party. The reason is, of course, that the Nationals are a long-established party which, with a few state-level exceptions, operates in permanent coalition with the Liberals.
But, for all practical purposes, the same is true of the Greens. Roughly speaking, Labor and the Greens are in the position the Liberals and Nationals (and previously the Country Party) were for most of the 20th century. They fight three-cornered contests, often bitterly, and do a lot of agonising about preference swaps, coalitions and so on. But, when push comes to shove in terms of forming governments, they almost always line up together, whether in a coalition, with a formal agreement, or with informal support.
The most important difference between the two is that the Greens get more votes from a wider range of electorates. The difference that drives the spurious analysis of “protest parties” is that the coalition between Labor and the Greens is less formal and more fractious than that between the Liberals and Nationals.
If you count Labor and the Greens as a coalition, then the rise of protest parties in Australia appears primarily as a crackup of the political right. We’ve seen a profusion of rightwing protest parties, with only the Xenophon group in the centre, and nothing much at all on the left. That differs from the situation in some other countries, where social democratic parties have embraced austerity and collapsed (Greece, Netherlands) or where the established leadership has been pushed aside (UK and possibly soon US also). I have some ideas about this, but I’ll have to write about them later.
But, coming back to the main point, a consistent analysis should treat both the Nationals and Greens as minor parties, or else neither of them.
Please oh please let Cory Bernardi turn out to be a citizen of, I don't know, the Third Reich.
Can we charge Eric Abetz on being the nephew of a Nazi and who-clearly-hasn't-learned-based-on-his-own-ideology-act?