ScreamingLlama posted:

I'm legit curious about how countries can function like that. Don't we need working government to set budgets, interact with foreign powers and generally keep things ticking over? If a caretaker government were to find a way to delay vote-counting indefinitely, that would be a great backdoor into a dictatorship.

Maybe if Australia were to dissolve into anarchy it might prompt the Governor-General to get off his arse

norp posted:

A permabanned user who's calling card is my little pony porn for pages and pages

Weatherman posted:

Welp it's probably just all the drinks I had with dinner out but that's the funniest thing I've heard all week

SynthOrange posted:

His greatest achievement was bombarding the thread with pages of pony porn after the media linked it when a forumer broke news of improper conduct with his lecturer handing out assignments that was literally 'write Liberal party propaganda for me' then using that at his party job.

EvilElmo posted:

the Greens talked about the ALP all campaign if anything damaging their vote rather than improving it.

Au Revoir Shosanna posted:

What, is this, like, loving backwards day or some poo poo?

Senor Tron posted:

What would happen right now in the case of a national emergency? Is the previous house of reps and senate still technically available to sit? Like if war broke out, who would be in charge right now?

Au Revoir Shosanna posted:

What, is this, like, loving backwards day or some poo poo?

Anidav posted:

They speak legends of the Raptorfag, he appears like a ghost and disappears into the night, leaving his gifts of night-mares and despair.

homebrew posted:

Watch this and it will become much clearer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrDVsprWRCQ

BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:

Saying that Pauline Hanson voters are moronic is true, but misses the point.
The lesson to be learnt from her successful Senate bid, and from the rise of Trump, and Brexit, is that moderate conservatism doesn't exist.
What connects the supporters of those movements is that they are angry, disenfranchised and - yes - racist. But how did they get that way?
You get that way when your poorly funded public education fails you to prepare you for rewarding or well paying work and you work a dead end job. You get that way when your healthcare is unaffordable and you're on long public waiting lists for treatment. You get that way when you can't afford a house. You get that way, due to neoliberal economic policy.

quote:

And you blame immigrants and foreigners for taking your job, freeloading on healthcare, buying up property and leaving you out of the loop. When really, blame should be placed at the foot of a government that has inadequately supported you to live a fulfilling life.

Ian Winthorpe III posted:

A key element of which is consistently high levels of immigration without the attendendent provision of services or amenity, so in that respect they're making a pretty rational decision in voting for One Nation.

As for 'dead end jobs', they're going to get a lot more common in the coming decades


Pretty sure that's exactly what a lot of them were doing when they ticked the One Nation box.

Tirade posted:

Sup IWC. The services provided to immigrants / refugees that make it through our tortuous process are actually close to world's best practice so you've missed the mark there,

quote:

It seems to be a post-election taboo to answer the question, "who did you vote for", let alone to ask the question in the first place. So for what its worth here's my answer. As a lefty (Vote Compass confirms my coordinates somewhere right of the Greens and left of Labor) my first preference for the House of Representatives in the federal electorate of Higgins went to the Greens.
This was largely due to Higgins being touted, pre-polling, as a potential upset for the Liberals. It turned out to be a safe seat. I've had time to reflect on this and I regret my vote. Not the sentiment driving my decisions, but the potential ramifications.
Firstly, my disinterest in the election was largely caused by my lack of buy-in to the central issues. Not to mention the seemingly dull similarity between the two major parties and their leading, white, male and frankly downright sensible leaders: Turnbull and Shorten. Brexit and Trump were simply more interesting.
But I feel I've let our system down. I care about politics in this country, and I didn't pay attention. The first murmurs of this future regret came on the eve of the election when The Age publicly backed the Coalition.

They reasoned that the Shorten campaign, strong as it had become, did not merit the unseating of a first-term government. Most importantly, we needed more time to see if Malcolm Turnbull could deliver on his progressive promise. He needed the majority support of the electorate to do it in order, to unshackle him from a divided party. I read The Age's editorial not so much as a vote for the future of the nation but for the future of the Liberal Party.
We often accuse the media and government of pandering to short-term news and electoral cycles and I feel the electorate has become the guilty party. We've cut off our noses to spite our faces. By undermining the Turnbull government we've provided ammunition for the right wing to claim vindication. They can now argue that it was wrong to depose Abbott in the first place and that Turnbull, after all, was just an ambitious, populist usurper. Abbott was right all along! I can just hear the rattle of the revisionist typewriters going to work.
Turnbull didn't need to transform the nation, he needed to do something more vital; save the Liberal Party from its own heavy-fisted fringe. To deny the party the chance to rediscover and reinstate its own conservative brand of progressive government in this moment is to hand it back to the re-enfranchised far right, and in so doing we may just witness an even uglier government emerging from the ashes.
By failing to shore up a Liberal victory, we've killed the one chance the party had to explore its less polarising, more progressive side while simultaneously demonstrating that conservative politics can be a great and worthwhile force. I contributed to that stuff-up. Sorry, Australia, I was sleepwalking with the Brexiters. Cue Abbott's return and an even uglier future government to come.
Sean Layh is a Melbourne based artist and a student of biological sciences at Monash University. He lives in the federal electorate of Higgins.
Follow us: @theage on Twitter | theageAustralia on Facebook

Antti posted:

Is there a good comprehensive article somewhere on this electoral reform, and on the election, let's pretend I was put in cryostasis after the Liberal spill where Tony was ousted.

ModernMajorGeneral posted:

Lumping One Nation with brexit (or even Trump) is an insult to brexiters - apart from One Nation having like 2% of the vote instead of 52% I agree with leave apologists who say they basically voted on vague ideas of shaking off Brussels bureaucrats and fixing the economy,(though xenophobia/racism clearly helped leave) and dismissing them all as racists is missing the point.

While One Nation voters may be similarly disenfranchised and economically disadvantaged 100% of them support the party because they fear Muslims and foreigners, this is the entire reason why the party exists and why anyone knows Pauline Hanson's name.

Maybe I only think that because I'm an out of touch liberal elite though.

Solemn Sloth posted:

starkebn posted:

Facebook just told me Belgium once waited 541 days so we've got a ways to go yet

freebooter posted:

it turns out that from the economic point of view, in the current crisis, no government is better than any government – any existing government.

Solemn Sloth posted:

hahahahahahahahahahahahahhahaahahahahhahahahahahahhahahahahahhahahahhaahahhahahahahahahhaahahahahahahahhahahhahahahahahahhahahahahahhahahahahahahahhahahahahahahhahahahahhahahahahahahhaahhahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahhahahahahahahahahaha

freebooter posted:

ALSO here's a nightmare for you, which I thought of courtesy of Chris Bowen's petulant foot-stamping Q&A response about how Labor will NEVER deal with the Greens or minor parties: how long do you think before the major parties try to shore up their mutually shrinking primary vote by collaborating in legislation to remove preferential voting and replace it with first-past-the-post? Is preferential voting protected by the constitution? How amenable do you think Joe Sixpack would be to further voting reform "in the interests of clear election results and strong government?"