Tag Archives: Oz Politics

As I’ve said a few times before, I’m not a big fan of scandals. With much of the country burned over the last season (not even last summer, it started in June) and coronavirus in the way, our supposed leaders could do better than argue about handouts for boatsheds. But the corruption is obvious, and someone has to pay. So, here’s my suggestion. Morrison’s chief of staff, John Kunkel admits that he ran the entire show (given that he was in charge of Morrison’s office, this is highly...

Looking at the string of appalling statements from the rightwing commentariat in the last week or so, I have come to the conclusion that they must be involved in a private contest to “trigger the libs”, in the parlance of the Trumpist right, by making statements that will provoke social media outrage to be used either for mockery or claims of persecution as the occasion demands. Chris Uhlmann’s entry in the competition, exposing firefighter Paul Parker as a One Nation voter, was...

There are lots of things going wrong with Australian government, resulting, for example in its failure to deal with climate change. One of these things is the membership of our political class. The problems are widespread but I’ll start with the National Party. The name itself is a problem, dating back to the brief delusion, encapsulated by the Joh for Canberra campaign in the 1980s, that the Country Party (as it then was) could become the dominant rightwing party. To the extent this...

That’s how a Labor partisan on Twitter described my criticism in Independent Australia of Labor’s strategy of avoiding any policy difference with the Morrison government, and shutting down all discussion of the climate catastrophe until they get around to announcing a policy for the 2022 election. The one exception I noted (and the one that incited this response) was support for the coal industry. As I noted Rather than offer a climate policy in response to the catastrophic...

Yesterday, the Oz ran the headline “Labor fails to win the middle ground”, reporting the unsurprising Newspoll result that high income earners[1] on $150000 or more mostly vote for the LNP. Today, it’s done a backflip, quoting Joel Fitzgibbon as saying that Labor is losing its working class base. Nothing too surprising here, but its worth remembering that the two-party preferred vote in the May election was 51-49 for the LNP, whereas the polls predicted 51-49 for Labor. If...

To read political commentary recently, in Australia and elsewhere, one would imagine that working-class voters have deserted Labor and other left parties en masse, and that these parties now depend on the votes of wealthy inhabitants of the inner city. The Oz (not linked) has just down a breakdown of recent newspolls, which shows this to be pretty much the exact opposite of the the truth. Of course, being the Oz, this is given the negative spin that “Labor fails to win back the...

That’s a term coined to describe the fate of the Greek social democratic (and nominally socialist) party PASOK, which implemented austerity measures in the wake of the global financial crisis, and was subsequently wiped out, with most of its voters going switching their support to the newly created left party Syriza. In France, Germany and the Netherlands, much the same has happened with the Greens gaining many of the votes lost by social democrats. Broadly speaking, the more a...

There have always been lots of people who saw nothing in politics except a bunch of windbags scoring points off each other. And a year or two back, there was a thing called anti-politics which attempted to give some kind of intellectual basis for this sentiment. Although I’ve known lots of anti-political/apolitical people and paid attention to the discussion of anti-politics, it’s always been something I’ve viewed from the outside, and as a problem to be remedied by doing a better...

Anthony Albanese has finally responded to the bushfire disaster. On the positive side, and by contrast with Morrison, he has at least acknowledged the role of climate change in turning our historical pattern of episodic bushfires into a new normal in which fires burn for weeks on end in places that have never seen them before. As of today, with the worst of the crisis behind us for now, NSW Fire and Rescue Service reports At 8.30am there are 129 fires burning, 66 are uncontained....

I plan a response to Nick Dryenfurth’s Blue Labor argument before too long. But for now, I’ll record one point of agreement. Far too many MPs, particularly on the Labor side are professional politicians, who have gone from university to a staff or professional union job (that is, not for a union of which they have previously been a member or activist) and then gained preselection through the faction system. Worse still, for most of these MPs, political office isn’t the final goal,...