oldcorollas
Levin the moment
Old potato, new potato?
The election thread - Medicare Vs cost of living Vs OMG China! Vs housing Vs I'm not Trump! Vs prehistoric fish Vs nuclear energy Vs tariffs Vs AUKUS
- Thread starter johnny
- Start date
It beggars belief that anyone that stupid can breathe
PJO
in me vL comy
Mr Crudley
Glock in your sock
We can only hope that is satire.
Sure looks like ON have found their own cooker Robert F Kennedy Jr conspiracy loving health leader clone all ready to go.
To think that our taxes fund these and all of the other elected political fuckwits while people that are really in need are put to the end of the line.
oldcorollas
Levin the moment
Month long 'fAcT FinDiNg" holiday.. paid for by us? CPAC with Farage and Rinehart.. Tommy Robinson...
Hanson quiet on who paid for Italy trip before speaking at pricey dinner
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson refuses to say who paid for her recent trip to Italy, where she attended a fashion show and was spotted at a five-star resort.
www.abc.net.au
Mr Crudley
Glock in your sock
fACt fINdInG is right.
She wouldn't know one of those even if it introduced itself to her then she fell over it.
I'm betting it is on Gina's tab or creatively expensed. Sigh,...
She wouldn't know one of those even if it introduced itself to her then she fell over it.
I'm betting it is on Gina's tab or creatively expensed. Sigh,...
oldcorollas
Levin the moment
is that what Gina calls it? (her....)
(Trying not to imagine her public speech voice saying "Pauline, could you please go a little faster and to the left"... those funds don't come without strings...)
downunderdallas
Likes Bikes and Dirt
The cookers of Secret Harbour have emerged victorious ... this means little for WA but what for the next federal election? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-30/secret-harbour-by-election-analysis/107092222
Asininedrivel
caviar connoisseur
I feel I understand little of political popularity these days and am confident of even less but there's one thing I'm certain of - One Nation will crash and burn before the next Federal Election. No maturity, no depth, no vision, just grievance and unquestioned allegiance to the ever fragile Pauline.
Do not underestimate a disenfranchised electorate.
ALP and LNP don't grasp the fight they're in.
beeb
Dr. Beebenson, PhD HA, ST, Offset (hons)
I sincerely hope you're correct, but living regional has been an eye-opener. The amount of people that (still) think Trump is an amazing leader is staggering. Same with Pauline, "She said a soundbite I agree with! I'm going to vote for her!" (...without ever checking One Notion's voting history on said topic, or legislation that would prevent them doing said thing).
Asininedrivel
caviar connoisseur
I'm not, but if we're assuming the bulk of One Nation's support is coming from those fed up with the status quo I'm confident that the fracturing of their party and their sheer lack of ideas will soon be abundantly clear to all but the most rusted on, and you can't win elections by appealling only to ignorant morons, there's just not enough of them (not yet anyway). Farley will be an independent soon enough, you don't go on national TV and openly contradict One Nation's most important mantra by accident.
I also don't underestimate the ALP's ability to read the room. While they remain a party I wouldn't vote for, they're clearly listening - see changes to housing policy, forthcoming immigration changes (for better or worse) and the transparently obvious tax cuts coming within the next couple of years. One Nation can't even articulate an immigration policy that doesn't burn some part of their support base - Farley's smart enough to see that but I'm not sure anyone else in the party is.
The LNP remain beholden to ideological bullshit and will continue to slide backwards until Hastie takes the reigns.
pink poodle
私はイナゴです
I dont think either of those major parties have the ability to communicate with the uninformed and wilfully ignorant either, and only 1 of them has any real media support.
Populism and authoritarianism off the back of economic distress is an age-old repeating pattern.
ON will be throwing up plenty of incompetent and inappropriate candidates as usual; possibly it'll be even worse given how many they'll try and field for 2028.
But I suspect it will be very close and scary election.
Asininedrivel
caviar connoisseur
What I think they really need is more zealot candidates trying to enforce religious views and restarting debates like banning abortion access. It's a solid vote winner and really seems to work well for them.
I reckon the upcoming Victorian election is the proverbial canary and worse-case potential outcome nationally. Unpopular Government that's been in for ages, 11th hour resurgent Liberal opposition, and One Nation probably poised to take a swathe of neglected outer suburban and potentially regional seats (with un-vetted, idiot candidates that will likely all be independents by 2030).
The United States 2016 and 2024 would disagree.
I see what you're saying, but I don't think that the majority of voters actually vote on ideas, I think they vote on vibe and then blame the politicians when they don't like the outcome.
Certainly feels that way, right?
I think their biggest weakness is not knowing how to act like a normal person and to be listened to by normal people (as in those that don't focus on politics, but focus on living their lives instead). I don't really know for sure, but I get the feeling that people are supporting PHON because of the vibes of authenticity, frustration and common sense. I'm not saying that any of that is ligitimate, but it's part of the populist playbook that resonates when people don't feel properly represented. And with politicians having for a long time greater allegiance to themselves and party, people want to give them the finger, and if that's the case, I'm not sure that ideas are the priority for them when they vote.
I think if PHON doesn't win heaps of seats in the next federal election, it will be more likely because they due to in-fighting and candidates that are rapists and fraudsters, etc.
Asininedrivel
caviar connoisseur
Yep, add Brexit to that as well. But compulsory voting has and will continue to save us from the worst excesses of apathy and by extension populist stupidity.
Victoria is going to be a watershed election for so many reasons, I reckon.
- Unloved government
- Dysfunctional opposition
- High violent crime (or going by the news headlines, at least...)
- Social cohesion hitting some scary lows
- The presence of white nationalists
- The presence of closeted white nationalists
- The presence of cookers
- Some large diaspora communities, a small few which vote in community blocs rather than making informed individual decisions
- General dissatisfaction
- One Nation.
Yeah, I mean it has definitely been our democratic superpower. But I wonder if dissatisfaction and generational change will have a greater impact this time around.
I think the generational change is a big one, Sam Roggeveen wrote about it last decade and I think that the foundational element of it is ringing true: The two party system is out of date because the reason for its existence is no longer present in civic life (The parties aren't gaining members like they used to, people aren't joining unions, churches, volunteering, etc., media has fractured, etc. etc. etc.). And I don't think that kids vote the way their parents did, like they had for generations (when I went to uni 20+ years ago, the main determinant of how you voted was how your parents voted - I get the feeling this is no longer true, largely because the media environment has completely changed).
With that maybe the case, I wonder if mandatory voting will save us from populism.
Populism and Australia’s future in Asia | The National Security Podcast
In this episode of National Security Podcast, Sam Roggeveen joins Chris Farnham and Katherine Mansted to talk about his recent paper Our Very Own Brexit: Australia’s Hollow Politics and Where It Could Lead Us. Is Australia seeing a surge in conservat...
shows.acast.com
Our Very Own Brexit: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special by Sam Roggeveen
A close examination of whether Australia might have its own Brexit moment and the possible repercussions, from the Lowy Institute.
www.penguin.com.au
In conversation: Weak parties, hollow politics, and democratic danger
Could a radical break with Asia be the cost of a growing dislocation of the political parties and the Australian public?Sam Roggeveen,George Megalogenis
13 November 2019
This is an edited and abridged transcript of the launch of Sam Roggeveen’s new Lowy Institute Paper Our Very Own Brexit, held last week at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne with prominent social commentator and award-winning journalist George Megalogenis.
George Megalogenis
Normally, the Lowy Institute is externally focused with implications for Australia. But you’ve reversed the lens for this particular work. You’ve started looking locally and drawing international implications.Sam Roggeveen
I think the best way to describe my approach is to think of an analogy. If I was talking about a book that I had written about, say, contemporary Egyptian politics, then you would probably hope that a book like that had something to say about the Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni–Shia divide, or about Egypt’s relations with Israel or about America. So, in other words, a book about contemporary Egyptian politics which doesn’t look beyond the boundaries, the national boundaries of Egypt, is an incomplete one.And yet it is striking to me how seldom we adopt that kind of approach when we look at Australian politics. But as an international affairs specialist, I thought, well, let’s start on the outside and then work our way in. And it seems to me when you do that, you come to actually quite different conclusions about the stability and what we can call the long-term viability of the two-party duopoly in Australia.
GM
So in the first 110 years of Australia’s federation, there was a leadership spill for the governing party called on only three occasions. Only one of them led to a change in Prime Minister, which was Bob Hawke to Paul Keating in 1991. The others, Billy McMahon’s on John Gorton in 1971, was a tie and Gorton sacked himself, and in the third one, Malcolm Fraser and Andrew Peacock in 1982, Fraser was reaffirmed as prime minister.From three spills in 110 years, we’ve had – I’ve lost count – six or eight in the last eight years, and four changes of Prime Minister. So something has obviously shifted in the conduct of party politics in the second decade of the 21st century. Tease out the whys and wherefores in Australia of what parallels you can draw from overseas.
SR
So what’s shifted? This is the part where it helps to start from the outside in, starting from a perspective on politics in mature Western democracies and then work your way into Australia. I think the near-universal phenomenon is that the major centre-left and centre-right political parties in all those democracies are in decline, which is to say they’re losing members and they’re losing vote share.Now, why has that happened? Well, I think the Australian case actually illustrates the point for the broader sample.
What’s happened in Australia is essentially that our economies and our societies have changed. The Labor Party was founded as the political wing of the union movement and today less than 15% of our workforce is unionised, less than 10% if you take out the public sector. So we’ve got a political party which is designed and was founded to represent a social and an economic base that no longer exists.
You’d think, in circumstances like that, that the Liberal Party would thrive. And in a sense it has, because the Liberal Party has spent much more time in office in the post-war period, and in particular the last 20 years, than has Labor.
But the Liberal Party is in decline too, just like centre-right parties all over the Western world. It has lost membership. When organised labour implodes as a social and economic movement, what’s the Liberal Party for anymore? Why do you need a Liberal Party if there is no union movement to oppose? So the Liberal Party too is a political movement with no actual social or economic base to represent.
When these parties go backwards, when they go into decline, they become less stable. And in Australia, I think one of the symptoms of that is leadership churn.
GM
And the title, Our Very Own Brexit. There’s a word missing – Trump is obviously not involved here. Why look at Brexit and not the US election in 2016? Why does Brexit have greater saliency for the Australian situation than, say, the American examples?SR
The evolution of our major political parties is really at the core of the argument. The analogy is easier to draw not just with Britain, but also with Europe, where there are also a lot of parliamentary systems. In the American system, presidential politics tend to be at the forefront and party affiliations are different, the dynamics work a little differently with regard to party politics.In European politics, as much as here, a couple of generations ago, you voted the way your parents voted, and they voted the way their parents voted. And the party you voted for was tied to the class you belong to, the kind of job you had, or your parents had, the church you went to, and so on. All of those social connections to party politics have almost entirely disappeared. So voters are free to go where they want and what that means is that politically the big political parties are just far less stable and they’re far more vulnerable to shocks from their own backbenchers.
And that’s what happened in the United Kingdom. In 2010, the year David Cameron came to office, the polling firm Ipsos used to take a poll every month asking, what do you think the biggest challenge to Britain is today? And in October of 2010, the year David Cameron came to office, the grand total of the percentage that said that Brexit or that Europe was the most important challenge for Britain was 1%! Six years later, there’s a referendum and they decide to get out of the European Union.
Now, how the hell did that happen? You can’t explain it by the fact that the people revolted. There were no marches on the streets. Nobody was breaking windows. This was cooked up inside the Conservative Party. Previous prime ministers had the authority to be able to put down that Eurosceptic sentiment. Cameron couldn’t. And so they had to had to call this referendum.
GM
Let’s get down to the detail on migration. How would this question – and we’re catastrophising here – you’re not saying it’s going to happen in the next election or the election after …SR
… A “plausible worst case”, I’m saying.GM
Walk me through the worst case. And which party could it come from?SR
The Brits broke away from Europe through Brexit. We can break away from Asia if we make a radical turn away from immigration. I argue in the book this could come from either party.I’m very careful in the book to say this won’t be driven from the bottom up. There is not this kind of racist underbelly in Australia that a lot of, I think, critics on the left worry about, that there’s some kind of nascent, xenophobic, racist movement in Australia and if you scratch the surface of our tolerant selves, you’ll find a bunch of white supremacists. I think that’s mostly a fantasy.
Where the analogy lies is that one of the major parties become so unstable that it cooks up something like this out of desperation, that it basically takes a position to the election where it says “Australia is full”. And at that point, we are, in fact, deciding – if one side of politics says we continue with our high-immigration model and the other party says “no, Australia’s full” - at that point, we’re holding a de facto referendum on Australia’s place in Asia.
The reason I think this is a nice analogy with Brexit is that high immigration is a point of elite bipartisan consensus, just as the relations with the EU were in the UK. This was a point of elite consensus which was never tested really with the population. Both major parties in the UK took it for granted that Britain’s slow, halting but gradual enmeshment with Europe was a good thing.
And it seems to me because these parties became so disconnected from the public in the way that I just described earlier, they fail to recognise that the public had not bought into this sentiment. Now, it’s not that the public was against it necessarily. They just they just haven’t paid any attention to it. And they certainly weren’t invested in it the way that the political class was in in the UK. So when they did eventually make the mistake of asking, the British people came back with the “wrong” answer