Conservative Tony Abbott now PM of Australia

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My fear is that Abbott doing something about the Senate will translate into them basically making it impossible to run unless you've got a millionaire funding you. They already double the cost of running candidates before the election as it was.
 
It's only $500 now though right? That's far too small. Putting yourself on the ballot should require substantial investment.
 
Fredescu said:
It's only $500 now though right? That's far too small. Putting yourself on the ballot should require substantial investment.
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Nah, I don't think making it more expensive is the way to go, just increase the amount of members needed and make it illegal to belong to two parties at once. Maybe I am being naive though, people can collude still. I just don't think making the barriers financial is the way to go.
 
Fredescu said:
It's only $500 now though right? That's far too small. Putting yourself on the ballot should require substantial investment.
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No. It's $2000 per candidate for the Senate, and $1000 per candidate for the House of Reps.
http://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/candidates.htm

Since you need a minimum 2 candidates to get a ticket for the Senate, which gives your party to a column of its own and makes it possible for people to vote for you above the line, it's really a minimum of $4000 per state.

Now that may not sound like much for you, but when us Pirates were forced to stump up $16k to put 8 candidates in 4 states instead of the $8k we had expected to before they changed the rules....well, that dramatically reduced the amount of promotional material we were able to make.

There's the opportunity costs to consider as well. Unlike the major parties, we can't afford to pay people a wage. That means the candidates and their teams can't take time off work to campaign, since they have rent or mortgages to pay and families to feed. As you might imagine, that creates a huge barrier to new parties starting up without some deep pockets to fund them.
 
Yagharek said:
Yeah, I'm obviously a more left-leaning voter than the Liberal party's target audience, but I don't begrudge them their electoral win. It was on the cards a long time ago.

I do call foul play on the senate results though. That is plainly unrepresentative. There should be a couple more Greens, Labor, Lib/Nat senators in each of a few states, along with a couple of Pups.

The LDP/AME/Sports parties are electoral frauds, and truly unrepresentative.

"democracy" my fucking arse.
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Agreed. Joke parties would be better than the transparent exploitation here.

The AME policies looks like the LDP with a motoring theme tacked on. There's a disturbing number of minor parties I could say this about actually.

The Sports Party literally has no real policy information whatsoever and their preference deals say nothing about their ideology apart from some vague clues they are on the right.
 
Elaugaufein said:
The AME and Sports parties aren't jokes , joke parties would be far better , this is ruthless exploitation of the system.

The AME policies looks like the LDP with a motoring theme tacked on.

The Sports Party literally has no real policy information whatsoever and their preference deals say nothing about their ideology apart from some vague clues they are on the right.
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I didn't call them joke parties. I called them frauds. As in the proper use of the term.
 
$16k is chickenfeed. If that puts a dent in your campaign, you don't have a good enough following to even approach 4% of the vote. It's a waste of space on the ballot. I'm sympathetic to the causes of the Pirate Party, but I don't think anyone that can pony up $20k has the right to make the senate ballot paper larger than it should be.
 
Fredescu said:
$16k is chickenfeed. If that puts a dent in your campaign, you don't have a good enough following to even approach 4% of the vote. It's a waste of space on the ballot. I'm sympathetic to the causes of the Pirate Party, but I don't think anyone that can pony up $20k has the right to make the senate ballot paper larger than it should be.
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I dunno. There are certainly demographics that can potentially have large followings and good things to say but not large war funds (those that appeal to the 18-25 demographic or the poor and low-income for example). I don't think its right to disenfranchise those people , especially given that older people tend to have inherently more political influence due to the network effect (and knowing where the bodies are buried) and the public perception of age and wisdom being linked, and wealth is also going to be an advantage (if Katter had the kind of money to throw around Palmer did things might be very different, and Katter is a very long way from being poor ) high money requirements also gives campaign donors yet another avenue for undue political influence.

ETA - Darn it people. I post something and two of you post in succession in minutes. I then read something and make a reply , and then spend 5 minutes reading some more and writing a reply to something else and no-one posts in between. And you do it consistently.
 
A party focusing on the youth would be another waste of a ballot spot. There are already well funded parties that intend to serve the interests of the poor and low-income that I don't think we're wanting for those. There's nothing wrong with being a political force that doesn't run for government, but still attempts to influence debate and gather followers at a grass roots level.
 
Fredescu said:
A party focusing on the youth would be another waste of a ballot spot. There are already well funded parties that intend to serve the interests of the poor and low-income that I don't think we're wanting for those. There's nothing wrong with being a political force that doesn't run for government, but still attempts to influence debate and gather followers at a grass roots level.
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Labor is a joke and the Greens are environmentalists before they serve the working class. I don't see any well funded parties that properly serve the interest of labour or the working class (but I am looking in as an outsider). Catering to the two party system will hurt Australia in the long run.
 
Fredescu said:
A party focusing on the youth would be another waste of a ballot spot. There are already well funded parties that intend to serve the interests of the poor and low-income that I don't think we're wanting for those. There's nothing wrong with being a political force that doesn't run for government, but still attempts to influence debate and gather followers at a grass roots level.
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By this token you could argue that anything but two parties are unnecessary, and that they will represent everyone with sufficient funding, since it's almost impossible for a given demographic not to be ideological closer to one of two positions that are fairly centrist. You could have certainly argued it about the Greens before their rise, Their cause was represented by the ALP. But the Greens, in practice, represent a significantly different demographic: a position to the left of Labor that would not really be adequately represented by Labor given its union ties and thus a fundamental limit on how seriously they can take environmental policies given industry opposition , those voters were merely represented by Labor because they are closer than the Coalition.
 
You Are Viewtiful said:
Labor is a joke and the Greens are environmentalists before they serve the working class. I don't see any well funded parties that properly serve the interest of labour or the working class (but I am looking in as an outsider). Catering to the two party system will hurt Australia in the long run.
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A lot of the Greens policies are aimed at helping the poor. They do tend to put their environmental policies first, which I think hurts them, but eh. There would also be the Socialist Equality Party if you're after a real working class party. They're probably too extreme to be palatable in the real world.


Elaugaufein said:
By this token you could argue that anything but two parties are unnecessary
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Maybe you could, but I don't. I don't know what the right levels are, and I wouldn't make them prohibitively high, but I disagree with the argument that "$16k is a lot of money!". If your party is worth putting on the ballot paper, it shouldn't be.
 
You Are Viewtiful said:
Labor is a joke and the Greens are environmentalists before they serve the working class. I don't see any well funded parties that properly serve the interest of labour or the working class (but I am looking in as an outsider). Catering to the two party system will hurt Australia in the long run.
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No Labor genuinely does serve the portion of the working class that they have always claimed to serve, which is the Unions. I don't think this is a bad thing , despite not liking their overly close ties, the idea that the rich/corporations ,in general, will treat their workers fairly when bargaining power is entirely one sided is borderline delusional. At no point in history has it been true, those who did are brought up so frequently in this context that their names are almost synonymous with it precisely because they are the exception not the rule.

I'll agree that there's no representation for the self-employed or the small businessman though. The LNP likes to pretend it does and sometimes passes things that help them by coincidence or for political capital but at days end their loyalty is to rural farmers and big business and Labor likewise makes some moves of concession where it won't hurt unions (like exceptions to regulations for business below a certain threshold of employees) but at the end of the day its not where their loyalty lies either.
 
Annabel Crabb's piece is a pretty good analysis of the position Abbott finds himself in. Also, she's a bloody good writer :)
The vicious tribal hardball of the last three years, in which the new prime minister has had a substantial hand, left voters with an unappealing field of options in 2013.

Which to choose; the wrecker, or the self-harm experts?

The national answer to this conundrum is most clearly read in the Senate, the chamber most usually reserved for crowd-sourced ironic political commentary.

And the strongest trend telegraphed by this new Senate appears, at this stage in the counting, to be a tremendous swing towards None Of The Above.
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I'm so frustrated that people just don't seem to give a shit about the environment, to the point of outright hostility to the party trying to do something about it.

We only have one planet, why is there such vocal opposition in trying to preserve it? Good luck with eating, breathing and drinking money.
 
lexi said:
I'm so frustrated that people just don't seem to give a shit about the environment, to the point of outright hostility to the party trying to do something about it.

We only have one planet, why is there such vocal opposition in trying to preserve it? Good luck with eating, breathing and drinking money.
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A variety of reasons:
For some being able to sustain themselves in retirement is a more immediate goal, they genuinely care but they'd rather be able to eat and live acceptably well . Some really do buy that its a liberal conspiracy to bring down glorious capitalism. Some are just focused on extremely short term interests (i.e money) and the consequences aren't likely to be too severe for them personally. Some believe that its a problem that should be dealt with when it provably happens (i.e when a section of a city in their country is pretty much permanently underwater or their farmers crops start dying). And a very small minority stand to profit from the things that cause environmental damage and will have the wealth to insulate themselves from the effects and so don't give a damn (and so they spend a lot of money fighting it).
 
Elaugaufein said:
Some really do buy that its a liberal conspiracy to bring down glorious capitalism.
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This is a super common one. "The Greens want us all living in caves." And to be fair, there are super hippies that everyone has come across that actually thinks that sort of thing, just as there are extreme right skinheads who want to kill all non-whites. But we don't judge the right by the skinheads and we shouldn't judge the greens by the hippies.

The reasonable data driven environmentalists are still generally tarred with that brush, and the reason is the people that put ideology before evidence. The economic libertarians or anarchocapitalists that generally don't believe in government action will always be the first to disbelieve in problems requiring collective action.
 
Fredescu said:
This is a super common one. "The Greens want us all living in caves." And to be fair, there are super hippies that everyone has come across that actually thinks that sort of thing, just as there are extreme right skinheads who want to kill all non-whites. But we don't judge the right by the skinheads and we shouldn't judge the greens by the hippies.

The reasonable data driven environmentalists are still generally tarred with that brush, and the reason is the people that put ideology before evidence. The economic libertarians or anarchocapitalists that generally don't believe in government action will always be the first to disbelieve in problems requiring collective action.
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It's especially bizarre given that the Greens are explicitly for a wide range of technology advances that would help their position, and basically show an excellent awareness and understanding of modern technology and social media. The only area of technology that the Greens could really rationally be argued to be unfairly against, given their position, is nuclear power and even that's a matter of weighing up a very small chance of what is potentially decades or centuries of environmental harm. Then again these people generally aren't on the cutting edge of technology themselves (its just not relevant to their lives).
 
Fredescu said:
Apparently the other one was Dutch!

edit: supposedly the work of the New York Times.
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It's nice to see the international media taking notice of our refugee policy. We may be shamed into doing something sensible (like actually accepting people who come on boats without visas who are genuine asylum seekers for one rather than refusing them all because "tough on illegal immigrants" and "discouraging effect").
 
Elaugaufein said:
It's nice to see the international media taking notice of our terrible policy. About the only way we'll be shamed into doing something sensible.
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We dont shame easy. Itll just make us indignant. Just look at the Aboriginals when the UN says something about them.
 
Hell, the UN dropped a report a few weeks back basically saying our asylum seeker policy was in violation of international law and barely anybody seemed to have even noticed
 
Jintor said:
Hell, the UN dropped a report a few weeks back basically saying our asylum seeker policy was in violation of international law and barely anybody seemed to have even noticed
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Didn't get media traction. Now that the election is over , Newscorp can spend a few weeks gushing about the new government but then they'll actually need stories, so if the international media keeps it up for a while it'll eventually show up.
 
Jintor said:
Hell, the UN dropped a report a few weeks back basically saying our asylum seeker policy was in violation of international law and barely anybody seemed to have even noticed
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UN is biased towards boat people of course they will say this. - Tony as he is reading the report.
 
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