Australian Federal Election 18th of May 2019

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What policy differences exist between the United Australian Party, Katter's Australian Party, and One Nation? I know they broadly compete for a similar base of voters.

Well they are all wrapped up in the personae of their leaders, so might as well go over them.

Bob Katter is a longtime fixture of Queensland politics, having inherited his rural Northern seat of Kennedy from his father after serving in the rather infamous Queensland cabinet of Joh Bjelke Peterson (it's very hard to get Queensland conservatism without a look at this guy). He left the National Party in 2001, complaining that they were too close to the Liberals and their support for free trade and free market policies were decimating the outback economy. KAP is a very parochial party, in that it doesn't really try outside of its base of North Queensland (especially after its flop national campaign  in 2013). I would have once said that Katter is less tolerant to racism than similar protectionist outfits, but this term he let Fraser Anning in his party following his defection from One Nation, briefly defending his horrendous "Final Solution for Immigration" speech. I don't really like the phrase "social conservative" but Katter fits more than Palmer: it goes back to his youth when he egged The Beatles on stage. His policies are super integrated to that base: it's all about ethanol subsidies and protectionism on agricultural products etc.

Palmer is a less ideologically aligned politician. Some might call it centrism, but Palmer is more the sort of guy who just grabs a bunch of popular sounding planks (abolition of tuition fees), punts on all difficult "social" issues like euthanasia or gay marriage and embodies a hostility to the party system. He seems to directly place his new party as a successor to the historic UAP: a National Government style formation formed amidst the Great Depression (hilariously his website lists the UAP PM's Lyons and Menzies as historic members), which says a lot - UAP is intended as a party with a mass appeal that will unite Australians around a central figure. Whether Palmer's flamboyance and ridiculous election spending can outweigh the shambolic performance of his last time in politics and the recent liquidation of his Nickel concern is another question (I doubt it will work). They have a lot more national ambitions than KAP, with its predessesor PUP grabbing seats in West Australia and Tasmania (and they briefly attracted aboriginal defectors from the CLP in the Northern Territory, which was weird), and have a lot wider (but not deeper) appeal than Katter's base of "old farmers".

Pauline Hanson is yet another politician based in Queensland, as you probably know. Although her original iteration was based around Australia being swamped by Asians, now the focus is more on Muslims. While Katter and Palmer will occasionally wade through that mire, it's not the purpose of their parties (heck Palmer in 2013 ran to the left of Labour on the refugees issue): PHON is a party based around opposition to immigration and alt-right politics.

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Yeah, I think this comes to Shorten himself (who was always a lousy choice, given that he sort of epitomises the factional hackishness that people have grown to loathe in the ALP), with the coal/Adani issue hanging like the sword of Damocles over those Queensland seats.

1. The ALP should have learned long ago that 'cultural' politics is a net vote and seat loser for them. The nature of the Australian culture war is such that they can't disengage totally, but they should avoid allowing it to dominate. This isn't a matter of 'Left' or 'Right', of course (not that any Australians here will need that note, but people from elsewhere might).

Perhaps they learnt the wrong lesson from the last Victorian election where the Liberals led a very culturally focused campaign (Safe Schools, black African gangs etc) and utterly flopped when compared with Dan Andrews' obsessive focus on infrastructure and development (apparently removing railway crossings is the electoral equivalent of crack in Victoria).

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Why Queensland is rather conservative compared to other states ?

Queensland is very distinctive in Australia because its regional and market towns are far more important in the state's identity than the norm. NSW, SA, Victoria and WA have large (I would say iconic, but nobody thinks that about Adelaide) capitals containing the bulk of the state's population; and though towns like Geelong and Newcastle are not unimportant, they have far less distinctive roles and identities than Cairns, Townsville, Rockhampton and Mackay, port towns that act as the economic nexus points for the state's export based economies. The state's capital of Brisbane, meanwhile, was a very humdrum place historically, considered little more than an oversized regional town that happened to host the government.

This is related to the beleaguered economic history of the state. While NSW and Victoria industrialized fairly quickly before federation, fostering a native class of capitalists, Queensland remained a primary industry focused area, reliant on foreign capital for investment and a corporatist governing style. This different style of an economy often led to clashes with the southern states. Queensland were one of the bigger sceptics of Federation (which was largely an elite-driven obsession) and the state where the labour movement enjoyed more early success than any other. Indeed, a lot of ALP historians mark a key impetus for the formation of the party as the strike by sheepshearers in 1891 and the state party enjoined a consistent and uninterrupted government from 1915 to 1958 (Queensland Labour formed the first ever socialist government anywhere in the world). It was a lot more populist and appealing to smallholders than its southern counterparts, but it was still recognisably socialist. Indeed, Queensland's fragmented and backward economy led the state to become a hotbed for IWW activism and radicalism, even electing Australia's only ever Communist MP in the 40's. Billy Hughes even worried about North Queensland revolting, and was pelted with eggs when he visited.

The state's reputation as conservative erupted upon the split and subsequent fall of the aforementioned Labor government, allowing the Country/Liberal coalition to emerge and the eventual rise of Joh Bjelke Peterson, possibly the most controversial Premier in Australian history. The first Premier to really exploit the state's differences with the crowd in Sydney and Melbourne (and the Whitlam government) in a conservative manner, he routed the Labor Party in its rural heartand in 1974. He also led the growth and development agenda - overseeing a massive property boom in the Gold Coast, fostered by both a staggering amount of corruption and hostility towards all potential sources of delay (including labour agitation and environmental laws - JBP's attitude towards the latter can be summed up by him once musing about the economic advantages of blowing up the Great Barrier Reef).

The JBP government fell in the 90's following his aborted attempt to become PM and the steady realisation that the brazen corruption isn't really a great thing in the increasingly modernised economy, but  his shadow isn't really gone. Queensland isn't a conservative bastion the way some describe it - it isn't Bavaria or whatever. In fact, the Queensland Labor Party has been pretty successful in the post-Joh era, winning every election bar their nadir in 2012. However a new factor has become more prominent in recent years: that of decline. With the exception of Brisbane and its surrounding areas in the SE (including the Gold and Sunshine Coasts), all the aforementioned regional centres are losing their economic engines and identities; and the collapse of the old gerrymandered system means that they don't receive disproportionate funding. Queensland was the launchpad of Pauline Hanson, the controversial MP for Oxley (a Greater Brisbane district centred around the mining town of Ipswich), who relied heavily on the economic depression as part of her anti-Asian narrative, and tends to get very good results in peripheral (not necessarily rural) areas that feel most under threat. But there are also a lot populists of a more centrist or "mere" anti-elitist bent: the likes of Katter, based in rural Kennedy, or Palmer, in the Sunshine Coast.

in conclusion Queensand is a land of contrasts

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I think one issue where Labor overdid their hand on social issues was Shorten dinging Morrison on whether the latter thought gays were going to hell or not. This is a tactic that can work in certain circles (e.g. it heavily wounded Tim Farron in the key seats that the Lib Dems were going for in 2017) but came across as kind of unfair, I feel, for the median voter (who supported SSM, remember). ScoMo is many things, but he is not Toneh Abbott. Abbott has a very one track mind, and that sort of attack works on him because his weirdo obsessions and niche interests comes across as deeply baffling to the non partisan voter who is more interested in things like tax or education spending. But Morrison? I think he made a basically fair point that he was running for PM not for Pope (a distinction that Abbott never got) and it was broadly unfair to be targeted for a privately held belief. This may kind of link in to a broader issue with the whole Israel Folau situation.

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Rural people are generally rational voters. They vote for their interests. Labor sold itself out long ago to pursue urbanites because that's where they saw the future of the party. It really is that simple.

If you want rural people to vote for you you're going to have to discard the carbon tax (which threatens the jobs of rural people and is absolutely despised and drop alternative energy subsidies (which steal the taxes of rural people to finance daft things that just happen to be well liked by urbanites.

I think it's a bit more curious than that. It's been long observed that the National Party is the weak link in the Coalition, being extraordinarily vulnerable to independents and minor parties. In fact many of these independents have fairly left or liberal perspectives but they are framed very differently from how these issues are presented by Labor or the Greens. Environmental issues are not the global and abstract issue of climate change, but local issues presented by drought and irrigation. Your description of renewable schemes again misses the mark: rural areas often have relatively popular and successful solar and wind farms, but they are seen more as an economic venture than an "environmental program" (the problem with subsidies there more falls on individuals with no means to launch renewable projects of their own, which is a problem of its own).

The key issue in Queensland is the aforementioned peripheral areas. Many of the actual farmers are skeptical or even hostile to the coal projects; it is the vast crowds of un(der)employed figures that are susceptible to the "we would be rich if those Green lawyers didn't care about rare butterfly habitats" arguments.

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renewable schemes again misses the mark: rural areas often have relatively popular and successful solar and wind farms, but they are seen more as an economic venture than an "environmental program" (the problem with subsidies there more falls on individuals with no means to launch renewable projects of their own, which is a problem of its own).

The problem with subsidies is how I stated. They are stealing dollars that these folks have to pay. You are right that rural folks are open to alternative means, but, as a supplement. That's what folks don't get.

I don't want to get in to much of an ideological debate on this board, but it does seem a but rich pushing this point when by far the most wasteful and useless renewable subsides of all are the pushes for bioethanol that rural areas continuously advocate for. And I don't see the supposedly anti-subsidy Right complaining about the piles of dollars given to Adani and so on.

I mean renewables can, providing the government aren't dumbos, be a very good tool in rural areas. Rural areas are typically underserved and overcharged by the local monopolies in charge of power distribution, so it could be quite a good source of liberation, especially if solar is combined with energy storage, to be self-sufficient. Farms aren't the issue here, it's low income individuals who might not own their house or be in a position to get solar or storage who end up subsidising their richer neighbours with solar panels. A big issue, yes, but totally different cleavage than the Rural Vs Urban dynamic.

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why are so many Americans unable to think about another country's politics outside the prism of their own country?

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I think that's the point. Labor really wants those North Shore voters but they are fundamentally at odds with the party itself (which is not to say their policies, as much as the party's image - especially in a state like NSW). The ALP is not the Canadian Liberal Party, and is not becoming them anytime soon.