Australia General Discussion 4.0: It ain’t easy under Albanese

[TheTide]

Is this it, and net zero is settled?
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/24/nationals-agree-to-net-zero-target-by-2050-despite-barnaby-joyces-opposition

Joyce has for a while struck me as the type who might lead a semi-successful minor party that has his own name in its name. Which is not without precedent in Australia. Maybe this will be the trigger for it.

[TheTide]

You are admittedly a socialist. An ideology which is unelectable in a modern Australian FE or SE. Which is rightly why our last truly socialist PM was in the 1940s. The fact that this led to 23 years in Opposition....

I'm a social democrat, dipstick. I mark myself as a socialist because it triggers people like you.

Albanese, Wong etc. are social democrats. But, you, Bandt, Mckim, the psychopathic curried woman et al, are not.

Social democracy is a form of socialism, just as Turnbull etc are conservatives.

[TheTide]

And Albanese is from the Left, while Shorten is Right. Do these factions even matter beyond "this is what i vaguely believed when i joined the party in uni or from the union, now it's just my mates"?

Eighteen years, Mark Latham (officially, I think, part of the Right) was a Labor leader with a fairly lefty image (in terms of being anti-war and environmentalist).

These days, (without even getting into his party affiliation) his typical tweets seem to be, well, those such as this.

https://twitter.com/RealMarkLatham/status/1610126832090886146?s=20&t=1f5dp4S...

[TheTide]

So Mark Latham has made some disgusting comments regarding Alex greenwich, the Independent gay MP for Sydney.

I won't repeat them here because they are beyond disgusting. Go on Twitter and have a look at them if you so desire.

It seems he's gone too far even for Pauline Hanson.

[TheTide]

Aston by-election tomorrow. If the Liberals manage to lose it Dutton may be rolled. The first big test of his 10 months of leadership.

6.6% swing to Labor with about 25% counted so far...

[TheTide]

There hasn't been a contested spill federally in either major party since 2018. Which is quite amazing if you look at the period from 2007 to 2018.

[TheTide]

Not exactly a shortage of contenders for the leadership presumably?

[TheTide]

Latham really is a fascinating case study, but not in a good way.

The comparable figure in Australian history would perhaps be Billy Hughes, although of course Latham has never quite reached the same heights.

This video about his political career is a good watch. It suggests that his mentor Whitlam disowning him after the 2004 election was the point when he turned from a mere hothead into a complete lunatic.

[TheTide]

Someone is going to get hurt in 2025. Someone may even be killed.

Most likely by the people who went to the Sydney Opera House and chanted “gas the Jews”.

And that goes to show how little you know of Australia

Indeed. Australia is a country where the most right wing Prime Minister it has ever had was able to address a crowd of gun nuts and tell them what a load of idiots they were and then subsequently pass legalisation that severely cracked down on guns. It is not the United States.

[TheTide]

Well, it turns out that Tim Wilson has been preselected for GOldstein . . . three years after he lost Goldstein to a Teal named Zoe Wilson

Will be very interesting to see this. If Dutton can't make inroads in those outer suburban seats in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide-and it's looking tougher for him with the Dunstan defeat-then they have to win back the Teal seats. Now, for reasons that people smarter than me can explain, unseating independents in Australia is extremely difficult, so it looks like an uphill battle.

I'm not quite an expert on this matter, but I suspect it's because members of either of the two majors have to devote more time to internal party (and ministerial, if they get that high up) matters. Independents have more opportunity to 'nurse' their seats. It's possibly no coincidence that Bob Katter's majority in Kennedy took a big hit in 2013 when the Parliamentary numbers meant that he had had to devote more time to Canberra.

[TheTide]

I don’t know if the old truism about independents will really apply to Teals though. They are incredibly ideologically fixed and don’t have that local pragmatism. We’ve also seen at the NSW and Victorian state elections that both parties are quickly adapting to fighting them off.

I’d bet that when the Coalition sweeps back into power (which ain’t happening under Dutton, let’s be real) all the teals will be swept up and tied to their track record of ideological stances that diametrically oppose their electorates. And for all the talk a grand ideological shift - as a voter in a teal seat there was only one issue that worked. Climate. Once the Federal Coalition gets over the climate debate the teals lose their purpose.

Yes, I was going to say that the Teals are already a collective brand. The trick for Dutton or any other Liberal leader is to turn them (in the minds of the crucial voters) into a defacto party (Labor Lite or something along those lines). They are probably safe for as long as the current Labor government remains popular (or not unpopular), but when it isn't, then they are in trouble.