Australia 2022 Election

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Is there any party that considers the horrifying, totalitarian Australian lockdowns a grave mistake and actually promises no more lockdowns? This would be my issue 1, 2, 3 etc. in Australia.

No, because a large majority of citizens agreed with them, complied with them, and got vaccinated as soon as possible. You know, like you would expect from a country that hasn't become deranged to the point of self-destruction.

All this does is confirm my belief that Australians are dumb and easily influenced.

I hate when this forum "Americanizes"--you know, overstating the "totalitarianism" of lockdowns.

It'd be as if "dumb and easily influenced" referred to why Australians veered *away* from Pauline Hanson's One Nation, rather than *toward* the same...

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I hate when this forum "Americanizes"--you know, overstating the "totalitarianism" of lockdowns.

If you think opposition to totalitarian lockdowns is a purely American phenonenon, it might be you who has an America-centric worldview.

It's more with reference to the Int'l forum mod's pigeonholing of such coarse labelling of lockdowns as "totalitarian" as a spiritual import by American posters from the American forums.  Sort of in the same way that tasteless-garbage McMansions are frequently pigeonholed as American, yet Euro-Russian oligarchs and vulgarians build them, too...

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I hate when this forum "Americanizes"--you know, overstating the "totalitarianism" of lockdowns.

If you think opposition to totalitarian lockdowns is a purely American phenonenon, it might be you who has an America-centric worldview.

If you genuinely think Australia's lockdowns were totalitarian you're listening to too much Ted Cruz and not enough of us who actually went through them.

Speak for yourself.  Being confined to a 5 kilometre radius for 3 months at a time, repeatedly, under the threat of thousands of dollars of fines, is not an experience that I care to repeat.

It is not an experience I care to repeat either, but it was one that I felt was necessary at the time (along with many health experts).

The Issue is not so much the past lockdown but a consistent push by a loud minority to normalize some aspects of the lockdown permanently, minimize how invasive it was to fundamental rights and perhaps some remnants who want to re-adopt a zero covid approach.

Look at how people have been complaning about the scrapping of vaccine pass systems(despite almost all evidence indicating that they were useless at actualy preventing spread outside of encouraging vaccination) and how some people want to make mask wearing a permenant part of life(treating it as no different from another piece of clothing).

Your post is an example of how those outside Australia totally misunderstand its policies. I can tell you definitively that mask wearing is barely required in any normal setting anymore here; hospitals and public transport (and it is not now, nor was it ever, enforced on public transport). Some of you seem to have this picture of Australia as a police state when we have been living fairly normally and lockdown-free for about 6 months now.

I understand quite well what the situation was like in australia and how defacto for much of the population life was pretty normal and is now everywhere pretty normal. My comment is about the long-term political effects and why people are still concerned about them.

Yeah, but what kinds of "people"?  I see the word "people" being used as a false-universalizing weasel word by those who seek to universalize their imagined anti-elite bugaboos all the time: "people don't like modern art", as opposed to "some people", or even "a lot of people".

The fact is, "totalitarian lockdowns" is for the most part a dead horse fixation except among a devoted minor-party fringe.  It only *seems* to loom larger if you spend an excessive amount of your time within a political-Twitter and social media realm where libertarians and freedom types hog the oxygen, and you have your real-world perspective skewed by that fact...

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If there's a significant cohort for whom the notion of "totalitarian lockdowns" (sic) looms really large, it's the proverbial "aggrieved young men" demo--the same sorts who might have voted for the People's Party of Canada in large numbers last year, and have also fueled gender divides in other realms like higher education and the incentive to pursue it.  And I'm supposing that a lot of *those* are into, well, political Twitter, almost as a proxy for a boring old political science course with "biased" instructors and what have you...

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I understand quite well what the situation was like in australia and how defacto for much of the population life was pretty normal and is now everywhere pretty normal. My comment is about the long-term political effects and why people are still concerned about them.

Yeah, but what kinds of "people"?  I see the word "people" being used as a false-universalizing weasel word by those who seek to universalize their imagined anti-elite bugaboos all the time: "people don't like modern art", as opposed to "some people", or even "a lot of people".

The fact is, "totalitarian lockdowns" is for the most part a dead horse fixation except among a devoted minor-party fringe.  It only *seems* to loom larger if you spend an excessive amount of your time within a political-Twitter and social media realm where libertarians and freedom types hog the oxygen, and you have your real-world perspective skewed by that fact...

I think on the modern art point you'll find the answer is "a large majority of people", but that's neither here nor there...

Yeah, and certain Roger Scruton-adoring political figureheads from Thierry Baudet in the Netherlands to (tying things back to Australia) Dominic Perrottet in NSW *really* want to push that "large majority of people" point as a political tool.  When the truer reality might be more along the lines of a large majority of people being along a positive-to-open-endedly-non-committal spectrum--because, in a way, those pushing the "people don't like" part are even more abrasively unlikeable than that which they're claiming is unlikeable.  (Which parallels the libertarian-political-Twitter conundrum.)

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Asides from the border restrictions, and with Melbourne as an unlucky exception, Australia and NZ did comparatively well at minimizing restrictions on the domestic population, as well as doing amazing comparatively at saving lives.

Luck had little to nothing to do with what we were subjected to here. It was all very deliberate (although also very haphazard and reckless) and has left a scar in many ordinary people in ways that will impact their voting behaviour for years.

You also leave out that restrictions in Melbourne and Sydney, interstate and overseas travel restrictions, etc impacted regional Australia economically and socially too. People in states without restrictions themselves had impacts cascading to them. Whether or not this is a net good when factoring in theoretical worst case death toll scenarios is irrelevant when it's what actually defined the last few years for you: not seeing family and friends, plans being ruined, losing income, just ballooning uncertainty everywhere.

Luckily for Labor the Australian population seem to be largely docile. There's no strong tradition of standing up for human rights. It's not something that activates a majority of people, unfortunately. However, there is still a portion of people who ought to be labor-leaning who have gone a little nutty because of the abuse they've endured. It is what it is.

TBH, Australia isn't alone in being what it was being subjected to.  As they used to say during wartime, it was "for the duration".

And if you want to know what leads people to be voluntarily docile, it's because they're left with the unflattering impression that this kind of "standing up for human rights" is, in practice, kinfolk to something like Christian conservative or men's rights types claiming to "stand up for human rights".

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As for the "for the duration" comment, we enjoyed some of the most asinine, pointlessly cruel restrictions in the world.

Believe me, they weren't *that* appreciatively different from what you found elsewhere (except, perhaps, in Trumpy jurisdictions).  It's just that when it's in your own backyard, it feels "immediate".

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In the UK just about all of those urban “remain” types who care about climate change vote Labour.

They certainly do not, except as a tactical choice on occasion. In fact both the question and the answer is exactly the same as 'why do people in Richmond never vote Labour when they're cross with the Conservatives?'

Yes, but Labour wins some pretty upscale seats like Islington etc...The thing that surprises me is that the Coalition is even still competitive in upscale inner city electorates like Wentworth. Seats like that in Canada are now totally unwinnable for the Tories and in the US professional urban voters have completely turned their backs on the GOP. And its not as if the Liberals in Australia have done anything to make themselves more palatable to urban quasi progressives - they are led by a fundamentalist Christian, they are totally xenophobic and into complete climate change denial.

Whatever the leadership, the Coalition is still a "big tent" entity--in fact, if you want a Canadian equivalent of the Aussie dynamic, look no further than the part of Canada that's closest to Australia.  That is, BC, where you have a currently-in-power "Labor" entity (the BCNDP) vs, well, the fittingly-named BC Liberals mashing up the interior rednecks w/the urbane Langara/Quilchena types...

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Ironically there is no major party in BC (or anywhere in Canada) that is in any way, shape or form “socialist”. Some would even classify the NDP as anti-socialist these as well (or at least non-socialist). Seriously, the NDP government in BC is about as "socialist" as the Democratic governor of Washington state! Similarly can anyone keep a straight face and call the Australian Labor Party “socialist”? When was the last time the ALP campaigned on the workers owning the means of production and ending private property??? These days what we are seeing more and more is liberals and social democrats forming alliance to keep out the rabid extreme right. The idea of a so-called "free eneterprise coalition" is very much an anachronism. I mean who exactly is against "free enterprise" in any North American or European jurisdiction?

I think the consistent thread to both the past "free enterprise" alliances and the more recent left-alliances is a bid to keep "those coarse folk" out of power.  One's definition of "coarseness" can, of course, differ (not to mention how said pigeonholed "coarse" can politically migrate: thus Obama/Trump, Labour/Leave, the American South's morph from a Dem monolith to a GOP monolith, etc)

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Let’s not get into Covid restrictions again.

Yeah, when we start to get into "list of nasties" labels inclusive of Trudeau and Ardern, I'm left thinking of the kind of person whom, if ranked choice balloting existed in Canada, would put PPC first...

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On a more general point, why have far-right parites been so uniquely electorally successful in australia compared to other  anglo countries ?

Have they, though? I'd argue the UKIP/Brexit has done better than our populist right parties, and the US's main center-right party is basically a fascist one at this point. One Nation is not that big....

Canada....well look at Quebec. Admittely Anglophone Canada is pretty anti far-right, but equally it's not like their Tories are that moderate.

Maybe in the form of One Nation, they were *prototypically* successful in Australia.  But not so much "electorally".

And when it comes to Quebec, the whole PQ/BQ lineage has never been precisely "far right", whatever their position on head coverings and whatnot--indeed, right up to the Orange Crush, such electoral forces were commonly viewed as *left* of centre...

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* The Teal movement. I was a little bit more bullish about them than most here, but they've flipped at least 5 and quite probably 6 blue-ribbon seats (to go with the one they've already won). There's more too - Higgins went to Labor, Ryan to the Greens, Brisbane to one of those two. With most of the big money seats not voting Liberal, that is a massive concern in the short-term and it's going to be a massive headache unless they can convince core Labor voters to come to the Liberal camp. Although the Fowler result suggests another alternative....

At this rate, when it comes to the Coalition, who knows if we're headed for an eventuality of Liberal/National *seat parity*.

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Has anyone calculated what the seat count would have been in Australia if there was no preferential ballot and it was pure FPTP like in the UK or Canada?

It's not easy, because you can't just assume that people's first preference votes would become their only preference votes.  I assume that in practice a lot of first preference votes for parties out of contention would have instead been tactical votes, but you'd have to estimate the extent to which that would happen.

I realize that if you change system people may vote differently - though in Canada having pure FPTP doesn't prevent over 30% of people from voting for smaller parties! I just want to know how many seats each party would have won last week in Australia if we just counted who led on first preferences. Period.

Bennelong: Lib rather than ALP
Boothby:  Lib rather than ALP
Brisbane:  LNP rather than Green
Curtin:  Lib rather than Ind
Fowler: ALP rather than Ind
Goldstein:  Lib rather than Ind
Higgins:  Lib rather than ALP
Kooyong:  Lib rather than Ind
Lyong:  Lib rather than ALP
Mackellar:  Lib rather than Ind
North Sydney:  Lib rather than Ind
Robertson:  Lib rather than ALP
Ryan:  LNP rather than Green
Tangney:  Lib rather than ALP
Wentworth:  Lib rather than Ind

So the present ALP-and-leaning is 76, Coalition-and-leaning 59--which'd mean 73 Coalition to 71 ALP.  (If my math is right, that is.)

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Yeah, Fowler is one of a kind and I would hope that Labor learn the lessons there.

Yeah, kind of the Aussie equivalent to Segolene Royal in Chjarente-Maritime 1 in '12.