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Australia doing it's level best to follow America down the turd hole [1]
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Date: 2025-02-22
Well, they’re at it now in Canberra too.
Australia actually has something of a vibrant, multi-party system of government. While Parliament is largely dominated by the same old corrupt, two-party disaster that plagues the USA, preference voting — coupled with compulsory voting (you get fined if you’re registered to vote and don’t) — produce a surprisingly large number of independent and minor party candidates being elected, especially to the upper house (also called the Senate — more inspiration from Roman arseholes).
This is reflected in the diagram at right.
As you can see, the Australian Senate is particularly diverse — a dramatic contrast to America’s ossified chamber.
The diversity of voices in Parliament makes governing a whole lot more complicated for the revolving-door government dominated by either the Liberal National Party (a formal coalition between the Liberals [that’s the Edmund Burke notion of ‘liberal’ — meaning conservative] and the Nationals [who started off as an agricultural socialist party]) or Australian Labor Party (the ostensibly quasi-socialist trade unionist party). Incidentally, flipping the USA’s convention on its head, the conservative LNP is ‘blue’ while the ALP is ‘red’. Oh, and to give a bit more perspective, the LNP would probably be well to the left of the USA Democratic Party. But that doesn’t mean they’re not a dodgy pack of c*nts (don’t worry, they are).
Lately, the LNP/ALP duopoly has gotten very worried about the erosion of their share of the ‘two party preferred vote’ (aka the ‘primary vote’). This describes the flow of voters’ ‘preferences’ to one of the major parties. It’s a little complicated, so I’ll explain: When Australians vote, all candidates and parties in the electorate (lower house) or region (Senate) are listed (just like the good ol’ democratic USA). But unlike the USA, citizens vote for every candidate listed — in their ranked order of preference. Yes, Maine is starting to do this with (‘ranked choice voting’ — Yanks are such copy cats!). So if there are 6 candidates running in your House electorate, and you’re a left-leaning voter, you might vote Greens — 1, ALP — 2, Reason Party — 3, Socialists — 4, Australian Democrats — 5, LNP — 6. In that hypothetical, if the Greens candidate doesn’t win >50% on first preferences, my vote flows to the next preferred candidate, the ALP. If the ALP candidate got enough 1st preferences plus the flow of 2nd preferences to get over 50%, they win.
Like I said, more and more ‘teal’ candidates (that is, unaffiliated independents) and minor party candidates (particularly the Greens) are winning the two-party preferred vote. So in a remarkable display of bipartisanship, the LNP and ALP have gotten together to craft legislation that would f*ck over independents and minor parties and entrench their dominant status, probably forever.
To explain the shitfuckery of the two parties, I’ll let the lovely ladies of ‘Honest Political Ads’ explain — YOU WILL WANT TO WATCH THIS AS IT’S INFORMATIVE AND HILARIOUS. There’s nothing better than a couple larrikin-talking Sheilas intelligently describing — in choice profanity (they like ‘shitfuckery’ a bunch) — the cupidity of the two leading political parties.
You know, the Roman Republic was a two-party system as well? Yep, the oligarchs in the Senate divided up into the optimates and the populares. The first championed the power and privileges of the patricians and despised the plebians; the second played to the plebs but only to advance their own patrician privileges (btw, Caesar was a populare, don’t you know).
Gotta love those political duopolies — nothing more stable!
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