Australian politics - Perpetual Thread.

[Camacan]

Of course, always possible that Labor goes through their own spectacular implosion in the next few years, so never say never.

Speaking of self-harm, Labor has just created a weapon set to criminalize opposition to genocide. The Greens tried to sound the alarm over the new hate speech laws. The Greens justice spokesperson, David Shoebridge said:

“People don’t realise that the Coalition cut a deal with Labor yesterday that didn’t narrow the scope of this legislation to groups that are promoting violence or breaching the law,” he said.

“The deal the Coalition cut with Labor in the last 24 hours massively expanded it.

“It roped in seven different state laws and said conduct that breaches any of those seven state laws, which includes tests like ‘ridicule’ and ‘contempt’, that can lead to the banning of organisations, the criminalisation of being an informal member of those organisations, and people going to jail for five, 10 or 15 years.”

If the relevant pressure groups get organizations protesting ethnic cleansing and genocide in Israel and/or individuals jailed for the same, I'm thinking Labor is toast. As for "social cohesion", how damaging would it be?

Edit to add: And the moron-o-circus is stealing all the oxygen. This isn't being discussed. And if the Nats had a problem with the hate speech bill (and I don't know what their issue was) surely the time to bust up over it was before it was passed. This way it's all cost, no benefit.

 

[Camacan]

On a completely different and more positive note; I had a doctor's appointment yesterday, and for the first time in years my visit was bulk-billed!

So huzzah, always nice when government gets something unequivocally right. I'm comfortable enough that a $40 gap isn't a huge burden, but there are plenty of people out there who aren't as fortunate. More and earlier GP visits means far better outcomes.

Damn straight. Prevention campaigns that get people to avoid bad health drivers are cheaper than treating the results of letting it rip. Like you say, more and earlier GP visits catch things early. In terms of hospital, earlier operations avoid progression and complications (stitch in time saves nine).

 

[Camacan]

Oh, I wouldn't be so hasty.

I'm not a gambling person at all, but right now I'd be willing to bet a not insignificant amount of money on events playing out roughly like this:

• Ley gets rolled, Hastie takes over (Taylor is too tainted and they need whatever passes for fresh blood in the Liberals to lead them)
• Hastie's first act is to reach out to the Nats to re-commit to the Coalition
• The Nats put up some pretend-hesitation and get one or two token concessions as a result
• Littleproud and Hastie get credit for saving the Coalition, Littleproud's leadership is strengthened
• Big happy family

And if it plays out like this, we'll know it was never about the hate speech laws, and it wasn't just the Nats throwing their toys out of the pram - they simply wanted to get rid of a 'moderate' woman as leader and replace her with a hard-right man, and engineered a plausible pretext to do so.

I wouldn't take that bet, I think you are right on the money.

The scheme as outlined looks like effective factional political theatre to me. But destructive to the fortunes of the coalition overall. Australia women aren't stupid, they understand the coalition doesn't afford them proper representation. And it's reflected in the vote:

A majority of women preferred Labor in all age segments (18-34, 35-54 and 55+) and the report noted: “Liberal defectors in ‘Teal seats’ were highly likely to agree with the statement that ‘the treatment or attitude toward women within the Liberal Party had a strong influence on my vote’.”

Screwing Ley over, as I believe was Littleproud and Hastie's aim from the get-go, just adds lighter fuel to that fire, right? First. Female. Party. Leader. That only happens once. And she went all out to cater to the far right from day one, making events only clearer.

 

[Camacan]

The reported 'community concerns' about impact to native wildlife seem idiotic - a pine plantation is about as far from natural habitat as you can be, short of paving the area in concrete.

On a related note, I rode my bike around Portland the other week, and it was interesting to see the turbines there. A lot were stationary during the morning despite the strong wind, but spinning later in the day, presumably as demand increased.

When I read Portland, I immediately thought of

Spoiler: Portlandia

...rather than Victoria. Looking up Portland up, I was depressed to read that a foreign company, Vestas, set up a factory to manufacture wind turbine blades. Opened in 2005, closed in 2007. We are still ordering masses of turbines from them. Seems too typical an Australian story: insufficient domestic investment means no Australia company in the area and foreign companies are ruthlessly fickle and unconcerned with the countries they operate in.

 

[Camacan]

If he said anything even remotely relevant and non total-fuckwit-angle, I'd be surprised and shocked.

Australia is the weirdest. We have some of the best people on earth, people of wit, insight, grace, empathy, deep insight and resource. But we elected Tony Abbot.

 

[Camacan]

The Guardian has a sobering article about the rise of One Nation.

“The rise in support for One Nation is not trivial,” Lewis said.

“It reflects shifts occurring elsewhere in the UK , Europe and of course in the US where populist movements are repudiating the mainstream parties’ failures to harness global capitalism.”

It's a mild way to put it, a failure to harness, for the many economic and societal problems undercontrolled capitalism is causing. But the key point is that electorates around the world stressed this way aren't responding to the causes but with racial and cultural grievance instead. Fighting racism is right, obviously, but to my mind the major parties can't beat One Nation by only fighting racism without addressing the fuel.

So as long as the major parties leave the hard stuff in the too hard basket, they will continue to decline, and populism will thrive.

The latest Guardian Essential poll put One Nation’s primary vote at 22%, triple what it achieved at the 2025 election and just three points below the Coalition.

Peter Lewis, a director of Essential Media, said One Nation’s support should be viewed as an expression of dissatisfaction with the major parties – particularly the Liberals and Nationals – rather than a genuine voting intention, given the next federal election isn’t due until 2028.

I think this underplays the threat. Expressions of dissatisfaction have a way of hardening into actions when left unaddressed for too long.

 

[Camacan]

A so-called 'independent' campaign group going by 'Australians for Prosperity', which has strong links to the Liberal party and has been running attack ads against Labor, Greens and Teals, has received the bulk of its funding from... drum roll... oh man the suspense is killing me... the coal industry!

(More specifically an industry lobby group called Coal Australia which is basically financed by major coal producers)

https://www.theguardian.com/austral...ia-industry-lobby-attack-ads-labor-green-teal

What I really want to know however is:

Australians for Prosperity got nearly $4m in donations and other receipts in the last financial year($3.89m total, of that $3.68m came from Coal Australia alone).

They spent just a hair under $415k on the attack ads during the last federal election. Roughly ten percent of the above.

What the fuck are they doing with the rest of the money?

The writer Dashiell Hammett was a master at dramatizing the bedrock problem serious criminals have: who are your closest associates and business partners? Criminals. So, can you trust them? What might they be planning to do to you? What recourse do you have then?

Legal, but corrupt, people have the same problem.

 

[Camacan]

I thought you were referring to the AC/DC singer.

That's Angus Young

Other than pure misogyny I don't understand the rush to topple Ley as the leader. The coalition know that they aren't going to win back enough seats to win the election in 2028, so why not play the long game? Support Ley all the way through to the election and then have a leadership ballot afterwards. They get to make a big show about supporting women in politics to try and coax some votes out of the unsure (or at least stop hemorrhaging votes to Teal/Labor).

Instead this just feels like really bad political maneuvering. Doing things this way around is just going to cement them as the anti-women party in the minds of the entire electorate and possibly lose them more seats next time around.

What's the worst that can happen, Ley leads the party to an election win?

I've been saying this, too. It's a dumb thing done dumbly. My sense is that these days everybody is hyper-attuned to their identity and if/how it is represented in parliament. They haven't offered a comprehensible public story about any of it, not the splits, not the spill. It can't be about any policy, right? Ley didn't even try to oppose any right wing extremism or return the coalition to the center.

 

[Camacan]

James Paterson was quoted as follows today (emphasis mine):

Over the months according to the most recent opinion polls, 2.1 million of those people have since deserted Coalition. That is more than 200,000 votes a month. It 50,000 votes a week. More than 7000 votes a day. This cannot go on.

Angus is the smartest policy brain in the shadow cabinet, a man of and courage and values. And most importantly, Angus understands this is a change or die moment for the Liberal Party.

I don't know where these people have been over the past decade, or what parallel universe they inhabit, but if Angus Taylor is the 'smartest policy brain' they can. muster, then they have a much bigger problem than they even realise.

In public life, smart people don't need a mate to stand up and assert they are a "brain". They humbly offer the product of their thought for judgement.

And again, "values". Stalin had clear, firm, values. It's meaningless by itself: what values? What published writing of Taylor's can we read to get an idea what values he holds to? What speeches are recognized as setting out a fresh set of values for the coalition? How do Taylor's values differ from Ley's? Courage: to do what? Being courageous is no good if you have bad intentions. And so on.

I find the moral and intellectual collapse of the coalition upsetting. I don't find relief in thinking them unelectable because, given the unwillingness of any sitting government to get to grips with our core problems, there's the real threat of an extreme opposition getting people to come around to their point of view.

 

[Camacan]

Yeah really, from The Guardian:

Wow, that's quite a piece. In the absence of any substance, his business dealings probably give the best information about his values. I think my favorite bit was when his Facebook account commented on its own post:

“Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus.”

 

[Camacan]

Yeah Howard was a turd, a cunning turd but destroyed so much social program funding even as he got a free ride on the back of China's explosive growth in demand for our coal and ore at the time. Wasted it all, and wrecked a lot of what was good about our governance before then.

When Howard came to power, Australia was at a crossroads. It had become apparent that things couldn't go on as they had if we were going to meet our potential and stay out of trouble.

Howard was a skilled denialist and placater. And contemporary Australian culture handed him tools. It handed him pervasive cultural constructs like "a fair go". It sounds good, the idea that everyone in Australia should have opportunity and that Australia is an egalitarian nation. But in Howard's Australia it was turned on its head to mean that because Australia is egalitarian, all social programs working to prevent disadvantage could be dismantled and any growing threat to equality could be ignored.

I'm not sure if I'd go as far as Dr Ken Henry:

Every generation of Australians since the first wave of European settlement has
celebrated plunder, dumb luck, and ‘finders keepers’. This is what we mean by ‘a
fair go’. In considering the merits of any policy proposal, every generation of
Australians accorded the privilege of suffrage has only ever asked one question:
what’s in it for me?

(But his analysis of inequality and the myth of egalitarianism in Australia is worth the read, as is this Guardian article.)

Australia as the land of the fair go. She'll be right. Relaxed and comfortable. Maybe Howard gave the electorate what they wanted to hear: a plausible excuse for inaction, indifference to the fate of the less fortunate, a way to put off hard thought about Australia's future and focus on personal wealth.

 

[Camacan]

Jane Hume wins the deputy leadership
Hume wins 30 votes to 20 against Ted O’Brien with one person again voting informally.

First elected in 2016, Hume is a leading moderate but is backing Taylor after serving as shadow finance minister while Taylor was shadow treasurer.

A former minister for superannuation and finance services under Scott Morrison, the 54-year-old Melburnian was blamed for Peter Dutton’s disastrous work-from-home policy, and was demoted by Ley last year.

Not that I know what "moderate" means anymore in the modern Liberal party.

 

[Camacan]

But he didn't even do that. He never put forward a bill, he never even promised that there would be a bill in case the referendum plebiscite postal survey returned a favourable vote. The bill was introduced as a private member's bill by a backbencher in the senate.

Turnbull's leadership through that whole affair was abysmal, and what's even worse is that at some point he was actively trying to claim the legalising of same-sex marriage as his legacy.

I'm waiting for the opponents of marriage equality to publicly apologize, now none of the catastrophic consequences of dropping that bit of bigotry came to pass.

(Another bit of ABS abuse was Labour ditching LGBTQ+ questions in the census. They backflipped when it was protested, but with the bare minimum they could get away with.)

In passing on the libspill, I thought this bit from Ley's exit speech was... odd.

"I have have never sought to influence what people thought of me."

Retiring bus drivers don't generally proudly declare they've never seen a bus.

 

[Camacan]

Good visualisation of One Nation polling support.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-15/story-lab-one-nation-polling/106322978

No huge surprises really. By far the biggest predictors, are education (15% gap between pre-12 and postgrad), location (14% gap between rural and metro), and age (11% gap between 18-34 and 55+). It's not a QLD vs Australia thing anymore; the ACT is the only highly polarised state/territory now (which you could predict by looking at the three factors above!).

One interesting difference between One Nation and other right-wing populist parties around the world is a relatively low gender gap. Hanson might be a racist reactionary populist, but she and her supporters aren't particularly sexist. Yay?

One Nation supporter priorities stand far outside the norm of Australian politics on two specific areas. Immigration and trust in government.

So yeah, very much reaffirming what we already know, but good to have data nonetheless.

I was talking to a left-leaning Sydney-based friend yesterday. She has a degree and lives in the inner city of a capital city. In her mind the strong One Nation vote doesn't make any sense. To her, One Nation is strictly a poor, ignorant, backwoods grievance thing, and there is no population outside the major cities that could influence politics. In her mind, almost all the people in the city are well-educated, well informed, have a baseline progressiveness and are not really struggling. So they can't be One Nation voters. So the alarming primary vote is an unsolved mystery.

I didn't have enough of a handle on what's happening to respond intelligently, so thanks for the link.

I think part of that is people can see something like "14% gap between rural and metro" and process it like a totally predictive boolean.
(EDIT: add inner city: the inner cities are like another country, IMO.)

 

[Camacan]

So the highly predictable consequences of kicking the first female Liberal party leader to the curb are starting.

Some female Liberal members ‘incredibly worried’ after Sussan Ley’s ousting, with one saying: ‘The boys are back in charge’

Liberal women are “incredibly worried” by a potential voter backlash to the ousting of the party’s first female leader, with the high-profile figure Charlotte Mortlock giving up her membership altogether.

And friendlyjordies has a video up covering Angus Taylor becoming leader.

 

[Camacan]

I think the real worry for women in the Liberal Party is that they’re not ever going to be seen as leaders. Ley took the poisoned chalice after the election defeat, so I don’t think anyone expected her to last but it does look like the dumped her as soon as they could. The takeaway is that women are not capable of leading the Libs and even Taylor, of all men, is better than a woman.

There's a term for it. Glass Cliff.

University of Houston psychology professor Kristin J. Anderson says companies may offer glass cliff positions to women because they consider women "more expendable and better scapegoats." She says the organizations that offer women tough jobs believe they win either way: if the woman succeeds, the company is better off. If she fails, the company is no worse off, she can be blamed, the company gets credit for having been egalitarian and progressive, and can return to its prior practice of appointing men.

 

[Camacan]

That's what I was wondering about.

Why are you guys talking so much about the Liberals? They are out of power and it seems they push a lot of unpopular things so they're not likely to return to power any time soon?

That's a fair question and I think there are good answers.
While the Liberal party is irrelevant in terms of formal political power, it's fate very important. We know how effective reckless demagogue-style politics can be and what damage it can do. The Liberal party has been losing out to a Trumpist outfit, One Nation. Under Taylor, early indications are if you can't beat them, join them.

So their evolving nature, their success or failure from this point is very much worth talking about.

Also, the collapse of the coalition vote is part of a huge seachange in Australian politics: the falling primary vote for both of the traditional parties.

On a simple two-sided political axis, most seats swung left towards Labor last Saturday.
But if we look at the result in three dimensions instead, we see yet another shift away from the two big parties.

This triangle can help us see it in action.
It's a charming little equilateral beauty, isn't it?

 

[Camacan]

Man the idea of Australia not using solar+battery power and instead using nuclear is crazy to me. The costs keep coming down and you guys have like one of the sunniest conditions in the world.

The problem with solar panels is that if they melt down they can contaminate huge areas, terrorists might try to steal them and you have to pay to manage the products of solar power generation for hundreds of years.

 

[Camacan]

Historically the wealth of Australia was built entirely from resource extraction. If we can dig it up, farm it or shear it, we can sell it. We don’t build industries around manufacturing and exporting finished goods (although there are some that survived political neglect and antagonism).

We’re the lucky country, after all. Lucky in our unearned resources. Lucky in our success despite our often second rate leadership.

Yes it's very unfortunate that the meaning of "the lucky country" was basically flipped in popular parlance. The man needed himself some scare quotes.

Very second rate leadership, as a subculture: narrow minded, complacent, privileged, ossified ruling class which isn't up to dealing with the big changes in the world. It blows my mind that given what the US is doing to Canada and Europe our politics continues to be so inward looking. (As just one example.)

Did you catch the recent Four Corners about where the Libs are at? There was a lot to see in just what kinds of people are meant to be leadership material and what their concerns are, at least in terms of the Liberals.

(@ScruffyNerf I was joking, sorry.)

 

[Camacan]

The Gold Coast was developed into a luxury destination by Russ Hinze on behalf of the Bjelke-Petersen government in the 70s. There was a lot of money sunk into developing premium real estate, high rise apartment blocks, etc. They attracted a lot of investment and foreign capital, forcing real estate prices up.

Oh, and surfing doesn't necessarily skew that much younger these days.

Oh wow, Russ Hinze, as honest as he was beautiful. There's a name that takes me back to the old days, but makes me think twice about calling them good.

As an aside on a whole other topic, I thought Bob Breunig, the director of the ANU’s tax and transfer institute had some insightful things to say about where we're going as a society due to wealth concentration:

One of the country’s leading tax experts says the explosion in housing wealth has put us on the path towards a neo-feudal society where your prosperity depends in large part on whether your parents own land or property.

We knew that, but it continues:

We often frame the equality problem as an intergenerational one, an old versus young problem, which it’s not really.
If you are young and your parents have a lot of assets, those assets will eventually come to you. So the real inequality between people in the same generation [is] those who have assets and those who don’t.

Yes. The intergenerational thing can function as a dodge, a smokescreen.

 

[Camacan]

So this sounds like nothing but pure grift & bullshit. Most building industry figures haven't even heard of Altus. Me, I'm not holding my breath that anything will come of this - this Altus haven't ever done any hotel work at all from what I can find, and the entire fit-out of the "Trump Hotel" will be done by a wholly-owned subsidiary of Altus.

I wonder if Mr Young's business model is that the Trump org is brimming with ill-gotten money that it is looking to park and if there are any questions about the project he thinks he can depend on Trump using his power corruptly to strong arm Australia over it. (A few years ago that would have been an absurd idea.)

It makes me wonder how Australia stands in terms of anti-corruption laws WRT foreign investment. Do we have a robust ban on corrupt organizations, those who show a pattern of flouting laws, etc?

Seriously, even in QL, Trump brand has positive equity?

Here we know Trump for who he is. More widely in Australia, not everyone does. This is old, but I think indicative:

Guardian Essential poll: almost a third of Australians say they would vote for Trump if they could

The problems of contemporary Australia run deep, as does various strains of conservatism.

 

[Camacan]

Welp, pollsters are now talking about an electoral wipeout for the SA Liberal party. Senior Libs are refusing to discuss potential preference deals with ON, and there are more and more rumours around SA Liberal far right senator Alex Antic potentially defecting, with him being spotted sharing drinks at an Adelaide pub with Cory Bernardi.

I know the name, let's get up to speed...

Cory Bernardi (born 6 November 1969) is an Australian conservative politician. He has been a member of One Nation South Australia political party since February 2026.

Huh. As long as that.

 

[Camacan]

This internal review doesn't need to be made public in order for the Coalition to work out what they need to do, and there's been plenty of public discussion over what the Coalition did and didn't do to make themselves attractive to voters.

The question is whether the Coalition changes behaviour based on the information they have in time for the next election.

Personally, I don't care anymore. I feel that the policies they've actioned when they were in government and the ones they had while in opposition are so different from what I even consider reasonable that they can just fade into obscurity.

I think that the decision to bury the report... gah, I'm not a politician. Try again. I think the decision not to release the report does speak to their future behaviour. From here:

Three sources familiar with Friday’s meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the decision to shelve the review was about the desire for a “fresh start” not to protect Dutton, Taylor or Hume.

I can believe they believe that. But what can a fresh start possibly mean if they don't accept the deeper lesson, that you can't run for government on grudges with no positive plan? My bet is that something like that is in the report somewhere.

I find the implosion of the Liberals really troubling. I agree their policies are crap, but they were the most successful party in Australia's history. Our culture was shaped by their values, and it included a lot of deeply-held feel-good propaganda like "battlers" and the "fair go". There just doesn't seem to be a clear replacement to make the crap that capitalism serves up to ordinary people palatable.

 

[Camacan]

I hope it will, but fear they will. Because that's what happens. We need a reformer in charge of the Labor Party again.

I know you meant 'won't', but that inadvertently sounds like a quintessential left-leaning property owner "Negative gearing changes? Well, I hope they will but I fear they will."

But to the serious point of reform, well I've got words I need to type.

I think there are parallels between Australian and UK politics. We are both have had a recent large win for a left-leaning party that was as much about the right falling apart at the time, followed by a collapse of the traditional right-leaning party and a surge in a populist party. The UK is ahead of us along a similar political trajectory so we should pay attention.

I think there are is a core feature/weakness shared by Starmer's government and Albo's govt. : "labour minimalism."

Labour minimalists believe that England is a fundamentally conservative, right-leaning country, in which the party can only succeed electorally and in government by appearing as moderate and unthreatening to powerful interests as possible.

One of Labour minimalism’s key characteristics was its acceptance of much of the social status quo, which increasingly meant accepting extreme wealth.

Such timorousness means a cautious, gradualist, approach. But I feel the rise of One Nation here points to an electorate increasingly unwilling to accept small change in the face of growing stresses. My sister has always held gradualism as better because it's less disruptive and more controllable and more and more I see her point. But I've got a bad feeling we're entering a time when it becomes unsupportable.

 

[Camacan]

You misread. I said "I hope it will, but I fear they will" Note the change in pronoun. I hope the budget will contain the some measure to address capital gains and/or negative gearing, but I fear that Labor will once again chicken out.

Fair enough, sorry for any misrepresentation.

 

[Camacan]

This is why I'm taking the breathless reports of "One Nation is storming to victory" with a mountain of salt.

I'm not sure I fully understand. A Sky News bubble is one thing and I totally agree it was a factor in the coalition's defeat, but there are worrying polls pointing to growing One Nation support, right?

 

[Camacan]

The problem is that the minimalist’s “gradual” approach has ground to a halt in the UK and is now an acceptance of the status quo. They don’t dare change anything, except for making protest harder.

I think there's a whole discussion to be had about Labour Together in the UK, their role in even gradual change halting there and how Australia compares, no so much as an overt organization within the Australian Labour Party as a compromising ethos.

 

[Camacan]

There's plenty of the younger GenX still struggling to afford housing etc - don't lump us with the Boomers (or just ignore us like the media does normally).

Generational divides can easily be misleading. For example, in the boomer cohort there are those who benefited from more accessible housing and (in some cases) better support for tertiary education and those who struggled for a host of reasons including a lack of social progress and social services compared to now, to put it mildly.

Younger generations are also not monolithic. It depends enormously on whether they have the support of wealthy parents, for example. Class differences cut right through supposed age solidarity. I fully support the need for young people to have affordable housing: they are establishing their lives and so very much of Australia's well-being depends on that being possible. I'm not saying inter-generational unfairness doesn't exist, but I think the full picture is more complex.

 

[Camacan]

Of course it is. But on the other hand there are definitely common cultural and societal environments that will have shaped peoples' worldviews, so terms like Baby Boomers or Generation X aren't useless either - in the appropriate context.

But on the topic of housing, there is unquestionably a divide opening up between the haves (or the parents have) and the have nots. Australia has long considered itself a classless society (at least compared to Britain), but unless we make changes soon, we risk creating a (wealthy) property-owning class and a (poorer) renting class.

The idea that we're classless is a core part of our identity. But I haven't lived my life in a classless country. I grew up being told there were no classes while constantly bumping in to people who damn well knew which class they were in and would instantly judge which class I was in and react accordingly, all while carrying on a polite pretense. Working class people tended to be much less committed to the facade.

(You are right in asserting wealth inequality is accelerating, this is just a comment on our historical self-image of classlessness.)

 

[Camacan]

Trying to bury the report was a stupid idea - it was bound to leak.

It was just temping fate calling it the Streisand Report in the first place.

 

[Camacan]

So Anthony Albanese has compared the growing conflict in the Middle East to playing “Russian roulette with the destiny of millions” and said his country would “not be complicit in something that is bad for the world – and that is also contrary to our values and interests – simply out of fear of reprisals from someone”.
No, no. Sorry. The PM has not said any of that. My bad. that's The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez.

 

[Camacan]

I don't know if it is Done to cross-quote, but:

You forgot to add:

6. Morrison personally made millions and got a huge cushy consultants job with AUKUS after he got the boot.

Morrison's tailor is skilled beyond measure. I don't know how slime even dresses to the left or the right. Old news, but I missed it, may be news to some. Why on earth don't we have strict conflict of interest laws WRT people leaving powerful government positions?

Former prime minister Scott Morrison’s announcement that he’s set to join DYNE Maritime, a venture capital firm focused on emerging military technologies, makes him the latest politician to take business opportunities related to AUKUS.

 

[Camacan]

I'm glad they're doing it, but buses in Tasmania are just shite. Limited services, double digit percentage of buses that just don't show up due to lack of drivers, inadequate security for passengers and drivers, hostile work environment. It's just a shit show.

A relative's partner is a bus driver in Sydney. His situation is awful. He works for a dodgy private company running a permanent rail replacement service, essentially privatization of public transport on the sly.

Costs cut to the bone means the fleet is dirty, smelly, hot/cold and any given bus is on the verge of breaking down. Routes vary unpredictably, but there's no automated map, just a paper list of directions so sometimes he's navigating while driving. Plus it's shift work with insane blocks of time on, adding to the risk.

 

[Camacan]

I wish that Australians were much more interested in what is happening in other countries and more willing to draw parallels. The defeat of an illiberal regime built on culture war propaganda in Hungary should be a wake-up call for One Nation supporters: when countries go down that road, the results are dysfunction, mismanagement, corruption and an erosion of the rule of law.

If Australia has a national religion, it is: "We're not here to fuck spiders." Populist authoritarianism is the opposite of that.

Spoiler: Lots of things went predictably wrong under Orban

From Foreign Policy.

Fidesz entered the election burdened by three major liabilities. First, its recent economic record has been terrible. Years of fiscal mismanagement, state-capture economics, and erosion of the rule of law left Hungary mired in anemic economic growth, hovering around 0.5 percent last year. Compounding this was a surge of inflation in 2022 and 2023 that peaked at 25 percent, the highest in the European Union at the time.

Second, the government’s stewardship of core public services has been widely viewed as inadequate. Hungary’s state health care system is emblematic: Almost all Hungarians depend on it, yet frustration runs deep over deteriorating hospital infrastructure; persistent shortages of doctors and nurses (many of whom have left for Austria, Germany, and elsewhere in the European Union); and long wait times for care. Hungary has one of the lowest life expectancies in the EU, more than four years below the bloc’s average.

 

[Camacan]

A home being seen primarily as an investment, the perverse tax incentives around housing and the concomitant inflation is a problem in a lot of countries. I’m an ex-Sydneysider living in London and it’s the same here. Fixing it “punishes” those with houses, overwhelmingly older folk, not fixing it punishes everyone else, overwhelmingly the younger folk. It’s basically an intergenerational wealth transfer from the young to the old and also acts as a massive drag on people moving (say to get a better job). Yes, when property owning olds pop their clogs their kids will get the cash, but that concentrates property ownership in one set of families while others are locked out.

In the UK, where there is no compulsory voting and older folks with houses vote in large numbers, just talking about changing anything is electoral suicide.

Another role of property ownership in old age is as a ticket to decent aged care. There is a great difference in quality of life between salubrious up-market aged care facilities, the grey minimum-effort middle and the hostile, even dangerous, bottom of the barrel. Getting into the first two might take all your money and selling your house because of the astronomical bond. So measures that reduce house prices may strike fear in the back of old heads.

As for the effects of prices inhibiting moving, I know I'm dragging this from the American context, but it resonated with me.

America Doesn’t Just Have a Housing Crisis. It Has a Moving Crisis.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, as two world wars passed, as the Baby Boom began, Americans kept on moving. And as Americans moved around, they moved up. They broke away from stultifying social hierarchies, depleted farmland, declining towns, dead-end jobs. If the first move didn’t work out, they could always see a more promising destination beckoning them onward.

I'm sorry it's paywalled. As you can gather, the article valorizes a culture of moving as having social benefits. Personally, I would benefit from moving out of regional NSW to somewhere with more opportunities but I regard the capital city's property prices with dismay.

 

[Camacan]

Many right-wing parties have had a mutually hostile relationship with the ABC. One Nation has been breaking dangerous new ground.

It was a line straight out of US President Donald Trump’s playbook. “Bye bye to the ABC,” Pauline Hanson’s chief of staff, James Ashby, said as he ejected two journalists working for the public broadcaster’s rural service from a media event on Friday, less than 24 hours before polls opened in the NSW byelection for Farrer.

I recommend the Sydney Morning Herald backgrounder on what sparked that. It's got deep analysis of how this has been a trend forever, but also the nitty-gritty, such as the way the ABC didn't extend the unwritten rule that holds for every other party: high-level conversations are off the record until word is given otherwise. I strongly suspect ON is correct in thinking the ABC is hostile and while that is totally understandable, it does not help.

The main point of the piece is that vital public service reporting happened and was then punished: the ABC uncovered the fact a ON candidate had warrants out for his arrest. No political party is going to like that press, but for Australia to be a democracy they need to accept it and move on. But ON doesn't accept this basic principle and is escalating.

The One Nation founder said the reporters “shouldn’t have gone” because they were from the local ABC bureau, based in Wodonga. Ashby darkly insisted they were reporting back to the broadcaster’s federal politics team in Canberra.

Holy unhinged paranoia, Batman. Reporting back? Like foreign agents in the bush, reporting back to the depravity of Babylon Canberra?

 

[Camacan]

Since when was that an unwritten rule? Things like "off the record" are purely based on trust between the journalist and the source. And if there's information there that needs to be made public, regardless of whether "word is given otherwise", it doesn't matter whether it's a fringe member of One Nation or the Prime Minister.

Also, there is no such thing as 'off the record until word is given otherwise'. time.

I agree that pure journalistic ethics would say any information that serves the public interests should be made public. But my reading is that Calum Jaspan of the SMH is asserting that Australian journalists put their ongoing relationship with, specifically, the spokespeople of major parties above that ideal, or in less charged terms, in private. The deal he is claiming to be widespread is that phone conversations with spokespeople occur on the basis that they will not be named and anything they say is off the record unless they give permission. From the article:

In Australian political reporting though – where journalists have to speak to the same sources again and again – it is common for spokespeople not to be named and for phone conversations to be off the record, with attributable statements sent later via text or email.

Given the topic of the article, he's strongly implying this arrangement has been SOP for the ABC up until the fight with ON.