Captain GetUp is Coming for Your Democracy Sausage

This fucking country

not taking this well at all

i actually feel stateless right now, because there is no fucking way i am any part of this country

antony green has called it for the neonaizs and i do not want to be a part of this country any more

Well this is shit.

sausage democracy

I really felt Labor did an above average job of actually looking progressive this time. More appealing than they've been for ages. But appealing to someone like me is not how one wins elections in 'straya.

The shy fascist vote comes through again, everywhere, but especially in Queensland.

labor is one party. The other half have to gather the scraps. How is that fair.

Looks like the senate might also become a little more friendly to a coalition government. Bugger.

Ed otm

the australian commentariat is falling over itself asking “what happened?” – what happened is australia returned a corrupt, racist, homophobic, inept, legitimately sociopathic government that hates them. that is what happened.

this is a wake-up call to a lot of australians, not that we got the national mood wrong, not that we’re ignoring a “silent majority”, but that the level of corruption and collusion in australian politics and media is now absolute.

Well that certainly happened, but how do you see it as evidence of corruption and collusion with the media? The News Ltd papers spouting their usual anti-Labor cant? It's been that way forever. My take is that Shorten, for all his good qualities, was fundamentally unelectable for reasons I don't really get. I think we will see Penny Wong MP in the Reps within 5 years and taking the leadership.

Yeah, I've never really heard anyone articulate the reasons for Shorten's personal unpopularity. I mean, if Abbott and Morrison are electable...

Possibly the saddest thing: having run and lost with a vaguely progressive agenda this time, Labor's mostly modest, no-brainer reform proposals will be poison for several parliamentary terms. Labor's right factions hardly need further encouragement.

how do you see it as evidence of corruption and collusion with the media?

in that this government has been objectively worse than gillard/rudd at every single thing, but the press have given them a free pass at every turn. news corp obviously, but also whatever-fairfax-is-called-now flipped hard-right the second nine bought the company, and even the abc has been gentle on them out of fear that they’ll be punished even further. they’ve had a dream run where labor got massacred on a daily basis.

Yeah, I've never really heard anyone articulate the reasons for Shorten's personal unpopularity. I mean, if Abbott and Morrison are electable...

Shorten was never bad or poisonous; he was nothing. Voters respond to personal charisma generally, and it's also an extremely effective way of selling policies.

(Albo is a better communicator and campaigner than Shorten, but I think has been wise to not seek to do so on a national scale before. Plibersek would make a great leader and campaigner, but I'm afraid the eradication of a neutral news media is gonna make it hard-to-impossible for any woman to last a term in opposition.)

yeah i do think albo is the best choice, at least right now. he could sit nicely in the long shadow of hawke.

i see your point about shorten, but given the hideous alternative we were faced with (and got) (again), labor should have romped this in. country’s fucked.

Shorten was widely acknowledged to be less popular than the party he led, as preferred PM he trailed the last three Lib leaders consistently while the ALP were ahead by decent margins.
Consensus today seems to be that Queensland went hard for the Libs because the left wing southerners were touring the place telling them not to do the Adani deal, which didn't go over well. That, and a constantly shifting message from the ALP while Morrison was able to scare the electorate that if the franking credits were on the chopping block, who knows what other radical changes were coming. And sticking to the myth that the Coalition "manages the economy" (ha fucking ha) better than Labor.

the labor message did seem to move around a lot

basically a) everyone is fucking stupid/greedy and b) bledge sharmep is unlikeable

Tanya is probably the best bet now for the ALP, I reckon a highly competent female leader will be a great counterpoint to the shitshow that will be the next three years of government.

but she’s a woooooommmmmaaaaaannnnnn, the conservative tears will elevate sea levels

The problem with compulsory voting is you have, lets face it, the bulk of people voting on cult of personality and nothing else.

I'm here to tell you right now thats why Labor lost. Even Charlie Pickering was shitting on Shorten on his show last week for being a boring useless turd.

What someone's like as a person should have absolutely nothing to do with how anyone votes for a political party. But when you make the unwashed masses who actually dont care all have a say, they'll just fire off the easiest thing they think of, sorry.

I have to say I dont agree on the corruption comment though, not re the media? Geez all the polls coming in had labor in front and Hawke was venerated even in the Herald Snu.

Consensus today seems to be that Queensland went hard for the Libs because the left wing southerners were touring the place telling them not to do the Adani deal

This is also unsurprising to be blunt and fatalist. The focus on Adani so heavily really baffled me, esp coming from down here. I agree with an anti coal stance but now was not the time to make that the forefront argument if you want to win over the bulk of regional and northern aus. Jobs, infrastructure, taxes schools and health is all we should have been banging on about. People like my dad hear "adani" or "climate change" and immediately shut down.

always thought that if the US had compulsory voting the Republicans would never ever ever win again, maybe wrong though, I don't trust any assumption anymore

Making people who dont give a shit about politics vote is fraught. And they just dont teach civics in Aus schools in any meaningful way unless you actively take modern history classes (at least they didnt when I was in school, dunno what its like now)

there have been a whole load of hot takes since saturday night (i mean in the general discourse, not anyone here), but the one theme that’s emerging today is that labor appealed to the generous, considerate side of australians, but most australians are selfish bigots who don’t give a single fuck about empathy

sounds familiar to me

Adani, the death/retiree tax scare and the right wing slant of the media all played a role. But I don't think that lets Labor totally off the hook, Labor MPs put in Shorten as a factional play, even though rank and file members had gone for Albo and even though it was already obvious that he didn't play well with the general public.

it’s bizarre all this focus on shorten being unpopular/unelectable when the coalition has been fielding toxic fuckheads for >20 years

always thought that if the US had compulsory voting the Republicans would never ever ever win again, maybe wrong though, I don't trust any assumption anymore

fwiw it’s compulsory turning-up-to-vote, you can do what you like with the ballot papers

Really enjoying the endless "you shouldn't blame Queenslanders, they were scared and misinformed" takes, as though being a stupid fuckwit makes you less culpable for torching everything.

otm

As usual when Labor lose "unloseable" elections it's down to hubris and the smugness of the messaging - conservative middle-of-the-road Australians see schoolchildren taking the afternoon off school to hold up "Stop Adani" signs as a supposed grassroots movement, when let's be honest most kids would never have heard of Adani if it hadn't been a carefully orchestrated message, plays into the reactionary mindset. Messaging about the "top end of town" and smug right-on Instagrammable movements spell "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS" to your average rural Tasmanian or north Queenslander, who thinks "right, screw you guys" and votes for the familiar bunch of accountants and lawyers representing resistance to change and a desire to keep my money rather than give it to the pinkos and the dole bludgers. Idealism, especially choreographed self-righteous idealism, is poison at the ballot box.

absolutely do blame queenslanders, they are wanton dickheads glorying in their ignorance and insularity and bigotry and sticking it to the “lefty’s”

the idea of idealism being poison at the ballot box is depressing

Compulsory voting is a bad idea because it violates freedom of expression, it doesn’t matter what other effects it has.

compulsory enrolment in no way violates your freedom to draw a dick on your ballot, or to not bother turning up on the day, or from numbering 105 boxes in the order you want to

(also, what freedom of expression?)

even working at a federal election and having to explain to belligerent 18-yo tradies why they’re “supposed” to vote while their 17-yo gfs apologise over the top of them has not turned me off popular enrolment

matthewk: not that i disagree with you in principle at all, but i think the more hostile bigots will vote for bigotry whether kids are holding “STOP ADANI” placards or not. entitled fucks will always find an excuse to be entitled fucks, and it will always be someone else’s fault that they’re entitled fucks. remember all the “gays are wearing rainbow shoelaces IN MY TOWN and that’s why i will vote against their marriage rights” rhetoric from a couple of years back.

QLD really is a bit of another country compared to evrywhere else.

But people also forget regional NSW. Where I grew up is an exception (I guess eden monaro has canberra to boost it a bit to the left?) but everywhere west and south of the blue mountains people seem to forget about, and its all fairly centrist/slightly right in my experience. Not rabidly pro-mining/anti-reffoes/anti gay exactly but just... really whitebread?

I just always assume that people who don’t show up to vote are uin favor of more liberal politicians/policies . At least it seems that way in the United States

the idea of idealism being poison at the ballot box is depressing

Compulsory voting and preferential voting are good not bad
Australians are bad not good

This is heartening at least. I have plenty more to say but work to do right now.

Our statement on secure jobs and a safe climate. pic.twitter.com/O7budJqSob

— NUW (@NatUnionWorkers) May 20, 2019

AA I agree with you but I think the notions of social justice / humane treatment of refugees / indigenous recognition / sexual and gender diversity / climate action / anything not resembling the 1950s can be very conveniently wrapped up in the "political correctness" bundle for those who dislike even a couple of those notions. Bigotry is a bad look but if you're against "more bloody political correctness" you're a dead set Aussie legend, have another snag. The smug and self-righteous way that the ALP, Greens and supporters delivered their messages basically facilitated the bundling and made it easy to justify rejecting it at the ballot box. Don't get me wrong, I fall on the left side of all of those issues and vote accordingly, but I wince when I see how they are presented to middle Australia. For all his faults Kevin Rudd understood this. As did Kim Beazley.

(as did Bob Hawke, of course)

I'm in agreeance with Matt tbh.

Look at Dan Andrews. He's Labor/left but hes playing the middle and Getting Shit Done, he wont get into slagging matches about the other side, he doesnt press ht button issues, he just rolls up his sleeves.

(sorry for my very disjointed replies i rly should be working lol)

just saw on wechat that a friend campaigned for frydenberg. fucking hell. couldn’t delete him fast enough.

matthewk: right there you’ve hit on the enormous gulf between what australians think they are and what they actually are

I think it's a bit of a cop-out to just say the Liberals won because Australians are racist bigots. I mean they are, but no more so than they were when they were voting in Labor governments, which has happened recently even in Queensland. A Labor victory was possible - Labor couldn't control what the Libs or the right-wing media did, but could control their own message and presentation of it. They got some of that strategy wrong.