Captain GetUp is Coming for Your Democracy Sausage

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.

not much of it, really. the eradication of Fairfax, and the massive rise in proportional Facebook use amongst geriatrics, are probably huuuge factors in this election and the surprise re: polling beforehand

SHE'S NOT RUNNING

albo

Penny 2025

now you can't tell me this isn't inspirational from a prospective leader pic.twitter.com/6Z6mEwcvph

— jeremy poxon (@JeremyPoxon) May 20, 2019

When are they going to finish counting the votes?

After mine arrives.

Stephen Conroy: Australian's sent the message. They're not prepared to suffer further increases in electricity prices without a practical path forward. Labor has to step back from the @Greens and @GetUp led demonisation of coal.

MORE: https://t.co/ZDLxzYd6Cq #amagenda pic.twitter.com/mNXHbeOJcO

— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) May 21, 2019

This makes me so mad. Coal is a fucking furphy. The major driver for the increase in costs of electricity over the last 10 years has been the costs of the transmission and distribution networks which were either privatised or shined up to be privatises. Every dollar of capital that gets put into these networks gets a guaranteed return; so guess what, these networks have been over built and over capitalised. We have some of the highest network tariffs in the world whilst our wholesale prices for energy are middling, although even these are gamed by the oligopolistic gentailers (I know I used to work for one). Electricity retail competition is a sham, if labour wants to take a position on this they should advocate for nationalising the networks and consumer energy retail, move to wards a state owned version of the California model, or fuck it allow then to vertically integrate and regulate the hell out of them.

Coal is dead, it is more expensive than solar, more expensive than wind and it's not even reliable - watch what happens to the energy market when one of AGLs MacGen or LoyYang generators trips out ad compare it to what happens when the wind doesn't blow in a a small part of this very very big country.

That said labour really fucked up the whole Adani thing. Fisrt off they had quite a lot of room to manoeuvre because the Greens were nothing in this election. They could have left that flank unattended because the greens were going after liberal seats in Melbourne not Labour ones. Secondly they should have pushed the 'Green new Deal' angle and made it about mining - Put Matt Fucking Canavan on the back foot by establishing a Renewable materials infrastructure fund (or something) Invite the world to come and get their Cobalt and Graphite and Lithium and Silicon right here in Australia. Say to those miners in Queensland and the Hunter yes coal is ending but mining isn't - you and your children and your children's children will have a bright future because everything needed for the green revolution is under the ground in Australia.

Green Jobs should have been front and centre of a jobs and wages agenda.

It's really galling because their was some important stuff on the slate, restoring penalty rates to hops workers who got rorted. The Cancer care things was good, not least because there is a collection going on in my local cafe for someone who is has a lymphoma and is now getting hit with all these random medical bills she can ill afford. But that is not enough - we need to have a serious talk about medicare and the insurances system because guess what, it's fucked. I had surgery earlier in the year and I'm still getting random bills - it's like the surgeon just invited all his mates into the theatre whilst I was knocked out and told them to set they meters running. I'm all right but for many people there seems to be less and less service through medicare, insurance doesn't even let you cover everything - if you can afford it, and out of pocket costs can be crippling.

Basically Labour should go big or go home a lurch to the right isn't going to help, but it does need to build a big tent. It also needs a vision that inspires a ground game - Gould piece in the graun about Zali Stegals effort - labour needs that level of passion everywhere.

I like this post but as a non-Australian this is a lot to contemplate

a boomer, Ed - such great insight

A rhetorical shift to the right for Labor is pretty inevitable right now but it doesn't necessarily mean an awful lot with the election 3 years away. They're not going to be wheeling out any big policies now or in fact at any time I imagine given what happened in the election. They're just going to wait for things to go wrong for Morrison, which they almost certainly will.

It’s go big or go home. Any kind of nuance will get twisted on social media. By all account people were going to the polls with death taxes and shorten as a granny mugger thanks to Facebook so the messages has to be loud clear and unambiguous.

incrementalism and nuance just don’t work. Fixing Medicare for cancer suffers doesn’t work as a message - you have to go out and say ScoMo wants to make you pay every time you go to the doctor labour will make sure you never have. Labor get fucked every time on costsings and nuance and the coalition get to lie through their teeth and I think vision is the only way to override that.

You're right. But sadly I doubt many in Labor see it that way. They tried the rolling policy strategy and lost, so next time they'll try to eke out a win playing the small target game and leave the vision thing to the Greens...

Maybe it's because of where I live but the greens never even turned up to this election. Their strategy seems to have been to keep quiet and assume aa certain proportion of labor voters will preference them first in the Senate.

Its what I did, I only votd Lab with greens 2nd prefs and nothing else at all. They were all a festering pile of nope.

OTM re the Medicare business. To be honest, that Medicare-for-cancer stuff hardly grabbed my attention at all. And I'd had recurrent cancer since 2004! LOL. I don't doubt some people receive big bills somehow (probably weird gaps in the system that could apply equally to other patient types?) but as far as I knew, cancer patients pay virtually nothing under Medicare as it is. If I was underwhelmed then it's hard to imagine those with no particular interest in that one condition being swayed.

To be fair to the Greens, they have relatively few media opportunities. They're lucky if they get on something like Q&A much more than half-a-dozen times a year. (They'll be dissed every week though, of course, by the obligatory Labor and coalition representatives.) Whatever they did seemed to work. Their vote held up well. Significant increase in Queensland, even, last I saw.

Medicare infuriates me. I earn enough that I have to get insurance, I'd rather just pay more tax but fair enough. I recently snapped a tendon in my leg. I went to my GP because I thought it was just a bad sprain, my GP doesn't bulk bill but hiss surgery its in a convenient location, I like him and I do n't go that often but that was charge number 1. He said I should get an MRI, this isn't covered by medicare for out patients so charge number 2. GO back to the GP (charge Number 3) he says I need to see an orthopaedic surgeon, why not try the one with consulting rooms down the hall. I check he's on my medicare Gap cover list with my insurer and then go an see him (charge number 4).

Surgeon says I need surgery and quickly because the tendon is retreating up my leg and he has a slot in a few days.. He says he doesn't do surgery for the gap cover rate only, I look pained and nearly faint as he describes the surgery - this is apparently a good negotiating technique because he says he'll do it for $500 over the gap cover rate (charge number 5). He sends me for a moon boot (charge number 6).

Next Monday I get to the hospital for admission, they hit me up for the insurance excess (7) and a pre buy on my drugs (8). Admission nurse looks at my coverage and says oh, Australian unity they are notorious for not paying and making you go and sue someone to recover the costs (given I did the initial injury in Japan, I really don't want to do this. ) After surgery I start to lose count of chargers for drugs, anaesthetists, anaesthetists assistants, casts, follow up consults.

It's a good job I already owned a pair of crutches.

Conceivably this would have tuned out differently if I'd gone to the ER of a public hospital or had a mythical bulk billing GP; but by the time I got to the GP I was in a lot of pain and wanted it fixed. I wasn't going to shop around surgeons for the best deal. As it is the insurer still hasn't paid the hospital and who knows if they will. I'm lucky enough that I could eat the cost if it came to it but it would be a pretty significant chunk of change.

As it is its cost close on aa couple of thousand dollars to get this fixed, I'm just lucky I work some billable hours lying on the sofa to keep the money rolling in.

All in all I would rather pay more tax and get a medicare system that actually covered everything for every body and a long way in second preference have a medical insurance system that was in some way comprehensive. Although having lived in the States and had some gold plated insurance paid for by my employer, you can see, very easily how a private health system goes into a cost spiral.

a great post Ed

I get the feeling it's when you get private health insurance that it all goes wrong and it starts costing a fortune. I don't have private insurance and my GP bulk-bills and I've paid for very little down the years. I spent a night in a sleep lab and paid only $80 of the $900 fee, I've had free physio, free colonoscopy. I'm resigned to the fact that one day I'll need some elective surgery and won't want to wait 2 years to have it done in the public system but it will be cheaper just to pay for it as a one-off than pay years of insurance. My brother is an oncologist and he doesn't have insurance! He tells me if you ever have anything seriously wrong with you, just front up to ER or get referred to a public teaching hospital because not only will it be free but you'll get much better care than in a private hospital. Of course the current govt will try to force everyone to go private...

Why wasn't medicare an issue. This was the government that tried to put a tax on going to the doctor. This is the government that has frozen medicare rebates to GPs and almost everything else for years. Doctors (presumably with massive HECS debt) have to choose between get $36 a time in rural Queensland treating ordinary people or $90 a time for treating Ed's stupidity in Melbourne (if some one offers you a go on an aircraft escape slide - don't do it). No-one was even talking about access to medical services in the bush or the outer suburbs. No one is talking about how the coalition is dismantling the public health system bye systematically underfunding it an providing doctors with every incentive to work in a private system that the broken insurance system can't even cover properly.

Xpost

ZZ I have definitely learnt my lesson. I will front up to St Vinnies or the Royal Melbourne from now on.

Any chance this was a posterior tibial tendon?

Non-life-threatening musculo-skeletal conditions might be the least well-covered by Medicare, methinks. Even you do dash to a public ER department in the hope of being referred internally they'll often be tempted to refer you back to your GP for further scans, etc. If you're not spilling blood or having a seizure, ER doctors' investigations can sometimes be kinda cursory.

Tibialis anterior tendon

I do get the impression to that musculoskeletal injurers are regarded as having happened on the job or through stupidity and therefore workcover takes care of it or it is one’s own fault.

Sorry to hear you had that experience (and injury!) Ed.

Ive leaned heavily on the "fully public system" approach due to permanent emoty pockets and I have to say, I havent had a bad experience so far. Waiting lists have been reasonable, and the procedures all completely free.

(MRIs are def a different story - I need one for my shitty knees and its not covered under medicare unless I wrangle a sneaky referal from a sports (!!?!) medicine specialist ugh).

TBF my all-free procedures have been internal health related (scans, bla-scopies, etc) rather than "My hip has disintegrated and I'll be on the waiitng list for 2 years".

sorry to leapfrog so many people, just want to respond to zelda:

They're just going to wait for things to go wrong for Morrison, which they almost certainly will.

they already have done a whole load of times, and our compliant media just clear the way for him. so yes, in theory labor could take advantage of his daily fuckups, but they won’t get oxygen through all the loud and sloppy morrison gobjobs.

on sunday i read somewhere that morrison could kick a baby in the face and the press would ask what the baby could have done differently. this is the landscape now.

good news Chips Bowie is running for the ALP leadership, just the personality they need now

googles "Chips Bowie"

he's got my vote tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp7m8hMxPA0

chip thievery *is* socialism

eight hours after majority government confirmed, ScoNo's sole campaign plank has been withdrawn

who could have guessed they were making it up as they went along