Australian elections 2019

[Soldier of Macedon]

The Coalition appear to be doing much better than polls were suggesting. They're ahead of Labour and are 7 seats away from clinching it.

[Soldier of Macedon]

Shorten just conceded. The Coalition win. Election pollsters got it wrong, yet again.

[Gocka]

It is more likely you haven't shifted, but the ideologies have shifted. The extremity that the Left have regressed, now anything to the right of Pol Pot.... is Right wing.

Maybe in part but many of my views have also shifted.

Ever since I gave up being an accountant and focused on starting a business, I realized the huge and unfair burden that especially local government impose on small business owners. The bureaucracy, inefficiency, waste, and abuse of power were big eye openers for me. I realized that taxes are too high, that there are too many needless regulations, and that local government officials are fascists. I have also went to the right on social programs such as welfare.

I still tend to lean liberal on most social issues except abortion, which I am probably in the middle on.


So who won the elections there? Is it the right or left, also who is being elected, PM, President, etc? Excuse my ignorance, American media doesn't really report on Australian elections.

[Soldier of Macedon]

So who won the elections there? Is it the right or left, also who is being elected, PM, President, etc? Excuse my ignorance, American media doesn't really report on Australian elections.

The right won, against most polls and media suggesting the left would. Almost reminiscent of Brexit and 2016. But our right is centre-right and isn't as rigid (at least not collectively) when it comes to certain social issues.

[Soldier of Macedon]

Like most people, as I grow older, I'm moving further to the right but I feel the pace has never been greater than in recent years as I've watched the leftist/internationalist movement decimate Macedonia, virtually overnight...I always thought I was immune from their social engineering and madness but suddenly it has become really personal.

Same here. I guess there is some truth to the saying that (paraphrasing) if you're not on the left when you're young you don't have a heart, if you're not on the right when you've become more mature you don't have a brain.

The left is off the rails completely, and the right is slowly moving towards hate and away from a principled traditional conservatism.

The left (in basically most of the West) has definitely gone off the rails and is increasingly adopting certain elements from their fringe as mainstream. When you say the right is moving towards hate, where are you referring to and how do you quantify that in political terms?

[Risto the Great]

This article in the NY Times sums up my interpretation of the "left" as it relates to young people nowadays (I don't know enough about Biden to comment critically about him, but the opinions on millennials sits well enough with me):

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/opinion/biden-2020-millennials.html

Earlier this month, a video of Joe Biden saying he had “no empathy” for “the younger generation” that “tells me how tough things are” resurfaced on social media. The video was over a year old, but it elicited predictable howls from members of the dissed demographic. “Nothing says ‘perfect candidate to lead the most powerful nation in the world’ like ‘I have no empathy,’” wrote someone with the Twitter handle @anarchopriapism.

My own reactionary reaction was different. O.K., I thought, I could definitely vote for Joe — provided he has the mettle to stand his ground.

I’ve been saying for a while now that both parties could use a Sister Souljah moment, in which a candidate shows the intestinal fortitude to rebuke some obnoxious person or faction within his political base. Bill Clinton did it in 1992 after the recording artist Lisa Williamson asked, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton called it out as an example of reverse racism and still went on to win 83 percent of the African-American vote.

In this election cycle, no faction on the Democratic side more richly deserves rebuking than the one Biden singled out — which is not, of course, anywhere close to the entire millennial generation (roughly 80 million strong), or their younger siblings in Gen Z. But it is that part of these younger generations that specializes in histrionic self-pity and moral self-righteousness, usually communicated via social media with maximum snark.

Gawker spawn and HuffPo twerps: This especially means you.

It also means all those who recklessly participate in the search-and-destroy missions of the call-out culture. These are the Harvard students who demanded, and last week obtained, the dismissal of law professor Ronald Sullivan and his wife Stephanie Robinson as faculty deans at an undergrad dorm because Sullivan had the temerity to join Harvey Weinstein’s defense team. They are the Middlebury students who in 2017 violently assaulted professor Allison Stanger for the crime of moderating a talk with Charles Murray. They are the Yale students who in 2015 surrounded and hounded professor Nicholas Christakis because he would not agree to their demands that he denounce his wife for believing in free speech.

The signature move in each of these instances (and there are so many more) is to allege an invisible harm in order to inflict an actual one. In place of an eye for an eye, we have professional destruction for emotional upset. Careers and reputations built over decades come to ruin, or nearly so, on account of a personal mistake or a disfavored opinion.

All of these struggle sessions play to the sound of chortling twenty-somethings, who have figured out that, in today’s culture, the quickest way to acquire and exercise power is to take offense. This is easy to do, because the list of sins to which one may take offense grows with each passing year, from the culturally appropriated sombrero to the traditionally gendered pronoun.

It’s also easy because the grown-ups rarely push back and, in fact, are often happy to go along. Not one of the students who joined the mob at Middlebury was expelled. And say what you will of the students who demanded the ouster of Sullivan and Robinson, they would have gotten nowhere without the weaselly connivance of Harvard Dean Rakesh Khurana, who discovered unspecified problems with the “climate” of the dorm in order to justify his verdict.

Which brings me back to Biden. The rap against the former veep is that he’s old, frequently puts his foot in his mouth, and occasionally says nice things about Republicans. Another way of putting all that is that he’s mature, unstudied, and not just another partisan hater.

Also, he refused to beg forgiveness last month for being a tad too touchy-kissy. Maybe he should keep his hands in his pockets, but at least it means he isn’t prepared to capitulate to the icy codes of personal decorum written by people who don’t know the difference between exuberant human warmth and unwarranted sexual advances.

To which one can only say: Keep it up, Joe! He’s already leading all of his Democratic primary rivals in every demographic group save millennials (obviously), where Bernie Sanders has a narrow lead. He could make a virtue of the defect by emphasizing his distance from everything that defines the worst aspects of millennial culture — the coddled minds and censorious manner and inability to understand the way the world works. Does it ever occur to some of our more militant millennials that the pitiless standards they apply to others will someday be applied pitilessly to them?

The sensible center of America — that is, the people who choose presidents in this country — wants to see Donald Trump lose next year, but not if it means empowering the junior totalitarians of the left. Now is Biden’s chance to make it clear he’s just the man to fulfill that hope.

As an example, I saw someone post on Reddit that Old people should be killed. The reason being they voted for the Liberal coalition in Australia and seemingly have no interest in the climate issues. The level of blind stupidity supporting the comment is a new kind of "loser" that is festering all over the world.

[Soldier of Macedon]

I don't know enough about Biden to comment critically about him....

Biden is a moron. That's about all there is to know about him.

I saw someone post on Reddit that Old people should be killed. The reason being they voted for the Liberal coalition in Australia and seemingly have no interest in the climate issues. The level of blind stupidity supporting the comment is a new kind of "loser" that is festering all over the world.

Even in our own backyard. Here is another "gem" from the left (with the help of somebody that was apparently on the right):

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-10/birth-certificate-gender-laws-pass-in-tasmania/10989170

Tasmania's transgender community is celebrating after landmark reforms to make gender optional on birth certificates passed their last parliamentary hurdle.........also allows people aged 16 years or older to apply to change their registered gender without parental approval, and clarifies laws that protect the right of an individual to express their gender without discrimination.

It's this type of delusional rubbish that makes people feel like they are becoming more conservative, when in actual fact it is the left that is moving towards further extremes. So a 16 year old male is not allowed to legally drink, drive (alone) or vote in Australia, but can claim to be a female, compete in sport against a female, go into a female bathroom and sue you for arguing otherwise. Perhaps we're not that far yet, but that's the road we're heading towards.

[Karposh]

I'm pretty sure we've clarified this for our American friends before here but I feel like it needs to be repeated, just in case there is any confusion. As we established earlier on this thread, the left is championed by the Labor Party in this country while the marginally left of centre has a voice in the very left-sounding, Liberal Party. The Liberal Party has traditionally been associated with standing up for conservative and traditional values in this country but you wouldn't know it really. Over the past decade or two, the poisonous left agenda has infected all walks of life in every country of the world, including, I'm saddened to say, the Orthodox world. If you stand up for your country - you're a racist bigot or a fascist; If you call out the evils of gender fluidity - you're anti-inclusion and belong in an asylum; if you fail to embrace homosexuality (never mind disagreeing with it) - then you're a homophobic monster and deserve to die; and if you call out bullshit when you see it, such as climate change - then you're a climate change denier and you also deserve to die.

Bill Shorten made a number of mistakes that no doubt cost him the election but, for me, his biggest fuck up was when he called out Scott Morrison to publicly declare if he believed homosexuality was a sin (knowing full well that he is a devout Christian) just days before the election in a desperate and pathetic attempt to win points with the left. Thankfully, the Australian public saw him for the sniveling low life that he is and punished him for it.

[Karposh]

...while the marginally left of centre has a voice in the very left-sounding, Liberal Party.

Apologies everyone. Make that "marginally right of centre"....You know what I mean.

[Gocka]

When you say the right is moving towards hate, where are you referring to and how do you quantify that in political terms?

I am mainly speaking about the USA and what appears to be some parts of Europe too, and the growing far right movements, in some cases even neo fascist movements. This is not my description either, many of the groups that I am talking about call themselves as such proudly.

In political terms I see it most obviously reflected in growing anti immigrant sentiment much of which in my opinion has white nationalist roots.

In many cases its not even political policy per say, you can argue for more tight immigration and various things, but when you dive deeper into many of these movements, and you listen to what many of the grassroots organizers are saying, its rooted in racism and hate, not in principle.

In the same way that the fringe left is clinging harder and harder to more extreme positions, as are people on the fringe right, and both poles are pulling the middle towards them. Its becoming increasingly partisan and more difficult to find your place in either the right or left.

Perfect example is the abortion bill recently passed in Alabama that bans abortion even in cases of rape and incest, that is just a level of extreme I can not subscribe to. How can you tell a woman that may have been brutally raped, okay now go ahead and raise the racist's child and be reminded of the horror everyday. To me that is just as extreme as taxing people 70%.

[Risto the Great]

In many cases its not even political policy per say, you can argue for more tight immigration and various things, but when you dive deeper into many of these movements, and you listen to what many of the grassroots organizers are saying, its rooted in racism and hate, not in principle.

Arguably, a good thing (economically) for Macedonia would be to open the border with Kosovo and encourage fully open borders with Albania to take advantage of these resourceful people. No Macedonian wants this because it is likely to manifest itself in an erosion of Macedonian identity. And if you are seeking to preserve your identity, then that is easily interpreted to be a racist concept not unlike the "white identity politics" we see lately.

Would an elevated level of thinking see modern nations as an antiquated concept? Many would think so.

Maybe Goce Delcev's competing cultures is outdated now and the idea of clinging to what is "yours" is a racist mentality. I'm sure Soros believes this.

Arguably, the Macedonian Cause itself seeks to discriminate Macedonians and, as a consequence, discriminate everyone who isn't Macedonian. Seeking to favour ethnic Macedonians can be viewed definitionally as racism.

If you are a racist, put your hand up.

[Risto the Great]

Interesting discussion of how racism is a moving target here:

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/280482/we-need-to-talk-about-white-identity-politics

The partisan divide over whether majority-group interests are racist is stark. When I ask Americans whether a white woman who wants less immigration to help maintain her group’s share of the population is being racist or “acting in her racial self-interest, which is not racist,” 36-39 percent of Americans, depending on the survey, respond that this is racist and 61-64 percent say it isn’t. In most West European countries, 20-25 percent claim this is racist against 75-80 percent who say it’s an expression of white group interest, which isn’t racist. Let’s zoom in on the partisan gap: 91 percent of white Clinton voters with postgraduate degrees think the woman is racist, compared with just 6 percent of white Trump voters (and zero white British Leave voters) without a degree. In the middle stand ethnic minorities: 43 percent of nonwhite Americans believe the white woman in this example to be racist compared with 57 percent who say she isn’t.

[Risto the Great]

Looking like it might be a majority Liberal coalition government. People are saying Shorten lost because he was proposing to overhaul the tax system too drastically. I believe he failed because he looked insincere and because he couldn't explain the inequities some of Labor's tax changes would introduce.

He would have been fatal for the country. We are a stone's throw away from a recession right now and he would have made the country an economic joke.

Let's hope China grows up a bit and the world moves on.

[Vangelovski]

Looking like it might be a majority Liberal coalition government. People are saying Shorten lost because he was proposing to overhaul the tax system too drastically. I believe he failed because he looked insincere and because he couldn't explain the inequities some of Labor's tax changes would introduce.

He would have been fatal for the country. We are a stone's throw away from a recession right now and he would have made the country an economic joke.

Let's hope China grows up a bit and the world moves on.

I think Labor's failure was right across the board. High taxes been spent on issues the majority simply are not interested in (like climate change), attacking job creating industries (particularly in mining) and retirees, and religious freedom (I for one don't want Shorten brainwashing my kids with his BS rainbow ideology) amongst a range of other policies.

[Phoenix]

Looking like it might be a majority Liberal coalition government. People are saying Shorten lost because he was proposing to overhaul the tax system too drastically. I believe he failed because he looked insincere and because he couldn't explain the inequities some of Labor's tax changes would introduce.

He would have been fatal for the country. We are a stone's throw away from a recession right now and he would have made the country an economic joke.

Let's hope China grows up a bit and the world moves on.

Shorten had many faults, ultimately it cost the ALP what should have been an easy election victory...

He was disliked by many because of his strong trade union background, others were uneasy about his powerbroker role during the disruptive Rudd/Gillard leadership years...he is also a poor public speaker, delivers monotone speeches and comes across as insincere or lacking real empathy...he also has a problem in articulating policy.

This poor policy articulation also fell into the hands of the Coalition with their successful exploitation of the stereotypical framing of ALP policies as attacking "hard working" Australians by over taxing their hard earned wealth and that the Coalition are traditionally 'better' managers of the economy.

I think ultimately the result shows that future election platforms will be of a very conservative nature, it looks like Australia has lost passion for change and vision, politics is now a game of self preservation to ensure rule, no party will want to move out of their comfort zone