Raphael wrote: ↑Mon Dec 06, 2021 8:38 am
Thank you, bradrn! I admit I'm a bit surprised by this - a had had the impression, based on some stuff I'd heard, that Australia handled the pandemic relatively well.
Oh, we did handle it extremely well. That’s entirely thanks to Berejiklian and the other Premiers — the federal government is most noted for an attempt to prevent lockdowns at the beginning of the pandemic. (They did arrange funding for people temporarily out of work though, the one completely positive thing they’ve done in their entire term.)
And I would have expected your Liberal and Labor parties to stand for, or pretend to stand for, the standard packages of center-right and center-left ideas and policies, respectively.
In theory, that’s exactly what they stand for. But they seem to have lost their way a bit. (See also my comments below.)
advertising ‘FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM’. (This is a direct quote.
Chanted to the tune of the
Jaws theme?
No, arranged into a nice triangle on the newspaper page.
He won the last election by very vigorously proposing no policies whatsoever, and marketing them very well.
And here I thought the
cynical view of multiparty electoral politics was that people win elections by proposing
stupid and/or
horrible policies. So it turns out that's the
idealistic view?
These past few years have been an aberration. It used to be that one party proposed one set of policies, the other party proposed another set of policies, and based on these policies they dragged each other kicking and screaming through the election season until we put them out of our misery by voting for one of them. (In other words, a typical party system.) But this was all overturned by Morrison’s revolutionary discovery that, if one stands for election with
no policies at all, one can run scare campaigns on every policy the opposition has, while they can’t do the same to you. Of course, it’s a bit difficult to govern without policies, but it did get them into government, so it looks like the Liberals are going to run on the same ‘platform’ again. It also doesn’t help that the Coalition (as we call the combination of Liberal+National) covers an extraordinarily wide range of views, ranging from centre-left to far-right, but the ‘party line’ (insofar as it has one) is becoming increasingly far-right these days — so there are really very few policies in the first place which will satisfy all Coalition MPs. Labor has similar problems, though it’s not so far gone yet. Personally I’m hoping that Labor wins the next election and actually does something with it, while it and the Coalition disintegrate into smaller parties at some point so we’ll actually have a sensible party system again.
Barnaby Joyce, the current leader of the Nationals for the third time. (The first time, he was kicked out after discovering he had non-Australian citizenship. The second time, he was kicked out after they discovered he had an affair with his staffer.) A very strong advocate for local property ownership and Christian family values.
You've got those, too? Really? I thought
your right-wing troglodytes would focus on bigotry and making poor people suffer, and leave the "family values" stuff to their friends in the US? What happened to "
Thank God we got the convicts and they got the Puritans"?
Hah, yes, we’ve been a great importer of troglodatry from the US. (And
vice versa: George Christensen, technically an MP for Queensland even though he spends the majority of each year around the less salubrious parts of Manila, was last seen expounding on the evils of Australian COVID-19 policies to the good folks at Infowars.) Our politicians have become very concerned recently about what children might be taught at school and what people might do in their private time. Thankfully this train of thought isn’t quite so prominent over here (we’re a bit more left-wing than the US), and our conservatism is still very much based around global warming denial, dislike of Islam and—most importantly—giving poor people not one cent more than it says in the law. (That they temporarily raised the dole last year can be considered a minor miracle. That they let it go back down again cannot.)
Morrison has wasted a significant amount of breath railing against the evil Labor Premiers. (And you may parse that noun phrase however you want.)
Hm, is that the answer to my earlier question about relatively solid Australian pandemic policies?
To an extent, though as with everything this can be disputed. Though I may be biased, it is in general clear that the state which handled the pandemic best was my own state of NSW, thanks to Berejiklian — a Liberal premier. I honestly have no idea how she did it, but she somehow managed to keep COVID-19 mostly under control while avoiding complete lockdowns until as late as possible. On the other hand, along with Andrews she
also prevented it from getting into Australia by imposing lockdown early in the pandemic, against the wishes of our so-called ‘PM’. Past this initial lockdown, the other states mostly focussed on avoiding COVID-19 through extraordinarily tight border restrictions to other states. This has not been an especially popular policy amongst those families who live on the border, but people within the relevant states seem to like it. (NSW has had border restrictions also, but not necessarily to the same degree.) The states with the tightest restrictions have been West Australia and Queensland — both with Labor Premiers.
Victoria is a special case. Its Labor Premier Dan Andrews has not been too popular even amongst regular Victorians, due to his long, hard lockdowns which seemed to have comparatively little effect on COVID-19 — he has been nicknamed ‘Dictator Dan’. (Of course, he’s even less popular amongst the antivaxxer contingent, who have recently taken to parading around Melbourne with gallows.) For whatever reason, Victoria has been very bad at controlling COVID-19 over the past two years, compared to other states. For instance, the most recent Delta wave came into NSW first, with a maximum of ~1500 cases/day; despite this giving Victoria a month of warning, it then rose to a peak there of >2000 cases/day, and hasn’t yet really come down below 1000 cases/day. Part of this is, as I mentioned, the large antivaxxer contingent, but part of it is surely just bad management.
