General Australian Politics Thread

Edit: Because of course I got the pagetopper.

This is unfortunately not the first time this sort of thing has happened. When Labor was last in power and proposed a mining "super tax" (higher tax rate on profits over a certain amount) the mining companies basically ran scare campaigns claiming it would directly lead to higher impact and force the mining companies to reduce their workforce to deal with the increased cost, something that is poison on both sides of the political aisle.

Edited by KnightofLsama on Apr 26th 2023 at 1:09:16 AM

Reducing payments to shareholders is of course not an option. Won't somebody please think of the rich? How will they ever afford their new private jet every year?

Australia has faced down China’s trade bans and emerged stronger, since it turned out that the price to pay for China was too high - e.g "Luckily for Australia...the two economies were such a good fit that China’s firms felt as much pain from the curbs as Australia’s, if not more. And some commodities, such as Australian iron ore, were so hard to replace China chose not to target them"

ABC: Mark McGowan stands down as WA premier in shock announcement, citing exhaustion.

ABC: Federal government a step closer to early election trigger as Senate rejects housing bill. To sum up: Labor's centrepiece Housing Australia Future Fund bill seeks to establish a $10 billion investment fund, the dividends from which will be used to build and renovate social housing nationwide. The bill already passed the House of Representatives but got stuck in the Senate last month: partly because the Coalition were, well, the Coalition, and partly because Greens senators argued that the bill lacks provisions to address the ongoing rent crisis.

Now the Coalition and the Greens have teamed up yet again to delay the vote until October, and Labor's deputy Senate leader Don Farrell fired back by saying that these consecutive failures to pass the bill could constitute the triggers for a double dissolution election.

Why the Greens and Labor can't meet each other halfway is a mystery that will outlast Stone Henge.

All I'm gonna say is this: I thought Richard di Natale was a principled man who took great shots when needed and was down to earth and serious about his politics and the politics of the Greens, and while I don't have a read on Adam Bandt, I don't at all feel the same way about him.

I genuinely don't know what to make of all this, and it's incredibly frustrating. Good for di Natale for getting out, I guess, but the position we're in right now makes me incredibly uneasy.

Meanwhile, the Australian parliament greenlit a constitutional reform to recognize the Indeginous Voice, which must now be put on a referendum.

Not sure what a "yes" vote would entail exactly though. Would Aboriginals get a dedicated chamber in the institutions or something like that?

Edited by Lyendith on Jun 20th 2023 at 3:22:31 PM

As I see it that's the biggest hurdle for the yes campaign. Without laying out a clear idea The No side can simultaneously push that the voice will be disproportionately powerful and be pointless because it will have no power.

Edited by Gaiazun on Jun 20th 2023 at 11:48:29 AM

As someone who generally favours Labor, I don't think Bandt holds a candle to di Natale. With the latter, you're looking at a guy who said shortly after becoming leader that he was fine taking votes off Labor even if it meant more Coalition governments, and who in general has done a hell of a lot of bothsidesing. Like... yes, as the crossbench, it's entirely within the Greens' right to wring concessions out of the leading party, but they're really overplaying their hand here. It's the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme all over again.

Albo took the Greens' housing spokesperson to task the other day for trying to deny having written in a Jacobin article that their blocking the housing legislation was motivated by how (paraphrased) "it will dampen civil society's righteous anger about housing problems if we let it go through". Which is accelerationist bull.

(Albo invited Griffith MP Max Chandler-Mather to table the contents of his article to back up the latter's claim just after Question Time of being 'misrepresented'. Chandler-Mather replied that he didn't have it on him. Cue Albo producing the excerpts in question and reading them aloud.)

EDIT: More particularly, it seems Albo brought up the excerpts during Question Time, and in the aftermath, Chandler-Mather claimed to have been misquoted — so Albo brought the quotes back in.

VERY BELATED EDIT: For clarity's sake, 'the latter' meant Bandt (the latter of the post I was replying to), not di Natale.

Edited by coruscatingInquisitor on Aug 16th 2023 at 7:16:17 PM

Mark Latham dumped from One Nation's NSW leadership by Pauline Hanson

You simply can't set the bar low enough for him.

ABC: Albo announces that the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum will be held on Saturday, October 14th.

Is there a simplified explanation of what the expected outcome is if the referendum is successful? Based on what I've read, I'm not sure what this independent advisory body is actually planned to look like.

Apologies for the doublepost.

Here is a summary from AP News. Maybe I'm being thick, but I found this article to be clearer than what I've read on the topic thus far:

Edited by editerguy on Aug 30th 2023 at 10:24:02 PM

[CW: child abuse, sexual assault]

Guardian: Revealed: multiple sites of possible secret graves discovered at Stolen Generations institution for children. Surveys with ground-penetrating radars revealed nine possible grave sites on the grounds of the Kinchela Aboriginal Boys' Training Home, an institute near Kempsey, northern NSW, that held between 400 and 600 Aboriginal boys from 1924 to 1970. A survivors' organisation has called on both the state and federal governments to fund a thorough search of the entire site.

ABC: Daniel Andrews resigns as Victorian premier after three elections, nine years.

"Dictator" Dan willingly ceded his authority.

A testament to the credibility of Newscorp and anti-vax bloggers.

The referendum vote is nearing. Apparently, indigenous consultative bodies already exist elsewhere.

Could these Nordic parliaments give a glimpse of what to expect from the Voice?

Nordic equivalents are legislated, not in a Constitution.

I found it quite interesting.

It seems to me there is a general air of confusion around Australia's referendum, however.

Or disinformation.

That's the vibe I'm getting too. Lots of racists coming out of the woodwork, and a lot of deliberate disinfo on social media

While there is a lot of disinformation, I find it odd that the government would aim to insert a completely new body into the Constitution, and then not clearly set out the actual form they want it to take.

Frankly, Australia should remove the so-called 'race power' from the Constitution, and we're finally getting a referendum on a related issue and they just... leave it in?

This referendum is poorly managed.

I think that New Zealand's Waitangi Tribunal should be the obvious model, no? Seems weird that Voice advocates in the Parliament couldn't put together a sound, easy-to-explain scheme and instead caused public polling on the Voice to utterly tank when it seemed to be all but a shoo-in a year ago.

(Early voting is open, btw.)

ABC: Historic legislation to criminalise coercive control in Queensland to be introduced in parliament.

Cross-posting from the Social Media thread: Australia's eSafety commission fines Elon Musk's X $610,500 for failing to meet anti-child-abuse standards

Summary:

1. Sites like Google, Discord, and X/Twitter have been monitored by Australia's eSafety over child abuse and failure to prevent such a crime.

2. X/Twitter is threatened to pay within 28 days. If they can't do so, the fine will be increased from $610,000 to $780,000.

3. Between X/Twitter and Google, the latter claims to be committed but the head of eSafety, Julie Inman Grant, isn't convinced as Google failed to answer questions about handling child abuse.

Edited by HallowHawk on Oct 20th 2023 at 6:20:58 AM

Correction on the fines @Hallow Hawk, if they refuse to pay the first fine they can be fined up to $780K per day backdated to March. I already calculated this on the Social Media thread and Twitter would owe over $140M to date if the maximum penalty is implemented. And that's not an upgrade on the initial fine, that's in addition to the original fine.