Some preliminaries
Despite the egregious irresponsibility of 77 million American voters electing an imbecile conman as president, not nearly all Americans are actually fascists, imbeciles, or just plain evil. Seventy-five million voted against the serial sex offender, bankrupt, and fraudster. And about 36 per cent of eligible voters didn’t bother casting a ballot at all.
Things are different in Australia. It is difficult for a politician to be charged with any crime, but once that occurs, generally they will step down at least until found innocent. Anyone actually convicted has no chance at a further political career.
Australia also has compulsory voting. People who don’t cast a ballot face being fined. That leads to a generally high turnout: an estimated 98 per cent of 18.1 million registered voters cast a ballot, of which 780,000 were ‘informal’ meaning the ballots were incorrectly completed or deliberately defaced to make voting intention unclear under our optional preferential system. More on that later.
The Australian election
Some media commentators have called the election outcome a ‘landslide’ even before a final count is anywhere in sight. But it does appear as if the Australian Labor Party (ALP) has increased its majority in the house of representatives, and will still need to negotiate support for its legislative programme in the senate, from the Greens or the defeated Coalition parties (Liberal national Party in Queensland, Liberal Party of Australia and National Party of Australia elsewhere, except in the Northern Territory, where the amalgam is called the Country Liberal Party).
Judging by social media comments following the Australian election, we may have a much higher proportion of conspicuously evil, fascist imbeciles than the USA. That’s after we discount the obvious bots/trolls employed so openly by News Corp. Those bots/trolls are easily identified by the use of American idioms, profile pictures not of actual people, and the use of quaint translation engines by for-hire foreign bot/troll farms. Genuine Australian right wing nutjobs use local idioms, can’t spell, and have no idea about grammar and syntax, quaint or otherwise.
Another trend in social media commentary appears to be that despite abundant election information online, a great many people are ignorant of the fact that political parties do NOT control the flow of preferences. For everyone, not just foreigners, optional preferential voting means that lower house seat contenders must be ranked in numerical order of preference. So, if you have six candidates, you must number the candidates from 1 to 6 in order of your preference. If you vote only with 1, your vote is invalid. If you repeat a number, your vote is invalid. If you skip a number (or numbers), your vote is invalid. If you use ticks and crosses, your vote is invalid. It’s really not that hard to do, and the Australian Electoral Commission has a website on which you could practice vote to make sure you got it right.
Usually there are dozens of candidates for the Senate, so you get to number by political party, with a minimum of six preferences called ‘above the line’, which is literally a black line printed under the party names, below which are listed the candidates of that party). Or you can number every candidate by preference, which could be quite an arduous task if you have 30-plus candidates (my ballot paper had about 50).
Political parties are permitted by law to print and distribute ‘how to vote cards’, which are leaflets showing how to vote according to the preferences a particular party would like you to allocate. But no one has to vote the way the parties would like them to. Every voter is perfectly free to number ballots in order of their own preferences. So, while some commentators have argued the election outcome shows the ALP had won by flow of preferences as determined by the ALP and the Greens (who usually preference each other on their how to vote cards), the very poor showing of the Greens, and an apparent lack of preferences flowing from the rabid right wing minor parties to the Coalition, strikes me as evidence that voters rejected how to vote cards and made their own preference choices. I always do, and at this election I’m sure my preference flows would have baffled so-called progressive commentators as much as the closet-fascists in the majority of Australia’s commercial media.
It explains why the Greens did so poorly for the House of Representatives: Fewer voters preferenced Greens first, and ALP voters did not pass on their preferences to Greens candidates, the way ALP how to vote cards instructed.
What explains the disappointing results?
Anti-Trump sentiment is a powerful explanation for the election outcome: the overwhelming vote for the less-than-popular ALP, with a prime minister characterized by timidity and a disappointing lack of all leadership characteristics, is a clear indication that people were saying to themselves: ‘I don’t have a choice here. I simply cannot risk an imbecile mini-Trump being elected, and the only way to make sure of that is to vote for the lesser of really fucked up options all the way down the ballot paper.’
I see a lot of people making excuses for the Greens’ poor performance. I don’t think you can be a party of obstructionism forever. It’s juvenile and has no potential for a growing voter base. Blocking environmental and housing measures because they didn’t go far enough is self-defeating.
Worse, you can’t pursue some fictional but ideologically extremist alphabet-soup cause while forbidding open debate and and discriminating against women for demanding the same rights to determine their identities. To put the matter plainly, there is no LGBT ‘community’, and there are no LGBT ‘rights’ if they aren’t human rights. Otherwise we are really talking privileges. For a small group, and not accessible by others equally.
As far as the idea of community goes, it is geographically diverse, so not a localized community at all. But neither are there recognizably common interests. No one has yet been able to explain to me what are the common, ‘community’ interests between, say, Alan Joyce and a Fortitude Valley rent boy. Or between Penny Wong and a West End bull dyke. Or between Joyce and the bull dyke. And so on across the entire confected alphabet soup.
Socioeconomic class, and therefore existential, real interests, unite more people than a bunch of letters cynically exploited for political purposes, with never any intention of helping the most underprivileged and disadvantaged people in the country.
But never mind. I was prepared to ignore that particular hypocrisy. Even the Greens know that it will go nowhere and achieve nothing beyond motivating culture war insults, because it is entirely confected ideological perfidy with no remotely realistic success criteria, and therefore no achievable outcomes.
And worst of all, people are really sick of imported hatreds: you cannot achieve anything but carnage even by Middle Eastern standards if you back Iranian Islamofascism against Israeli Judaeofascism. It is obscene, bordering on treasonous, to seek to profit politically from a far-away, centuries-old, genocidal lunacy by pitting Australians against Australians. This was the single reason I voted against my sitting Greens MP and did not offer my second or third preference to him.
I am still astonished at how ignorant every Greens MP and acolyte I spoke to remains about Middle Eastern history, especially about who funds and drives that intractable genocidal mania today. What, exactly did the Greens achieve for Palestinians, or for those radicalized Muslims in Australia who believe Iranian propaganda? Just heightened fear and distrust. And the Greens remain entirely in denial about their ignorant, extremist folly.
More generally, what have the Greens achieved for their supposed constituencies of terrorists, heteroclites, and Maoist wannabes? I propose: absolutely nothing. Except fear-mongering and social division within Australia.
Speaking of pitting Australians against each other, the undisputed and most vile manifestation of that kind of politics is still most openly pursued by the mercenaries, plutocrat shills, fascists, and outright lunatics in the Coalition, conspicuously supported by the Murdoch family propaganda factory, but almost as blatantly by the Liberal party fan club in the Nine Entertainment fantasy ecosystem.
The demonization of the least powerful, most vulnerable people in our society by those organizations constitutes a special kind of evil. The ALP election win will offer some respite from it, but the ALP is not known, either, as a champion of the poor, the elderly, or the sick. Unemployed people are still subject to regular indentured servitude in programs that make treadmills seem like reasonable alternatives. The elderly are still subjected to unconscionable mistreatment in so-called aged care facilities. And despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, the chronically or mentally ill are still condemned to suffer in silence if they don’t have the money to pay for private care, or to make themselves heard.
There is an indescribably facile propaganda phrase that casts the ALP as a ‘centre-left’ party. That can only be true if right wing extremism, like the White, nationalist Christofascism of the Coalition, represents ‘conservatism’. And I reject that proposition categorically. The Coalition has been moving to right ever since Menzies; how could it have remained a ‘conservative’ party after this decades long shift to the right? Ergo, the Coalition really does represent right wing extremism.
By contrast, the legacy of Burkean and Menzian conservatism is reflected precisely in the contemporary ALP: timidly reformist without ever challenging the interests of the wealthiest people and corporations. Ergo, the ALP is Australia’s only conservative party. That’s what voters elected on 3 May: a timid leader of a timid party that wouldn’t ever risk anything resembling an actually progressive agenda.
And they elected this cowardly bunch because the Trumpian imbecility of the extreme right just wasn’t worth the risk to them. I would go so far as to say that the Greens suffered an electoral setback for the same reason: a moronic, Maoist extremism, stifling debate in its own party branches, and breeding the audacity to arrogantly, but ignorantly, shout down the very people whose votes they needed, as if they thought they were the murderous Maoist cadres during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Was there any upside?
You might think I’m so misanthropic I saw no positive news arising from the election. But that’s not true.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton, described by a former prime minister of his own party as a thug, and by a former premier of Western Australia as not very bright, lost not just the election, but his own seat in parliament.
Australia’s equivalents of national socialism polled so low a bunch of Wombats would have done better as candidates (as well as in character and integrity). The Neanderbogan party, One Nation, might not gain a single seat in the lower house, as is the case for millionaire Clive Palmer’s vanity project, Trumpet of Patriots (that’s not a joke: he funded a political party by that name).
And finally, it is fun to see the deranged media pundits who talked up Trumpism and Christofascism walk aback their ridiculous, sycophantic claims, or even to double down with even more conspicuously unhinged justifications for alleging that the voters of Australia got it all terribly wrong. As if Westminster style democracy is illegitimate, but totalitarianism is admirable.
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