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[Australian & NZ Politics] Thanks, Shorten.
Suriko
AustraliaRegistered User regular
AustraliaRegistered User regular
The System
Compulsory Voting:
Voting is compulsory for every Australian citizen aged 18 years or older. If you do not vote and do not have a valid and sufficient reason for failing to vote, a penalty is imposed. Initially the Australian Electoral Commission will write to all apparent non-voters requesting that they either provide a reason for their failure to vote or pay a $20 penalty. If, within 21 days, the apparent non-voter fails to reply, cannot provide a valid and sufficient reason or declines to pay the penalty, then prosecution proceedings may be instigated. If the matter is dealt with in court and the person is found guilty, he or she may be fined up to $50 plus court costs. (from the Australian Electoral Commission website)
Westminster Parliamentary System:
The Parliament of Australia, also known as the Commonwealth Parliament or Federal Parliament, is the legislative branch of the government of Australia. It is bicameral, and combines the fused executive of the Westminster System with the federalist senate of the United States Congress. Under Section 1 of the Constitution of Australia, Parliament consists of three components: the Queen, represented within Australia by the Governor-General, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.
The upper house, the Senate, consists of 76 members: twelve for each state, and two each for the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory. Senators are elected using a form of proportional voting. The lower house, the House of Representatives, currently consists of 150 members, who represent districts known as electoral divisions (commonly referred to as "electorates" or "seats"). The two Houses meet in separate chambers of Parliament House on Capital Hill in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. (from Wikipedia)
Preferential Voting:
The main elements of the operation of preferential voting are as follows:
1) Voters are required to place the number “1″ against the candidate of their choice, known as their “first preference.”
2) Voters are then required to place the numbers “2″, “3″, etc., against the other candidates listed on the ballot paper in order of preference.
3) The counting of first preference votes, also known as the “primary vote”, takes place first. If no candidate secures an absolute majority of primary votes, then the candidate with the least number of votes is “eliminated” from the count.
4) The ballot papers of the eliminated candidate are examined and re-allocated amongst the remaining candidates according to the number “2″, or “second preference” votes.
5) If no candidate has yet secured an absolute majority of the vote, then the next candidate with the least number of primary votes is eliminated. This preference allocation continues until there is a candidate with an absolute majority. Where a second preference is expressed for a candidate who has already been eliminated, the voter’s third or subsequent preferences are used.
(from Australianpolitics.com)
The Parties
In the Red Corner: The Australian Labor Party
Leader: Julia Gillard Kevin Rudd Bill Shorten
The Australian Labor Party (abbreviated ALP) is a nominally centre-left party. Their leader, Julia Gillard, took power from Kevin Rudd in a much-publicised coup before the last election (this did not trigger a new election, as Australians vote for a party rather than Prime Minister, with the party selecting its leader internally), and now seeks to push a number of reforms and national projects in the leadup to the next election. Historically very closely tied with unions, which is a partnership that exists to this day. In general, in favour of a high taxation, high public service economic model. EDIT: Kevin Rudd's our PM again. EDIT: It's Bill Shorten's time in the sun now.
In the Blue Corner: The Liberal Party
Leader: Tony Abbott
The Liberal Party is our main conservative political party. In general, they tend to be referred to as the Coalition, given their partnership with the Nationals, another conservative party that largely interests itself with rural voters. At around the same time as Gillard's coup, Tony Abbott lead his own, seizing power by one vote within his own party. Has tacked hard to the right under Abbott's leadership, which has seen him brand himself as a strongman both politically and physically.
In the Green Corner: The Greens
Leader: Christine Milne
The big ol' lefties. Milne has recently taken over from the previous leader Bob Green in a peaceful transition, and has largely maintained the party line. While previously largely concerned with environmentalism, the years have seen this party move into many more areas as they've gained an increasing share of the vote, especially in notable areas such as supporting the legalisation of gay marriage, and widespread opposition to censorship and privacy intrusions.
Compulsory Voting:
Voting is compulsory for every Australian citizen aged 18 years or older. If you do not vote and do not have a valid and sufficient reason for failing to vote, a penalty is imposed. Initially the Australian Electoral Commission will write to all apparent non-voters requesting that they either provide a reason for their failure to vote or pay a $20 penalty. If, within 21 days, the apparent non-voter fails to reply, cannot provide a valid and sufficient reason or declines to pay the penalty, then prosecution proceedings may be instigated. If the matter is dealt with in court and the person is found guilty, he or she may be fined up to $50 plus court costs. (from the Australian Electoral Commission website)
Westminster Parliamentary System:
The Parliament of Australia, also known as the Commonwealth Parliament or Federal Parliament, is the legislative branch of the government of Australia. It is bicameral, and combines the fused executive of the Westminster System with the federalist senate of the United States Congress. Under Section 1 of the Constitution of Australia, Parliament consists of three components: the Queen, represented within Australia by the Governor-General, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.
The upper house, the Senate, consists of 76 members: twelve for each state, and two each for the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory. Senators are elected using a form of proportional voting. The lower house, the House of Representatives, currently consists of 150 members, who represent districts known as electoral divisions (commonly referred to as "electorates" or "seats"). The two Houses meet in separate chambers of Parliament House on Capital Hill in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. (from Wikipedia)
Preferential Voting:
The main elements of the operation of preferential voting are as follows:
1) Voters are required to place the number “1″ against the candidate of their choice, known as their “first preference.”
2) Voters are then required to place the numbers “2″, “3″, etc., against the other candidates listed on the ballot paper in order of preference.
3) The counting of first preference votes, also known as the “primary vote”, takes place first. If no candidate secures an absolute majority of primary votes, then the candidate with the least number of votes is “eliminated” from the count.
4) The ballot papers of the eliminated candidate are examined and re-allocated amongst the remaining candidates according to the number “2″, or “second preference” votes.
5) If no candidate has yet secured an absolute majority of the vote, then the next candidate with the least number of primary votes is eliminated. This preference allocation continues until there is a candidate with an absolute majority. Where a second preference is expressed for a candidate who has already been eliminated, the voter’s third or subsequent preferences are used.
(from Australianpolitics.com)
The Parties
In the Red Corner: The Australian Labor Party
Leader: Julia Gillard Kevin Rudd Bill Shorten
The Australian Labor Party (abbreviated ALP) is a nominally centre-left party. Their leader, Julia Gillard, took power from Kevin Rudd in a much-publicised coup before the last election (this did not trigger a new election, as Australians vote for a party rather than Prime Minister, with the party selecting its leader internally), and now seeks to push a number of reforms and national projects in the leadup to the next election. Historically very closely tied with unions, which is a partnership that exists to this day. In general, in favour of a high taxation, high public service economic model. EDIT: Kevin Rudd's our PM again. EDIT: It's Bill Shorten's time in the sun now.
In the Blue Corner: The Liberal Party
Leader: Tony Abbott
The Liberal Party is our main conservative political party. In general, they tend to be referred to as the Coalition, given their partnership with the Nationals, another conservative party that largely interests itself with rural voters. At around the same time as Gillard's coup, Tony Abbott lead his own, seizing power by one vote within his own party. Has tacked hard to the right under Abbott's leadership, which has seen him brand himself as a strongman both politically and physically.
In the Green Corner: The Greens
Leader: Christine Milne
The big ol' lefties. Milne has recently taken over from the previous leader Bob Green in a peaceful transition, and has largely maintained the party line. While previously largely concerned with environmentalism, the years have seen this party move into many more areas as they've gained an increasing share of the vote, especially in notable areas such as supporting the legalisation of gay marriage, and widespread opposition to censorship and privacy intrusions.
I made a game! First Snow, a yuri visual novel available now on Steam
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Suriko on
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Our most likely next Prime Minister, ladies and gentlemen.
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Though, I almost feel that the Noalitions not-NBN nonsense might be something of a problem for them.
I wouldn't count The ALP out. Yet.
LET ME HAVE THIS
Liberals still way ahead on polling though. Including on trust with the economy.
Australia's stupid.
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Liberal Party political ads have just begun, independents have pledged a no confidence motion if Rudd won. Looks like snap elections for August, most likely.
Things don't happen often in politics here, but man they happen fast when they do.
Edit: OP updated with an appropriate image.
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At least Krudd is back, always liked him.
Conroy getting booted is a victory for the nation and Lundy was kinda nothing, so all in all we are immediately in a much better position...
And let's not forget that this is the party who put up Barnaby Joyce as Treasurer, aka Mr. "Australia will default on its sovereign debt".
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A mix, but when you have Abbott as the opposing leader and the 2010 election resulting in a minority government that was about as close as the electorate could get to saying that it wasn't happy with any of the choices but disliked Abbott a little bit less. I've no doubt that there are still those in the Labor party who loathe Rudd, but in true politician fashion, looked at the doomsday approaching and decided that if stepping over Julia Gillard's political corpse was the only way to save their own careers then they would do so.
Kevin Rudd, despite everything that has been happening, is still the most popular politician in Australia and is able to talk and explain policy in a much clearer fashion than Gillard was ever able to. She could do it, but was at her best when she was off script, which her handlers seemed to avoid through her entire term as Prime Minister.
While I'm still amazed that Rudd decided to do this, what I do like is that he is a policy guy. Despite being the micromanager that got him kicked out last time he is good at delivering policy clearly, and it's impacts. Part of the friction from when he was PM previously was that he wanted to move the Labour party to the left, there was disagreement and he was turfed out because of it.
He's said so far this afternoon that he wants to make the focus of this election policy, because Abbott has been extremely reluctant to disclose his own thus far, with the Murdoc press keeping the media spotlight focused elsewhere. He's courting younger voters, and now has himself, Albanese as Deputy and Penny Wong as Senate Leader, all of whom are proponents of marriage equality.
If he decides to make that a big issue of his platform, I think the electorate will respond to that. It's an issue that the majority of Australians are behind, it's popular with younger voters and will help drive them out to vote. As long as he makes himself super visible (which I think the media will do anyway given events) and makes a point of contrasting himself and Abbott and their polarising policies it will help a great deal.
Mostly I'd be glad if Penny Wong no longer was forced to vote against her own interests. I thought she would make a perfect Deputy on many levels but I'm still glad she's moving up.
With regards to Gillard before I crash for the night, I think she has had to put up with more bullshit from all corners on so many issues than any other Prime Minster previously. Much of it was inane (lack of marriage, faith, kids and her partner's sexuality) and completely uncalled for. It's hard to argue that that wasn't partly due to the fact she is a woman, and it's to her credit that she has refused to play the gender card through her time.
But I cannot agree with people complaining that was the events of tonight are due to gender. As I said, she's put up with more crap and disrespect that any other PM we've had, but I'm sorry to her and her supporters, you don't get to complain about being voted out at ballot when you have done the same thing previously, even if you did legitimately win an election.
That makes no sense if they're trying to court younger voters.
Apparently the Labor party is promising to set aside several million (I think?) for Northern Territory Education. If they follow through with that after election, it's a huge deal for us over in the isolated North.
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Amusingly the reporter said that Abbot would probably be pretty friendly as his wife is a kiwi
I'm starting a new job in a week =_=
They're not going to scrap the NBN. People have forgotten the golden age of John Howard's "non-core promises" - and I think Tony Abbott is going to find a lot of his very nebulous ideas are exactly that.
At it's core the only thing they actually have to deliver on is not having a budget deficit, and appearing to get there without cutting anything. The thing about the NBN is cutting is doesn't actually save you any money year-to-year - if you don't borrow a whole bunch of money, you're still in as much negative cash-flow as you were before.
My big bet on that one is that they'll rejigger roll-out plans a bit, and probably order NBNCo to do more city deployment then claim they've "done the hardwork and made it more efficient". I'll be pretty surprised if they actually cancel it.
Honestly I'm way more worried about the policy on "boat people". Because if he actually decides "tow them back to Indonesia" is a good idea, then that's going to turn into an international shit storm amazingly quickly once you have Australian warships towing boats full of Sri Lankans back to Indonesian shores.
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
I'd give it three scuttled boats with the associated deaths and media frenzies before the Liberals rethink their idiocy. A Tampa happening every week should be a heavy enough anchor around their necks.
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Because it would hurt the narrative that the Labor party has brought Australia to the brink of economic collapse, and if that's the case (and remember debt is always bad and there is never any justification for it) he gains nothing by walking back the policy before winning an election, especially when it'll cost him nothing to do it afterwards. Remember the big Liberal objection was that the project isn't "audited" properly by whichever commission they think will give them the answer they want. Once they're in charge this will obviously no longer be the case.
There were talks of keeping the NBN, but making it FTTN instead of FTTH and from what I remember, it would be cheaper yes, but doesn't set us up for the future very well.
Which is a shame.
The silliest part is, building an FTTH network would be necessary down the road even if one did build out an FTTN network anyway. It's a complete and utter waste of time and money, that amounts to halfassing the job so they can claim they're different to Labor, whilst throwing out utterly farcical figures for the NBN budget that go up seemingly every month (I think Turnbull was up to claiming $120 billion now?).
Completetely fucking stupid. This kind of nonsensical shit is why I loathe the Liberals.
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Basically it's a great way to spend twice the money for a 1/5th the product.
But like I've been saying: I'm feeling fairly confident we're going to slowly cycle around to staying the course. Trying to cancel the NBN outright would cost a huge amount of money for no gain and however Tony Abbott comes across, the Liberals as a whole do have pragmatic people in their ranks.
Personally the more interesting question is how long will it take for the media to start beating the leadership challenge drum for Malcolm Turnbull again - because whatever else, they got so much mileage out of Gillard/Rudd.
Well in theory FTTN would make that better by making the distance to the local exchange irrelevant. The only copper would be in her neighborhood and the fiber would terminate <1km away instead of the current 4km. There are technologies that can get you 50 Mbps at that range over copper.
But yeah, if you're bothering to do government backing of the whole thing you should just eat the upfront cost and do FTTP to save you from converting your FTTN network in the future.
FTTN is attractive to private companies because it lets them offer an interim service step (at a premium cost) while they wait for the FTTP costs to get lower, but there is no reason to not do FTTP if you're building the network from scratch.
It all ends up at "pay 80% of the cost for 10% of the benefit" - maybe. Which is why at the end of the day I'm pretty sure nothing will change - I suspect the worst case is NBNCo has a slower deployment (but that was kind of inevitable) because at the end of the day Abbott just doesn't know anything about the internet, and doesn't care to and Turnbull's had very cagey reasoning on why FTTH shouldn't be done (he's been doing the ideological Liberal "let the free market do it" thing rather then actually saying it's a bad idea, and lately its shifted to "can't trust Labor to manage it").
So my suspicion is, this'll all be quietly ignored and they'll spin the hell out of why they're still doing it.
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Yet, as far as I know, the thing which John Howard did which did more to stop people coming then anything else was to remove any possibility of gaining asylum seeker status if you arrived in Australia by boat. Whether or not we towed them back (I think 6, maybe?) seems practically irrelevant when you're talking about numbers in the hundreds to thousands.
If the liberal party just came out and said that they were going to tear up the un treaties on refugees that australia has agreed to then at least it would be honest on them.
Or make a point of cracking down on Visa overstays also. Hell anything that would affect (largely) white illegal immigrants. But as it is, the entire issue reeks. It's disgusting. It just feels like it's purely aimed at appealing to and fuelling racist undertones in mainstream australian society.
Australia is a country that is built on immigration, and the best parts of it are where it's multiculturalism shines through. Pretending otherwise is infuriating.
The NBN stuff is just dumb by comparison. And again exemplifies the failure of labor to fully capitalize on the coalition's weakness. It should be very easy to explain to people how doing 50% (or less) of a job for 80% of the price and having it take almost as long to complete and once it is finished to then at some point in the future have to go back and do the remaining 20% at an increased cost is a terrible deal. If only labor were as effective at fighting the opposition as they are at fighting themselves.
I want to fucking high-five Rudd for so effectively putting the Coalition on the back foot with a single speech about it. The entire party's suddenly been tripping over themselves now that they have to meaningfully defend their policies instead of just screaming at Labor about it. I think this, combined with the ad that's just been made, is the beginning of an offensive by Labor to show themselves as a united front, and to force the Liberals to have to explain themselves. Going by the two-party preferred polling now being 50/50, it's working.
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FTTN is NOT on the upgrade path to FTTP. The two are totally different technologies and any time and equipment spent building FTTN is not applicable when you do the inevitable conversion to FTTP. That's a key point that has had very little air time by any of the mainstream media coverage of the issue and to be honest, I was only enlightened to that critical fact when Simon Hackett of Internode explained the technologies behind the NBN years ago.
I'm fairly certain that support for a FTTN would collapse significantly if it were more well known that FTTP from FTTN is not an incremental upgrade but a complete total rebuild. Slightly cheaper now for a fraction of the utility only to be torn up because it's obsolete even now.
Throwing my two cents into the broader political arena, TBH there's probably more than just a few journos who absolutely loathe Kevin Rudd since he was a total prick to them during his first stint as PM as he had a workaholic perspective when it came to press access of doing it his way or get out of the way (Some of the complaints were that he gave no advanced notice of where he'll be so the journos were often left scrambling after him). They only tolerated him because his near invincible public support meant they wouldn't be able to get much traction with spreading rumours or kicking the dead horse on leadership speculations. Which of course meant jumping on the chance to take him down after the disastrous Copenhagen climate change forum.
That said, I'm more than a little bit surprised that he's gotten this much clean air time given that the mainstream media seems like they'd rather hang around Abbot to capture every gust of air from him, even if it's a fart.
Edit:
Retracting the first paragraph until I locate a fixed source for that information. As this is a serious discussion, I hold standards that what I put in needs to be backed up.
Edit Edit: Ok, I do a bad job in reading the thread. Since someone has found fixed support for the paragraph, I'll unstrike my original statement.
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You can also see why an existing telco would roll out FTTN, though. Spending $15B to leverage your existing network to remain competitive for ~10 years, while you wait for ONTs and the head-end hardware to get cheaper. Combine that projected savings (say maybe your FTTP network now costs $26B instead of $36B) with some time-value of money calculations, and I can see how a company would come to that conclusion.
But that would be terrible policy for the Australian government since the FTTN would cost $30+B, so I hope you guys get your FTTP network.
That said, the project cost ($4000+ per household) seems a bit higher than I would expect from a modern project? Verizon here in the US had gotten their house-passed cost for FTTP down to the $1500 range (though I think the hook-up cost was in the $2300 range due to the ONT) before they quit new deployments. I don't know the NBN plan for rural areas, so I assuming that's a large part of it if they're running FTTP there as well instead of some kind of white-space wireless solution.
Instead, I shall ask if anyone caught Shitsville Express last night on ABC2? It was great - http://www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/shitsvilleexpress.htm
Obviously my sympathies sit with the Labor kid, the Liberal and Liberatarians are nutcases (as they always are) and the Greens one is sort of pretty ok most of the time.
$4000 seems a very odd figure. ~$350 for the ONT, depending on model, a cheap PCD on the side of the house, lead-in fibre about $400 depending on length, and you're only up to $800. Add on a bit to have an electrician install a cat5 port somewhere in the house if you're that way inclined I suppose.
One of the more popular newspapers ran a story about the NBN costing $2000 per household, but it was a total beatup of an article that essentially regarded a whole-house rewiring as an NBN cost. The project's had an extremely rough treatment by the traditional media (print news + pay TV) here, because they're scared out of their wits by people actually having choice in how they get their media and news.
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I just did a rough division of the total projected $36B cost by the ~8.6M households in AUS.
I'm sure it's just something like "well these suburban houses will cost $2k each, then these rural areas will cost $25k each since we have to run an extra 20 miles of fiber".
It's also worth keeping in mind that it's not "2k per family" but more like "2k divided over every family that ever lives in that house". The original phone network probably cost more.