Australian Politics

Some snippets:

The Senate has a number of tools available to force transparency and accountability of the Government.

One measure is the ability to initiate an inquiry into an issue. This requires a majority vote of the Senate. The LNP and Greens would have to join forces (38 votes), with at least one independent (39+ votes), to get an inquiry up in the face of Labor opposition. Getting the LNP and Greens to agree might be challenging, but if that occurs, it won’t be hard to get at least one independent onboard.

The reader can easily imagine the difficulties of getting the LNP and Greens to align on an inquiry. There will certainly be no inquiries on “drill baby drill” or “LGBTQI rights in the community” while such an inquiry requires right-and-left support.

Arguably related: https://aussie.zone/post/20645968

At the Prime Minister’s Press Club address, Albanese stated curtly, repeatedly that ‘Australia is not selling weapons to Israel’.

This is unequivocally not true in any way that actually matters.

Not only have US airstrikes been coordinated and launched from Australian bases, not only has Australia’s political and media class endlessly covered for Israel’s war crimes, but Australia’s ‘defence’ industry has profited from the sale of deadly devices to Israel. The list of exports to Israel after October 7, acquired under FOI by Declassified Australia, is 90 fucking pages long. New armaments contracts have even been signed deep into what Amnesty International last week described as a ‘livestreamed genocide’ – again, seemingly without anyone in the Australian press noticing.

Like a lawyer looking for weasel-y loopholes, Albanese is basing the ‘truthiness’ of his claim on the difference between selling weapons and selling weapons components. This is like claiming IKEA doesn’t sell furniture, only furniture components. The hairs he is splitting are on the heads of murdered Palestinians.

SBS because ABC and Guardian want everything to be part of a live blog apparently.

Anonymous survey from the people behind Vote Compass. They're interested in hearing from people about how and why they voted.

Dan Repacholi, the re-elected Hunter MP, has been named to an envoy role responsible for men’s health after starting some national conversations on that issue in his first term

I can’t recall they’re being a minister or special envoy for men’s health before. Is this a first?

In short, independents and minor parties combined got more vote than a major party (the LNP coalition). I think this is actually great news, it shows how well ranked choice and proportional voting work to empower smaller parties and diversify them.

The Greens’ federal election result has been widely condemned as a “disaster”.

The party has been all but wiped out in the House of Representatives. It has lost three of its four members, including leader Adam Bandt, who has just conceded his once safe seat of Melbourne. This leaves the Brisbane electorate of Ryan as the Greens’ only remaining seat in the lower house.

Yet the tired explanations being rolled out – the party is too extreme, too obstructionist, too distant from a mythical single-issue environmentalist past – misidentify the party’s dilemmas.

And they overlook the fact the Greens’ influence will be greater in the new parliament, at least in the Senate.

(The author seems to be in a pretty unique position to comment, given that they literally wrote a PhD thesis on the Greens a few years ago)

In short:

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's defection to the Liberal Party has been criticised by some insiders as an attempt to assist the party's conservative wing.

But she says the Liberal Party needs strong people "more than ever" in the wake of its election loss.

What's next?

The Liberal Party is expected to meet at 10am on Tuesday in Canberra to elect a leader of the opposition and a deputy.

LNP Senator James McGrath has weighed in on the upcoming Liberal leadership ballot, saying he is “cautiously optimistic” of Harold Holt’s chances of being returned from the dead and clinching the top spot.

“I think it’s a little bit premature to be making predictions about who might be the next Liberal Leader when we don’t know yet if Harold Holt will be returning to the party and throwing his hat in the ring. We need to consider all possibilities and we can’t start rushing to any fairyland judgements,” McGrath said.

Fresh from his election victory, the prime minister takes on the Greens for blocking key policies in the Senate, singling out one MP who lost his seat at the election.

Since the recent election there's a lot of commentary saying the Liberal party needs to reconsider its policies and re-align with its core values which, when enumerated sound very centrist.

I just watched ABC's q&a, there was a few interesting points. There was a strong consensus that Trump style culture wars are toxic in Australian politics, and that it's unlikely future candidates would take that route.

I don't want to gloat infront of the seppos, but I think what's happening during this aftermath is very salient for all of those "both sides are bad" Americans.

In October last year there seemed to be a lot of users saying that they didn't want to reward the dems with their vote, and that the only way to communicate with the party was to withhold their vote.

I think what's happening right now in Australia demonstrates the importance of voting.

Labor might not be left enough for you personally, but each time the libs are defeated they need to move to the left to be viable, and Labor will have to move further left to differentiate themselves. That is to say, the spectrum of acceptable opinions is moving to the left in an observable manner, right now.

In short:

A high number of informal votes in a rural NSW electorate with a record number of candidates has been labelled "shameful" by the region's MP.

By May 6 more than 11,000 informal votes had been recorded in the Riverina electorate, accounting for more than 10 per cent of the voter turnout.

What's next?

Riverina MP Michael McCormack and political scientist Dominic O'Sullivan say the voting system should be reformed.

The Coalition should resist seeing Trump as a natural disaster over which they had no control. Peter Dutton made many other missteps that doomed his party’s chances.

Hello! Maybe this is the wrong place as I'm sure there are a lot of political aficionados here, but I did a little write-up on the little quirks, key seats, and unexpected results of Saturday's election. I've personally found it kinda annoying to trawl through ABC and Poll Pludger on a seat-by-seat basis, so I thought I'd give more of a state-focused overview on what's happened for those that haven't really looked into the finer details of the results yet.

NSW

• Labor retain all of (and grow their margins in) their marginal seats, and gain marginal seats of Banks, Bennelong, and Hughes (thanks to a big redistribution of the district area) from the Liberal party.
• Independent (and former Nationals member) Andrew Gee has gained Calare from his old party.
• Independent Nicolette Boele is likely to gain the seat of Bradfield from the Liberal party.
• Independent Dai Le retains her marginal seat of Fowler.

VIC

• Labor gains the marginal seats of Deakin and (probably) Menzies from the Liberal party. Labor also have a good chance of winning Melbourne back from The Greens, partially due to a redistribution of the district area.
• Labor risk losing their (formerly) safe seat of Bendigo to the Nationals.
• Another safe Labor seat, Calwell, is challenged by multiple independents (making the count difficult/slower), but Labor are likely to retain.
• Similarly, the Liberal seat of Monash has a close, complicated count, but is likely to remain unchanged.
• Goldstein remains a toss-up between incumbent independent Zoe Daniel and the Liberal party.
• Independent Monique Ryan is fairly likely to retain Kooyong.
• The marginal Liberal seat of Casey has bucked the trend and been retained, with a modest swing away from Labor.

QLD

• Labor has won marginal seats Bonner, Dickson, Leichhardt, Forde, and Petrie from the LNP. Longman may join this list, but still remains a coin toss.
• Labor has gained Brisbane and Griffith from The Greens. Ryan should be retained by The Greens. A lot of these big swings are shaped more so by the 2CP count rather than changes in The Green's primary vote.
• Flynn is the one marginal LNP seat that has bucked the trend, being retained with a strengthened LNP vote.

WA

• Labor has claimed the marginal seat of Moore from the Liberal party. Probably helped by ex-Liberal incumbent MP Ian Goodenough running as an independent against his old party.
• Labor have also held onto (and strengthened their result in) Tangney, a key marginal seat they swung in their favour in 2022.
• The new seat of Bullwinkel is likely to be claimed by Labor in a very close contest (currently only 85 votes difference, out of 89000 votes total!). This seat is perhaps one of the more curious ones in Australia atm, it looks like one of those American gerrymandered districts - the area is largely around the conservative Wheatbelt and Perth Hills region, but contains a thin sliver of Labor's stronghold suburbs to the far east of Perth.
• Forrest will likely be retained by the Liberal party, although independent Sue Chapman has given them a good challenge.
• Regional areas showed very strong swings towards the Liberal party, even in the semi-metropolitan area of Canning. The 'Keep The Sheep' campaign has been very vocal and this likely reflects their efforts (although this is only really relevant to Canning, the only seat possibly within Labor's reach this time).
• Fremantle (one of Labor's safest seats nationally!) looks like it could be lost to independent Kate Hulett. A super thin margin on this, so we'll need to wait and see. I think this would be the first example of a "teal independent" targeting a safe Labor seat - to my knowledge all others have targeted safe LNP seats. If Kate gets in, this could really shape the way people see this political movement going forwards.
• Kate Chaney has held on to retain Curtin as an independent, but only slightly improved her narrow 2022 margin. This seems to be the case with many returning teal independents - a strong Liberal performance in 2028 could see them as some of the first seats to fall.

SA

• Labor has gained the marginal seat of Sturt from the Liberal party, and strengthened their lead in all other seats.
• The Liberal party holds on to two seats; Barker and Grey (the latter in spite of a strong effort from independent Anita Kuss)

TAS

• Huge swings to the ALP has seen them secure the two Liberal-held seats of Bass and Braddon. Labor will also retain their safe seat of Franklin despite a decent challenge from independent Peter George.
• The only non-Labor-held seat is now Clark, held comfortably by independent Andrew Wilkie.

ACT

• Very likely no changes, with ALP retaining their three seats despite a bit of competition from independent Jessie Price in Bean.

NT

• Labor retain their two seats. There was a considerable swing against them in Solomon (Darwin/Palmerston), but a roughly equal swing towards them in Lingiari (the rest of the NT).

SENATE

• The senate takes longer to count, so this is more of a preliminary analysis. Long story short, nothing too drastic has changed. ALP is likely to gain at least 3 senators; LNP has likely lost 5 senators. One Nation may gain up to 2 of these senator positions lost by the LNP, but Labor are probably front-runners for these spots. The best case scenario for Labor would be that they only have to rely on the Greens (and not other crossbenchers) for a majority.
• In each of the 5 big states, the LNP appear very likely to lose one senator. These spots are likely to be gained by ALP senators, but One Nation could potentially compete for this spot in both WA and SA.
• ACT and NT unsurprisingly remain unchanged. The Liberal party has plummeted to 15-20% of the primary vote in ACT - maybe threatening to sack a large portion of the population of the territory wasn't a great idea.
• Other parties are probably unaffected in the senate (QLD looks like they're going to re-elect Malcolm Roberts for One Nation :/). There's an outside chance that Jacqui Lambie loses her spot to Labor in Tasmania, but it's too early to say.

Summary

• Labor gained a lot of seats from the Liberal party, strengthening their position in the House Of Representatives. The Nationals seemed largely immune to this swing.
• Independents also did fairly well in this election, with incumbents retaining and newcomers gaining several seats, continuing the huge rise of independents we saw in 2022.
• The Greens would be concerned that their primary vote has stagnated following a decent rise in 2022. Their big loss of seats was mostly out of their control (due to changes in 2CP counts, plus the redistribution of Melbourne), although there was still a considerable swing against Bandt.
• One Nation are still a fair ways off having much power, but their primary vote grew in every state, about 1-3% of the total vote. Considering they only have ~6% of the national primary, this is a fairly decent increase for them.
• Australia continues to ignore Clive Palmer. God bless this country.

Let me know your thoughts/insights! I'd love to hear any personal experience/vibes from seats you know about.