I wonder whether Trump is the sort of guy who'd take credit for something he's no doubt partly responsible for, but mightn't actually like? In this case, he can take part credit for the Labor Party here in Oz gaining an increased majority and our conservative Coalition parties crashing to their worst result in decades.
1. Quick primer on the nuances of Aussie democracy.
We have a House of Representatives with 151 single-member seats, where the government is formed. Voting is preferential (not FPTP), so a candidate in second place on primary votes can overtake the first place candidate by gaining the preference votes of the less popular candidates.
We have a Senate with 76 seats, 12 for each state and 2 for each territory. Half of the state-based senators are up for election each time, while all the territory-based senators face election each time. Voting is a form of proportional representation, meaning that one or two seats from each state are often taken by minor parties or independents.
This combination of voting systems means that the Australian Parliament provides opportunities for voters to elect candidates who support policy platforms that differ from those of the major parties.
Voting is compulsory, the majority of polling places are primary schools, most schools take advantage of their captive audiences to run fund raising sausage sizzles, and so we all buy democracy sausages.
2. Parties
The Australian Labor Party (ALP) is a centre-left party. Its leader is the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, who led the party to a very narrow victory in the 2022 election. As a party of the workers, its colour is red (take note, Yanks!).
The Coalition is a grouping of two conservative parties. The Liberal Party is a party of the centre-right to the right (that is, a party of Classical Liberalism and Free Enterprise). Its leader is Peter Dutton, who is very much of the right wing of the party, and often caricatured as Darth Dutton. Its colour is blue. The National Party is the party of rural Australia; while notionally conservative, farmers never say no to government subsidies.
The Greens are exactly as you'd expect them, to the left of the ALP. They poll about the same as the Nationals but win fewer seats than them as their support is widely and thinly spread.
Pauline Hanson's One Nation is a minor party to the right of the Liberals. It appeals to the same sort of people that Trump appeals to in the USA.
Trumpet of Patriots is a minor party led by businessman Clive Palmer. Palmer had one term in Parliament about a decade ago. He then created the United Australia Party and spent a heap of money in political ads, for a result of zero seats in the 2019 election and one seat in 2022. When the UAP was de-registered, he instead took over TOP. TOP was marketed as a very Trumpian-style party, with Palmer having some definitely Trumpish characteristics such as his litigiousness and his occasional business failures.
3. The Teals
A growing feature of Australian politics has been the Teals. As you might guess from their colour, these are candidates calling for action on climate change, but from the conservative side of politics. At the 2022 election they dragged a swathe of votes from the Liberals and took about six seats in the House of Representatives.
Even more remarkably, in 2022 a Teal won one of the two Senate seats here in the ACT. Since the ACT gained Senate representation in the 1970s, the two seats have been split between the ALP and the Liberals. But in 2022 a Teal beat the Liberals for the second Senate seat.
The result was that while the ALP claimed only a small majority in 2022, the Coalition was a very distant second.
4. The election campaign
Not surprisingly, the major parties ran a bunch of negative ads, although the ALP did a fair bit to remind people of what they have achieved in the last three years. By contrast, the Liberals couldn't decide what they wanted. Policies would be announced one day and then walked back a few days later when they turned out wildly unpopular or impractical, and Dutton himself was often drawn to his own Trumpian dark side.
TOP invited that charming USAnian Putin apologist Mothertucker Carlson to Australia a few months ago, to allow him to gush about Palmer the way he does about Trump and Putin. Their political ads were as frequent as ads by the major parties, and they attacked everyone, even their Pauline Hanson fellow travellers. When I checked out their website, they actually had a couple of half-decent policy ideas, but you'd never have known that if you relied on their advertising as they never mentioned their own policies.
The Greens were invisible. I don't remember seeing a single ad for them.
Here in my electorate, held by a fairly anonymous ALP drone, we had a high-profile campaign by a Teal.
5. The result
The short of it - the ALP has gained about 10 seats and the Coalition has lost about 10 seats. This makes Anthony Albanese the first person to win successive elections since 2004, which says something about how politically unsettled Australia has been in the last two decades. One of the Coalition losers was Opposition Leader Peter Dutton - the first time an Opposition Leader has lost his seat.
The other Coalition loser was the Coalition itself. They consciously presented themselves as parties of the right, rather than shifting towards the centre to try to win back Teal voters, and ended up losing votes on the right anyway, mostly to Pauline Hanson.
The Greens also lost votes. Over the last Parliament they had the opportunity to help the ALP emplace some decent progressive policies. Instead they joined the Coalition to block these policies in the Senate, because they weren't progressive enough. It was a stupid display of ideological purity, all the more stupid because it's not the first time they've done this sort of thing, and the voters seem to have remembered.
My seat? It's too early to be sure, but our Teal candidate looks like she's won. And as a Teal voter I have to say I'm pretty happy with that result.
And TOP? After all that advertising, they got about 2% of the vote. It would seem their trumpets were modelled on Monty Python trumpets.
I wonder if Mothertucker Carlson will have anything to say about his involvement with TOP, or if Trump and his "advisors" will learn anything. At the very least, I hope that sensible USAnians will draw some comfort from the Trump-rejecting results here and in Canada.
6. Conclusion
Okay, sorry about that. I just wanted to get it off my chest. For the first time in months the future looks a little brighter.
