dolorosa_12 | (Reply)

From:

What you say makes a lot of sense. I never know how much to trust my own perception of the situation, because a) I haven't lived in Australia since 2008, so I'm well aware that I'm getting information secondhand, from a small circle of family and friends whose views aren't representative and b) even before I left the country I knew I lived in a leftwing bubble, and I've been burned before by assuming our attitudes were held universally. But I totally agree with what you're saying regarding even Liberal voters being pissed off with Morrison — Australians are many things, but we aren't very religious, and evangelical Christianity is an extremist religion by Australian standards.

I have seen bits and pieces about the Liberal party believing the problem is they weren't right wing enough. Time will tell if that works out for them, but I think that's yet another sign they're clueless fuckwits.

I agree with you within the current electoral system. My real concern is that they'll wise up to the fact that preferential voting and compulsory voting benefit the centre-left (I know this sounds strange given that Australia tends to have Coalition governments more often than it has Labor ones, but the point is that the electoral system tends not to give Coalition governments a huge majority, and therefore they get restrained to a certain extent from doing very right-wing things). I have this dark fear that they'll campaign for the next election on a platform of abolishing compulsory and preferential voting (i.e. they'll take these things to a referendum, were they to get elected), and, with a cheerleading Murdoch press they might get away with it. Everyone I've raised this with so far has told me that I'm being hysterical and paranoid, but the problem is that I've lived in the UK for the past thirteen years, and this swing to the far-right (accompanied by various changes in legislation that make it illegal to protest, attempt to remove the independence of the judiciary, remove the independence of the UK electoral commission, and implement voter ID laws like in the US) happened so quickly and so brutally that it's now basically impossible to reverse.

I hear you re: the situation in Victoria. I remember all of that, and thought it was disgusting. There was a similar sentiment expressed towards people living in overseas countries in relation to the border closures and hotel quarantine, a smugness that Australians were so much better than everyone else at handling the pandemic, and that each individual Australian had personally done something so clever and self-sacrificing and wonderful to keep Covid out of the country, unlike all the diseased and stupid people in Europe. It really made me so angry.