Aren't we Five Eyes nation members all affected by this? The U.S. should pull out of this. We need to re-assert privacy rights and avoid trade as much as possible with any countries that enact these kind of laws.
But yes, we can't cut the cord fast enough. Still, trade is another matter than shared mass surveillance. If the USG is sharing our data with the CCP, I'd very much want some people fired and perhaps jailed over it.
If by "our" you mean Western governments, Western countries are all democracies. If Western governments have switched to economy over everything mode, that's because that's what the electorate wants.
My family is pretty politically diverse and I would say none of them are ever happy with that is going on over the last 10+ years outside of a few things. Its just people making a choice about what they hate less.
US will never pull out of FVEY the reach they get is the main reason they started the alliance. The US doesn’t need massive overseas bases in places where it may not be possible or feasible when it has partners like Australia and New Zealand.
The US will not pull out of Five Eyes because it enables the US to circumvent the constitutional rights of its own citizens via proxy. This has been used in multiple high-profile cases to catch cybercriminals.
The government does not give back power it manages to hoard for itself. This is the fundamental problem with modern progressive liberalism and anti-choice conservatism. When you give the government power, it WILL use said power against you.
Not a single government in human history has not turned on its citizens.
We can refer to both now as acts because — in what is an increasing trend in the Australian Parliament — the bills flew through both houses in a single day.
Why is this an increasing trend? Voting is mandatory…so are voters more trusting of their institutions or just apathetic?
Voting is compulsory at federal elections, by-elections and referendums for those on the electoral roll, as well as for State and Territory elections. Australia enforces compulsory voting.[24] People in this situation are asked to explain their failure to vote. If no satisfactory reason is provided (for example, illness or religious prohibition), a fine of up to $170 is imposed,[25] and failure to pay the fine may result in a court hearing and additional costs. About 5% of enrolled voters fail to vote at most elections
Compulsory voting does not imply a politically engaged populace. I believe the majority of voters do not enjoy the requirement to attend on polling day, and treat the whole affair like supporting a football team. Except they care a lot less about the election results than their football team. Mandatory voting probably has the effect of protecting the two major parties more than anything else.
There was a surge in minor parties in the Senate about a decade ago. In the (very large) Senate ballot you were able to vote for a single party, and their official preferences registered with the Electoral Commission were automatically applied to the entire form. Minor parties with similar policies were obviously preferencing each other, and preferencing major parties very low. (The whole point of a minor party, sometimes a single issue party, is a significant deviation from the uncontested policy agreed upon by both major parties). So the process was changed and now the voter has to manually nominate at least 6 parties on the Senate ballot form. The effect of this is even the motivated voter with interest in the policies of a minor party cannot usually name 6 that they prefer over the 2 major parties, and so one (if not both) will end up getting a reasonably high vote preference when the previous scheme would have seen them near the bottom. This further secured the position of the two major parties.
Even though people may not be engaged in politics mandatory voting is important. It reduces extremist politics and the constant need to be increasingly divisive. It forces regression to the mean.
In non mandatory voting systems the politicians need to motivate people to the polls. The default of the population is apathy so to generate action you appeal to the extremes who are the most likely to act. The more people you can make act the more you can get to vote for you.
But with mandatory voting the apathetic mass (who are most likely to be moderates as they don't really care but generally are reasonable educated people and don't agree with the extremist views) cast almost random votes which smoothes out the skew to the extremes non mandatory voting causes.
Except this implies that disagreement on any policies agreed upon by the two major parties is extremist. What is the solution to issues where both parties perpetuate the status quo?
I would suggest reversing the Senate ballot 6 votes rule. We can have status quo in the lower house, and negotiation with minor parties representing the population on issues they deem most important - and handled incorrectly by the major parties - in the Senate.
It is important to note that you are making an argument for outcomes where the design of the system should be philosophical. What system best represents the will of the people? (Or whatever question best frames this problem. This is troublesome and often prejudicial.) It's the subsequent application of this system that is the people's voice. We should not be designing a system to get the political outcome you prefer.
It's not extremist politics. There was no TV marketing about how x group is the devil and they need this law to stop it. The government just passed quickly without much publicity. The average Australian is not radicalized like Americans are and they generally do not hate peoples existence based on how they vote / make their vote their identify.
There is no such thing as "a group of liberal supporters protesting" like you see with trump and biden supporters.
The Australians voted for these parties who then pass this policy. This policy is extreme. That sure seems like extremist politics to me.
I don't get why you are talking about the US. This policy was passed by Australia. I am not saying that non mandatory voting will avoid extremist politics. All I am saying is that mandatory voting is not a silver bullet to avoiding extremism.
The Australians who voted for these parties largely do not give two shits about the bills, because a) unlike HN, they don't understand them, why they're bad or any of the consequences, and b) because the media monopoly here ensures they don't get adequate explanation or coverage, which in turn feeds a).
I agree with GP that this is less about the Australian population being extremist or facilitating extremism as much is it is about voter apathy and a lack of proper coverage or education on these bills.
I feel like even when they do get coverage it doesn't matter. This issue has had plenty of coverage but the situation is pretty much "yeah? well what are you gonna do about it? Both parties support it"
Even the greens have been supporting objectionable laws relating to tech. I feel a good chunk of people do care but there is not a single thing that can be done about it.
Just because the average person doesn't know what bills are passed is irrelevant to what I am saying.
All I am saying is that forcing people to vote has no impact on stopping extreme policies. If you were correct Australia wouldn't have passed this and other similar laws over the past few years.
I agree that voter apathy can lead to extreme policies passing. That point is irrelevant to what I was trying to convey that extreme policies are still passed despite mandatory voting.
Compulsory voting in an unengaged populace can only serve to lower signal-to-noise ratio. How many times do we need to relearn "garbage in, garbage out"? The responsible ballot choice when uninformed is "abstain". AFAIA, Australia doesn't provide that option.
Also, the intransigent moderates you mentioned create inertia biased toward status quo and inhibits appropriate policy action and change (see e.g. the slow-moving trainwreck of climate destabilization).
Disengaged voters will simply vote for the current leadership or loudest guy, typically the same thing, without a thought towards the issues.
Strongmen love compulsory voting, it creates a false perception of legitimacy, because corruption or no corruption, if only 30% of a population is engaged in the issues and the other 70% could give two shits, that is a slamdunk for incumbents.
There's some evidence for this. Chile adopted voluntary voting in 2012. According to this study[0] this decreased the incumbent's advantage in the elections that follower.
To be precise, there isn't a specific "Abstain" option on the ballot paper, but it is perfectly legal to leave the ballot blank. After all, if they could trace blank ballots back to the voter to punish them, it wouldn't be a secret ballot.
For context, "informal votes" (i.e. those votes which are rejected at the counting stage) have typically accounted for less than 5% of votes cast, and blank votes were about 20% of the votes cast in the 2001 federal election[0]. That suggests that about 1% of the population is "abstaining" in this way.
> who are most likely to be moderates as they don't really care but generally are reasonable educated people and don't agree with the extremist views
Except this isn’t true. Non voters are significantly less educated than voters. This creates paradoxes like both Trump and Biden voters being wealthier and more educated than the average American.
Non-voters are less likely to be “extremist” in the sense of having strong party loyalties. But they’re much more likely to host a whole myriad range of beliefs that are disproportionately found amount the least educated and aware. They’re more likely to believe in psychics or be 9/11 truthers or to think Bill Gates is tracking people with Covid vaccine microchips.
> But with mandatory voting the apathetic mass (who are most likely to be moderates as they don't really care but generally are reasonable educated people and don't agree with the extremist views) cast almost random votes which smoothes out the skew to the extremes non mandatory voting causes.
Pure moderates aka centrists don't exist. Those people average out to be moderate but they're actually "cross-pressured" - they have crazy beliefs that are inconsistent because they never thought about them.
The one constant is that nobody in real life is a libertarian, even though you always run into them on the internet.
There was a surge in minor parties in the Senate about a decade ago. In the (very large) Senate ballot you were able to vote for a single party, and their official preferences registered with the Electoral Commission were automatically applied to the entire form. Minor parties with similar policies were obviously preferencing each other, and preferencing major parties very low. (The whole point of a minor party, sometimes a single issue party, is a significant deviation from the uncontested policy agreed upon by both major parties). So the process was changed and now the voter has to manually nominate at least 6 parties on the Senate ballot form. The effect of this is even the motivated voter with interest in the policies of a minor party cannot usually name 6 that they prefer over the 2 major parties, and so one (if not both) will end up getting a reasonably high vote preference when the previous scheme would have seen them near the bottom. This further secured the position of the two major parties.
The previous system was being actively gamed. Because the Group Ticket Votes flowed between candidates in unnaturally high proportions, it was possible to snowball your way to election from a very small number of initial votes. How small? Wayne Dropulich of the Sports Party initially won election with 0.2% of the initial first preference votes.
This possibility meant that there was a large incentive to create a minor party and join a large preference-sharing network of parties which shared little in the way of ideology. No-one knew who was going to get the Senate seat when the music stopped, but it was a pretty good lottery to enter. You may remember Ricky Muir of the Motoring Enthusiasts Party, who won election based on above-the-line preference flows from these groups: Bank Reform Party, Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party, HEMP Party, Shooters and Fishers, Australian Stable Population Party, Senator Online, Building Australia Party, Family First Party, Bullet Train For Australia, Rise Up Australia Party, No Carbon Tax Climate Sceptics, Citizens Electoral Council, Palmer United Party, Democratic Labour Party, Katter's Australian Party, Socialist Equality Party, Australian Sex Party, Australian Voice Party, Wikileaks Party, Drug Law Reform, Stop CSG, Animal Justice Party, and the Australian Independents Party. That's right, the vegans of the Animal Justice Party together with the Shooters and Fishers - I'm sure that's all about well-considered ideology?
The problem was that the previous system gave you two choices - you could rank all of the candidates - often well over a hundred - or you could accept another party voting for you. The new system instead allows you to rank the groups, of which there is a far more manageable number (and the groups are far more recognisable to candidates in most instances than the candidates anyway) - or you can still rank all 100+ candidates, if you like - or as few as 6.
The system after the abolition of group ticket voting more closely reflects voters democratic choices. The big parties get a lot of seats for the entirely unsurprising reason that a lot of people vote for them!
We don't vote on every bill, we vote on preferred parties every 3 years. It's still a predominantly 2-party dominated system though, and there's basically zero difference between the two on issues like this.
How do we vote for and elect representatives in sufficient quantities that will throw out privacy and security overreaches like this?
Very few of the representatives in both houses will understand the technical means, underpinnings, and exploit and overreach potential of these bills because they simply don't understand the technology in the middle.
All a party/member needs to do is draft the bill and then cause enuf fear and panic in a sitting parliament for the large majority of representatives to pass it. Are these things even being challenged in parliament? Who objects to this who understands it?
Recent bias/availability heuristic being what it is this might not be a fair assessment: but my recollection is there has been 1 person ever who’s been able to engage on these topics. I thought it was an independent, but I also thought their name was Scott Ludlum. But a quick Google tells me he was the deputy leader of the Greens so my recollection is wrong on at least one of those fronts.
Which is exactly the problem: A single example that is but a distant memory. No contemporaries that can challenge the status quo.
I think one solution could be to vote in a faceless/anonymous type candidate that simply provides the context/details up for any vote, then votes based on the outcome of a live poll from their constituents.
There would be several tech challenges, but it could provide a more pure form of the people’s will.
My theory is none of the parties object to it because its in both their interests to pass it. Labour or Liberal, both do not care about privacy or "digital rights", because it benefits them to spy on citizens.
Empower third parties to hold the balance of power. We did it last century with the Democrats and it moved the needle on some vital issues. We can do it this century with the Greens.
It also sets up conditions by which people have no choice but to make a choice which is in their own interest, rather than having a political process built on vote suppression, non-participation and the kind of clientelism which arises when politicians are more concerned with energizing their own base than expanding their appeal.
Quoting political scientist Waleed Aly:
"In a compulsory election, it does not pay to energize your base to the exclusion of all other voters. Since elections cannot be determined by turnout, they are decided by swing voters and won in the center... That is one reason Australia’s version of the far right lacks anything like the power of its European or American counterparts. Australia has had some bad governments, but it hasn’t had any truly extreme ones and it isn’t nearly as vulnerable to demagogues"
I think your point about compulsory voting creating ripe conditions for more propaganda is not borne out by reality - the USA is just as flooded with fake news as Australia.
I enjoy the quote from a political scientist, while ignoring the reality.
In Australia we have an example of what happens when you force everyone to vote. It’s not going well, they literally have concentration camps, ask for papers, don’t let you leave your homes, etc.
> I think your point about compulsory voting creating ripe conditions for more propaganda is not borne out by reality - the USA is just as flooded with fake news as Australia.
I think you assume what you see on TV is legit news. I agree, you see the same “fake news” everywhere. The problem, is those who believe fake news are often not those voting because they don’t do their own research, they aren’t engaged. You want the engaged going to vote, because they’re engaging with society. Forcing everyone to vote is basically a recipe for getting the candidate that “gifts” the most to the people. It’ll be the downfall of nations.
> It’s not going well, they literally have concentration camps, ask for papers, don’t let you leave your homes, etc.
Anyone who thinks this is actually what is happening in Australia is falling for propaganda.
> they literally have concentration camps
Offshore detention centres for refugees seeking asylum is a stain on Australia that cannot be excused or erased.
If you mean the quarantine centres they are finally building then.. they are nothing like concentration camps. They are a better alternative than the hotel quarantine system they have been trying and failing to make work until now.
And within 12 months we'll hopefully have vaccine rates hight enough travel for vaccinated people can get back to normal and they'll only be needed for people who choose not to be vaccinated and choose to come to Australia.
> ask for papers
I assume this is asking for vaccine certification? Seems reasonable, given our failure to get enough people vaccinated quickly enough.
> don’t let you leave your homes
I think this refers to home quarantine? That people in quarantine aren't allowed to leave their homes seems kind of the point?
> vaccine passports haven't been implemented in Australia yet.
The lack of vaccine passports is of little consolation when its citizens have already accepted this:
"The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person."
That is specifically about enforcement of home quarantine as an alternative to hotel quarantine for interstate travel. It's not generally applicable in any way.
Sorry, I should have provided more clarifying context. My point wasn't that this was a general policy, but that Australians have accepted a system of self- and AI-administered biometric constant surveillance for at least some citizens, some of the time. I could easily see this being used to enforce future lockdowns.
That didn't sound like the point you were making, and others agree with me. Everyone is responding to you thinking that you were criticizing mandatory or compulsory voting, not universal suffrage. Your choice of words "forced to vote" rather than "right to vote" conveyed that meaning.
Forcing people to vote is universal suffrage on steroids. I don’t think universal suffrage is good be default (it might be idk), but I think forcing the vote takes the worst parts of universal suffrage, uninformed and/or indifferent population voting, and over samples that group
When I first moved to Australia I rankled at compulsory voting as I believe that not participating is a valid political act. Countries without compulsory voting talk about the turnout as relative to previous years, and if it falls too far there will be questions about a mandate to govern.
In Australia that can't happen as turnout is always high, this leads to very little opportunity to overhaul the mechanism of elections to make it more applicable to the community, or to overhaul political parties entirely. Red team or Blue team are guaranteed some high proportion of the country voting for them and it gives a false sense of relevance.
However I'm now fully in favour of compulsory voting. Why?
Look at America, what an absolute shambles of a democratic system. One party spending decades attempting to stop black people voting. Voter suppression and gerrymandering (also not possible in Australia) baked into the political system. No thanks.
Australian politicians are no better, they would reach for those tactics in a heartbeat, compulsory voting stops us from heading down that path. There is no utopia, the system has problems, but the trade-off is worth it.
As an Australian living in America for 10 years you absolutely nailed it; compulsory voting effectively prevents what is the worst part of American democracy - the unceasing efforts to stop people voting .
Plenty of other bs, but at least the right to participate is guaranteed.
> compulsory voting effectively prevents what is the worst part of American democracy - the unceasing efforts to stop people voting
No, it doesn't; sloppy, deliberately overbroad purges of voter rolls (without notification of the targets) are a key voter suppression technique, and are not at all impaired by compulsory voting.
Are you Australian? I’m asking because I’m not aware of of that(very American) tactic being employed in Australia. Imho the requirement of voting moves the window of what’s acceptable in terms of voter rolls - I can’t think of one time I’ve heard of purging being employed inappropriately in aus. And I can’t really imagine a party getting away with it.
I could of course just be blissfully unaware, and it actually occurs all the time.
I am American, and I was reading “compulsory voting effectively prevents what is the worst part of American democracy - the unceasing efforts to stop people voting” as a claim that, applied where those efforts occur, compulsory voting would be an effective and adequate remedy, rather than “In Australia, compulsory voting exists and the efforts seen to suppress voting seen in America do not”.
AFAIK (which, I’ll admit, isn’t very far—my knowledge of domestic Australian politics is more of a very light random smattering than the result of any focussed study), you are correct that those don't tend to occur in Australia.
I understand your point now, thanks! I agree somewhat; if all you changed tomorrow in the USA was to make voting compulsory, you would immediately see redoubled efforts in purging rolls etc.
I agree I probably overstated, there would still be ways to stop people voting. Although it cuts out many many avenues, so you would imagine(hope?) the overall disenfranchisement would be significantly less, and decrease over time as the attitude of voting entitlement sets in.
> Look at America, what an absolute shambles of a democratic system. One party spending decades attempting to stop black people voting. Voter suppression and gerrymandering (also not possible in Australia) baked into the political system. No thanks.
It’s always interesting to see this essentially fake narrative. No one is trying to stop anyone from voting. It’s made up, to try and role the base, the same way you describe —- it increases turnout for the left. So they push the fake narrative.
Anyway, I see your point. But the US is an entirely different beast. As much as people want to knock it, the system is extremely robust. The federal government really isn’t supposed to have a mandate. That’s essentially the entire left and right debate in the US. States rights vs federal rights.
The issue you’re seeing in the US are that the left are socialist/Marxists who want a strong federal gov (authoritarian). The right believes that’s anti-American, and believes we should have strong states and personal freedom (Republican). If the left stopped trying to enact federal control (through monetary, economic, political, etc), the right would be totally happy. California would do its thing and Tennessee would do theirs, the best would win.
Unfortunately, that’s not what we’re doing.
This literally goes all the way back to the founding with the federalists (John Adam’s) and anti-federalists (Thomas Jefferson). The system is dysfunctional by design, the goal was never to have a strong government and while its tense, you have more freedom and security than just about anywhere.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked, "What's the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?"
Carvin responded, "Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game."
If you are saying the Republican Party has spent decades trying to stop black people from voting, that is simply incorrect. It is what the other party’s propaganda would like you to believe. Same with voter suppression.
Southern conservative as Democrats or Republicans like Jesse Helms and Trent Lott were very much in favor of not letting African Americans vote. Who they caucused with later is unrelated.
But yes, to say it was Democrats or Republicans would be very technically inaccurate.
It isn’t a coincidence that the states that were practicing Jim Crow before are the same states trying to discourage voting today.
"Texas ranks number 10 overall when it comes to engagement among African American voters, including being first overall in proportional representation of blacks in state legislature and national party conventions."
The reality on the ground is that all Western European nations have stricter voting laws / requirements than the US does and almost nobody on HN will dare to talk about that fact because it's inconvenient to the propaganda game.
It's the sick joke of eg Major League Baseball moving the All-Star game from Georgia to protest new voting laws, shifting it to Colorado which already had similar voting laws to those that Georgia wanted to implement. It's all bullshit propaganda.
The same is true of immigration restrictions. You're not supposed to talk about how strict most other affluent nations are when it comes to who they let into their countries to become citizens.
Can you imagine the global uproar if the US began a cultural genocide program against Muslims like Denmark is aggressively doing? Forcibly taking children away from their parents to be re-educated via nationalist propaganda and forced value systems.
How about something less sinister - a national ban on full face veils like France, with punishment by forced re-education. The US would be called draconian, Islamophobic and racist for such treatment. Meanwhile over there's Macron one step away from calling for a cultural crusade.
When the US does it, it's bad. When everybody else does it, it's logical and good and progressive.
> all Western European nations have stricter voting laws / requirements than the US does
The UK* has never required voting ID for elections, and it is possible to walk into a local polling station and be given a ballot paper after just stating your name and address. Sadly that may no longer be the case for future elections, because the UK Conservative party has decided to introduce a voter ID requirement, modelled on the success that the Republicans have had with it at decreasing turnout especially among the poor and minorities.
The fact that other Western European nations have voter ID laws is likely because they generally have mandatory national ID cards already, and it makes to use those to record who voted (how many times). If Republicans were first pushing for mandatory state ID, then later requiring those IDs at polling time would not be seen as so suspicious.
> The same is true of immigration restrictions.
I'm sure it's possible to find examples of policies in some European countries which are worse than the equivalent US policy, but to provide some factual comparison for how welcoming the US is of (poor) immigrants, let me point out that Sweden hosts 8.52 refugees per 1,000 people while the US hosts 0.92, ranking 13th and 68th respectively on the global league table for this.[0]
But you're right, the US would receive criticism for adopting more bigoted policies, just as France was condemned for its bigoted face veil policy.[1] If you live in the US, it shouldn't be surprising that you hear (and are more sensitivity to) criticism of the US more than criticism of countries like France.
* Technically voter ID was trialled in some English constituencies recently, and it has long been standard in Northern Ireland, so perhaps "Scotland" is a better example of a "Western European nation" here. On the other hand, not every US state requires voter ID, so I hope it's still fair for me to say "the US does" require it.
I think the poll worker would be entitled to perform a citizens arrest at that point, unless "the first person in line to mumble" that was also wearing a very good disguise.
So even without a physical ID document, the poll workers have at least the ability (if not the duty) to remedy a fraudulent vote attempt. The latest US "voting rights" push is to have as few voters as possible physically enter a polling place. Americans aren't grumbling about ID because they hate minorities; they're grumbling because their dead relatives voting in Chicago have been a running joke for 60 years.
You pointing out edge cases isn't a very convincing argument against Europe as a whole.
In general, Europe has more strict voting ID laws (fact).
In general, Europe has more restricted immigration laws (fact). I mean in the US the debate isn't even about who to let in, rather if we should even have a border and allow people to come in as they please.
In general, Europe is more racist. When Orlando Patterson, a renowned race-baiter in the US, surveyed the evidence he found that America was less racist than any other white-majority country by far. Americans are more open than Europeans to living next to a neighbor of a difference race. And we have sharply rising level of intermarriages.
I think you are making some reasonable points here, even though I don't agree with all of them. You're right that I was cherry-picking the example of the UK (just as the comment I responded to was cherry-picking examples of French and Danish policies) but I think I was justified in doing so since the other comment said "all Western European nations". Perhaps the difference between "all" and "nearly all" is not worth quibbling over, but my cherry-picked example does show that it's perfectly possible for a country to have legitimate elections without voter ID, which I think is relevant here.
Your comment would probably be more convincing if you provided some citations for your claims, though. The EU average for refugee population, on the link I gave last time, is 2.3 per 1,000 people and the European average is 2.01 per, which are both twice as much as the US. I suppose it's possible that Europe is more welcoming of refugees than other immigrants, but I think your second "fact" is not self-evidently true. The only policy you might have in mind is that EU states can, in some circumstances, expel citizens from other states, despite freedom of movement[0] and the Schengen system, which doesn't have an equivalent in the US as far as I know.
Of all your claims, though, the one that I think most needs to be supported is the idea that not having a border is a mainstream position. I don't think you're saying that every inch of America's land and sea borders need to have an impenetrable physical barrier to even qualify as a border at all, so can you point to an example of an official mainstream party policy saying that there should be no limits on who can enter the country? I'm sure some people on Twitter have suggested that the US shouldn't have a border, but I don't think it has more political support as a policy than, for example, the "shoot to kill" policy suggested by Georgia state Rep. John Yates (R).[1]
Just because they've been trying doesn't mean they've been successful yet. But just pile up more voting restrictions and let's see what happens...its not like Texas has very high voter engagement over all (which is on par with other poor southern states and...Hawaii).
Of black voter engagement (via some metric). Overall they are in the bottom 10 of voter engagement. I guess it should be ok to be compared to Mississippi.
Yeah, that's the problem that the new voting restrictions aim to fix. Likely also the redistricting; both because the Voting Rights Act, by which the federal government prevented Texas (among other states) from wholesale disenfranchisement, is out of the way.
The Democrats say that voting is being discouraged. What is being discouraged is invalid votes, to diminish fraud. Republicans would love to encourage an authentic black vote.
I'm not sure this is true, even as a black republican with several black republican voting family members. My experience is that most black voters are more conservative, but almost always vote based on race rather than policy. This is obviously changing, to skew towards black voters being less conservative- but calling candidates racist will usually trump all other values that go into the voting decision.
Black and Hispanic voters are more socially conservative on average, but they vote for the people that don’t actively work against their interests, as anyone who isn’t a push over should.
I’ll gladly vote for a Republican if I feel like the other side is working against my interests, ideology isn’t a determining factor.
So why do Black people say that Republicans are trying to stop them from voting?
I can't tell if you're completely comfortable with the fact that no evidence exists supporting fraudulent voting, or if you just think it's A-OK to break a few black eggs in order to make the omelette of your desires.
Mandatory voting can be done well if the first two options for every race are "I approve of none of these candidates" and "I approve of all of these candidates". Nobody should be forced to vote for a candidate that they don't want to, but it's also useful to be able to distinguish between a disaffected voter (the first option) and an apathetic voter (the second option). With non-mandatory voting, that distinction is erased, and the winner gets to freely claim that they have a mandate of the masses even if 70% of the eligible populace stayed home because they hate all the candidates.
Minor parties and protest candidates already offer the mechanism for that in Australia, and preferential voting means those protest votes often make a meaningful difference
In my anecdotal experience, people don't care about politics here and will most likely vote on either "I'd rather have a beer with X than Y so I'll vote for X" or "they're both as bad as each other so I'll just vote like my family always have."
IMO it’s the latter, plus a sprinkle of COVID-19 lockdown distraction (source: I’m Australian).
We haven’t had a prime minister see through a full term in quite a while (they keep getting shuffled out mid-term), and right now everyone is so focussed on lockdowns impacting ~60% of the population that it’s hard to stay up to date and focussed on some of these more important bills being put through the system.
This is pretty much it. It's not so much that people do not care about these issues, its that any time they feel spooked about their investment values or taxes, all other issues become irrelevant.
When it comes to authoritarianism Australians are either extremely apathetic or they are generally in favour of more government intervention in private life. Try having a calm and balanced discussion with an Australian about bicycle helmet laws for a wonderful example.
> Try having a calm and balanced discussion with an Australian about bicycle helmet laws for a wonderful example.
As an Australian I’d be curious to know what the argument against them is? (Keeping in mind that most Australians don’t see ‘freedom’ as a terminal goal.)
there's some research suggesting that bicycle helmets are harmful. In part because they are pretty useless at protecting against the type of accidents that actually cause severe head trauma, and then also because they seem to induce risky behaviour from both cyclists and cars around them. And then finally because they significantly reduce uptake of cycling which means people are doing other unhealthy things instead.
(I'm not actually arguing a position here, just saying that this is not as clear cut as you might think).
Not Australian and never been to the continent, but... are bike helmet laws an actual example of authoritarianism? Like, I don't hear about the existence motorcyle helmet laws or seatbelt laws as proof of authoritarianism, aside from fringe groups of protestors (with several of them ironically dying from accidents that would've been survivable with proper safety measures).
It's a little different when you consider that the taxpayer funds everyones healthcare. Most people taking the side of requiring bicycle helmet laws are probably thinking "I don't want my taxes going towards looking after some numpty who was too stubborn to wear a helmet and crashed".
People arguing this position are assuming that requiring helmets will decrease the risk of injury, which I am well aware there is conflicting evidence around.
I guess but I don't think it's as rational as that.
I mean you generally don't see people arguing compulsory helmets for car passengers. Even though the number of people requiring medical treatment head injuries caused by cars is orders of magnitude higher than it is for cyclists.
Because the lived experience of politicians on both sides is that the less time something spends in the limelight the less scrutiny it gets. Once something is determined to be supported by both parties (and almost universally when it involves increasing the power of government over citizens they are all in favor) it is not in anybody's interest to have it linger around for debate.
Most Australian politics is cynically focused on controlling the debate rather than solving important issues. So both sides will usually pick strategically controversial but unimportant things that they think favor them and then focus exclusively on those. Everything else is dealt with as expeditiously and in the most minimalist fashion possible. It does have the upside that a lot of "good government" where both sides agree happens in the background without anybody realising.
Democracy fails if the majority is some combination of apathetic, uneducated, or incapable of critical thought. I don’t know about Australia, but the US is in serious trouble if that statement holds. We are a Republic, which probably buys us time. I’m amazed by how many voters I know personally who have never even read the US constitution or the bill of rights. It’s a real shame, and my guess is it won’t end well.
Democrats and republicans alike, let's make sure we don't do this in USA. Please donate to EFF, FIRE, ACLU, etc. I feel like both parties are becoming more authoritarian. COVID-19 is here to stay for many years if not decades. We're not going to be able to wipe off the virus from the planet. Governments will continue to use this as an excuse to erode privacy.
This whole clampdown feels completely anti-Australian to me. Australians I've met are all very open minded, free spirited folks and they are always flipping a birdie to the government.
I whole heartedly agree. I made a top-level comment, but I think it bears repeating: this is human nature at play.
Governmental parties are making plays for more power under the guise of working “for the people”, but sadly they are deluded.
Not sure what the answer is here, but just voicing that you’re 100% correct in my estimation. This pandemic and the tragedies yet to come will always be leveraged by those in power to gain more power.
> Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The Court's decision articulated the view that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the state.
> "[r]eal liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others."
You're making the mistake of conflating Australia's COVID-19 restrictions with this legislation, when they're entirely unrelated. These digital powers were something Australia has sought for many years- under the good ol' reasons of terrorism and child safety.
The recent hubbub surrounding Australia's restrictive COVID-19 measures were possibly the best thing that could happen for our government- when our vaccination numbers rise, the public health restrictions will rollback, whilst the digital legislation will continue on unabated.
One can point to Australia's COVID death rates (~4 per 100,000) in comparison to the United States and the United Kingdom (~200 per 100,000) and make a case for that.
This legislation is far less justifiable, and should have no reason to exist. By associating the two issues, you are weakening the case against it.
Is it good practice compare a very large island that has 2/3rd the population of California, or it’s 1/10th the population density of the whole of the USA?
Seems like a flawed argument for at least a dozen more reasons.
I'm not interested in pursuing this debate, but I will point out that our highly urbanised population means that it's not as cut and dry as you're making it out to be.
There is some justification for nearly all authoritarian laws. One can point to the low crime rate in Singapore relative to the United States, for example.
People who oppose authoritarianism do so because it's not worth the cost, not because terrorism, child abuse, and disease aren't real problems.
Fun fact: Vermont ratified the individual right to gun ownership and the abolishing of slavery in their State Constitution at the same time in 1777. The second amendment actually helped defeat racism and the only thing racist about it is the disproportionate infringement against minorities.
> Vermont’s Declaration of Rights of 1777 set forth the following fundamental rights and abolished slavery: That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent, and unalienable rights, amongst which are the enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. Therefore, no male person, born in this country, or brought from over sea, ought to be holden by law, to serve any person, as a servant, slave, or apprentice, after he arrives to the age of twenty-one years; nor female, in like manner, after she arrives to the age of eighteen years.
> Vt. Constitution, Art. I, § 1 (1777). See Zilversmit at 116. The Vermont Declaration also provided: “That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State . . . .” Id., § 15.
3. ACLU used to defend free speech of even neo-nazis but have since then abandoned their principles:
The ACLU, Prior to COVID, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics. Now, they have completely reversed its views, arguing vaccine mandates help civil liberties and bodily autonomy "is not absolute."
The problem here is a human one, not a governmental one. The government is just doing what humans tend to do: consolidate and protect power.
The fact that this doesn’t serve anyone (other than their) interest is really just a side effect of the underlying cause.
We should champion this issue and we should fight to keep this kind of thing from happening. But the deeper issue here is one of human nature. How do we build a system that guards against ourselves? 50 years ago I would’ve pointed to our own government as an example, but I’m becoming less and less sure.
Not sure why this is downvoted but it’s factually correct. Organizations consolidate power and try and hold onto it. You can even see it in a big corporation where groups will get territorial and actively try and sabotage other groups even though they work for the same company.
That’s why functional democracies are a patchwork of rules that try and prevent such consolidation.
yes
>AN ACCOUNT TAKEOVER WARRANT enables the law enforcement agencies to take control of an account, and even lock the account holder out of it. This can be done covertly and without consent, so the individual wouldn’t necessarily know what is going on until or if they are ever charged. It includes removing two-factor authentication and using one account to gain access to others (directly contradicting cyber security best practices for staying safe and secure online).
It's ironic that a country founded by England with prison convicts who pushed out the indigenous people would eventually choose to create a police state.
Edit: Fixed for people who knew what I meant but want to bust my...
There's a difference between "country founded by", and "land occupied by". Yes, the aboriginals, like native tribes all over the world, were displaced by modernity. One can debate the good vs. bad of it all, but the country of Australia was founded as a penal colony (after displacing the aboriginals).
Maybe it isn't ironic at all. This is the conclusion by Waleed Aly (quite a prominent journalist in Aus) that I read a while ago:
> The British arrived with Governors, ready to assume the role of governing. [...] Then, these governments set about building infrastructure in a way they never did in Britain. They were not managing a society that existed. They simply crushed the Indigenous ones that did, then proceeded as though no society was here in the first place. That set in motion a peculiarly Australian logic that government created society, not the other way around.
> All these traits are invaluable weapons against COVID. They’re also what makes it possible for us to legislate gun control after an isolated massacre, pass expansive counter-terrorism legislation without anything like the scrutiny of a serious public debate, and maintain a brutal policy on asylum seekers. [...]
> Perhaps America cannot control its guns for the same reason it can have a spectacular civil rights movement. And if that’s true, perhaps we stopped COVID for the same reason we stopped the boats.
> They’re also what makes it possible for us to legislate gun control after an isolated massacre,
This statement alone should call the writer's knowledge into question. Whilst it was after a particular mass shooting, it was because of the increasing regularity of mass shootings that the laws were drafted.
I remember riding the Melbourne Eye, which has a narrator explaining that "before Melbourne, there was nothing here" and then later mentions the Aboriginals used to live in pretty much the same places.
And Tasmania (the Australian island state right at the South) was the prison island for the worst convicts. It is now probably the most conservative state in Australia. It's like the phenomenon where the bullied becomes the bully, but on a societal level.
Tasmania (where I live, and am right now) is definitely _not_ the most conservative state. While this may have been true in the 90s, it's not now, and while we do have a Liberal (the right-most of the big Australian parties) State Government, they are the most left-leaning of the State Liberal governments.
I've lived in Australia for 10 years and really considering my familys future in this country. We are sleep-walking towards a very average future.
An undiversified export economy, out of control house prices, a job-market primarily focused on two cities, a government intent on selling all public assets, very limited political interest in positive climate policies. The latter is simply addressed with "technology will help us out when we need it to".
It really feels sometimes that the only thing the average Australian cares about is the price of their property portfolio.
Or maybe 3 months into the Sydney lockdown is finally getting to me.
I guess I don't really follow the reasoning with the examples.
Syria has always been a somewhat dangerous place. Ukraine got invaded by Russia. Hong Kong was taken from China by the British, became it's own nation and is currently being ... taken back against its own will in a sense.
Not that it couldn't happen. But Australia is not really a place I would imagine a violent uprising happening compared to most other places. I think we have too much social cohesion, even between those who are politically opposed.
I lived in Australia for 5 years and my sense is that, as harsh as it sounds, Australia needs to go through an extreme hardship to wake up as a nation. Australia has lived true to its moniker as the Lucky Country - at least two full generations of Australians have never witnessed economic hardship or downturn of any kind. Natural disasters pass the nation by (other than wildfires). Even Covid looked like it was going to give Australia a miss until very recently.
The populous of Australia are fat and happy, and therefore unbothered by the extremely worrying creeping authoritarianism, an economy teetering on total collapse and incompetent local governance. I had real Brave New World vibes living over there.
This is exactly my feeling. Aussies are constantly whinging about extreme first-world problems and are completely apathetic (or willfully ignorant) of what real hardship is.
As a result the general population is blindly letting the government erode our rights and are too pre-occupied with their own lives to actually realise what's happening.
In Australia people are compelled to vote, so the problem looks like the majority having a different take. Not that I agree with their votes, but you can’t say they don’t vote.
Ultimately what is one supposed to do in a democracy (never mind Australia for a moment) when you’re just not part of the majority opinion on something?
The culture helps too. In Australia the "democracy is majority rules" meme (which is a lie) is very strong. Just ask the Australian Indians.
Fun fact: Māori people had the right to vote in Australia from the start, Aboriginal Australians (just how racist are they when there is no word in Australia for the first people?) did not get that right until 1967.
While many people think that the Referendum gave Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples the right to vote, this wasn’t the case. Aboriginal people could vote at the state level before Federation in 1901; Queensland and Western Australia being the only states that expressly prevented Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from voting.
It wasn’t until 1962, when the electoral act was amended, that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were given the right to register and vote, but voting was not compulsory. Full voting rights were not granted federally until Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were required to register on the electoral roll in 1984. ...
When the Constitution first came into being in 1901 there were only two parts that referred to the First Peoples of Australia: Section 51 (xxvi) gave the Commonwealth power to make laws with respect to ‘people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any state, for whom it was deemed necessary to make special laws’; and Section 127 provided that ‘in reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted’. ...
On 27 May 1967, Australians voted to change the Constitution so that like all other Australians, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be counted as part of the population and the Commonwealth would be able to make laws for them. A resounding 90.77 per cent said ‘Yes’ and every single state and territory had a majority result for the ‘Yes’ vote.
Democracy is not majority rules. Democracy is rule by the people. Minorities matter too, and if minorities are railroaded by majorities it is not much of a democracy.
Voting is important, but much more important is the rule of and access to the law.
"Australian Indians" means the same thing as "Australian Aborigines" Indian and Aborigine are synonyms.
You schooled me on the right to vote! My prejudice leaked out!! I will not let it become bigotry. But I think it is at the federal level. At federation (I thought it was 1905) they really wanted NZ to be a state, and in NZ Māori electorate was a thing, not a particularly democratic thing, but a thing. So to make NZ a state Māori had to able to vote at a federal level.
Hi. "Democracy is rule by the people" - well, I know enough to know that it's not any one thing, or captured by any one definition. How that one differs from "majority rules" I'm not sure. Anyway. Let's not get into that here.
> "Australian Indians" means the same thing as "Australian Aborigines" Indian and Aborigine are synonyms.
Uh I'm not sure where you are, but in Australia it sure doesn't mean that. No-one here calls aborigines "Indians", and far as I know never has.
Hehe it's ok, I think most Australians probably believe that 1967 thing, if they know the date at all, I'm not sure why. The truth is somewhat complicated.
Gee, I had no idea NZ was involved in the pre-Federation conferences in Australia, although sounds like NZ just wasn't very into it. A wise decision!
The continent was home to a very large number of difference language groups and languages prior to settlement. There is not one common demonym - in southeast Australia "Koori" is often used, but more commonly people are referred to by the language group to which they belong (eg an Arrernte man).
> Ultimately what is one supposed to do in a democracy (never mind Australia for a moment) when you’re just not part of the majority opinion on something?
I think the only option is to emigrate. I didn’t and still don’t agree with most of the government policies in The Netherlands (regarding immigration, climate, EU, etc), but most Dutch voters apparently do. Eventually the best option is just to cut your losses and leave for greener pastures.
At least this way I am not forced anymore to have my hard earned money taxed on issues I don’t support.
In spite of the tendency for part of the US electorate to wish to federalize all government functions, there's still a lot of difference between US states.
That seems to work out pretty well. It isn't like California is identical to Arizona, at least currently.
I moved from Australia to the Netherlands as well and felt the same about not having my tax dollars directed where I didn't want them to go. I unfortunately had to move back to Australia and now get to watch my tax dollars flow to the richest companies (including foreign luxury brands) thanks to Jobkeeper.
Actually I moved from The Netherlands to Thailand, since I don't like the way things are going in The Netherlands :)
If you do hope to move to The Netherlands in the future, if you believe it's a better place for you, I hope you can succeed. I would agree based on the news from Australia, that The Netherlands seems the better option of the two.
But the only way to realise that gain is to downsize or move out of town. And neither of those options is easy, because of restrictions on development and redevelopment.
Well, I think that's where individual rights and a constitution is supposed to help. If at least you enjoy the rights you get, there's that. Maybe you disagree with how best to run the country so it can protect those rights, but at least you'd have them. And then you could argue that if a majority thinks one way, it might be right even if you disagree.
Otherwise, I forgot which philosopher said this, but the only real freedom is the freedom to choose where to live and the choice of many places with different viewpoints and social norms. That way each individual could pick what matched their preference best and move there.
Unfortunately the freedom to choose where to live is not really something the world provides. So you might be stuck where you are, but if you're lucky, you might manage to get into another place you prefer.
If that doesn't work, your last resort is the activist route. Make your case and change people's mind. It's happened in the past, but it's a tough road.
Dudes strongmen literally attempt to kill the (15 year old) kid which can be seen in another video, so you know the act cuts deep as a form of protest...
Compulsory voting with good preference system already in place which means we have a ~90-97% participation rate.
>Protest - particularly direct action
Agree, but increasing using/changing laws to reduce this (declaring environment activists as "terror" groups).
>Challenge them
Not even sure what this means exactly but more people are organizing support for independents/minority parties over the major two. This combined with the ability to form minority governments I think is the best chance for progressive change, but a lot of money is being spent to keep the status quo.
I recently read an article in which protesters were fined thousands of dollars for violating "health codes". A country who cannot allow protest is no free country at all.
The right to protest during a pandemic is dubious, in direct conflict with other peoples rights. It is also self defeating, when the majority consider the protesters arseholes for willfully endangering the general community and don't get around to considering the actual issue being protested.
What the hell? Nobody sitting at home in their house has the right to prevent other people meeting peacefully on the street. People like you are what's wrong with Australia, you authoritarian monster! Nobody has the right to stop other people meeting because they might spread a virus to eachother with a 99%+ survival rate that might somehow eventually find its way back to them.
Willfully violating health orders endangers others, who are forced to share public spaces. As a community, we decided the law to protect ourselves (security of person) and the vulnerable (the people who don't have a 99% survival rate if they catch COVID; the immunosuppressed, the elderly, the chronically ill). Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we are entitled to security of person and protection by the law. And yes, it also declares several articles further down the right to protest. So the rights are in direct conflict.
It is also worth noting that people can still protest. They just can't do it while violating health orders. Yelling maskless at police on lockdown days is going to get you arrested. Other protests on non-lockdown days with people maintaining social distancing have proceeded fine apart from grumpy words and fear mongering by politicians.
If other people aren't afraid of the virus, you have no right to stop them; it's their choice. Now maybe you could argue you have a right to keep them out of your house, or your personal space, if you don't want to be infected, but you have absolutely no right to stop them meeting on the street far from you.
> You do so have a right to take measures for public health, which may well involve arresting people who ignore the necessary measures.
Do you even understand what a right means? Rights, be it as defined by the US constitution or the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are inherent moral rights, it's not something the government can freely suspend based on some arbitrary utilitarian justification like case numbers. The whole point of those declarations of rights is protecting people from authoritarian governments; if the government has the power to suspend those rights, you have no rights!
Tell me in which declaration of rights is there a right to have armed police attack and lock up people peacefully assembling on the street?
And if you don't believe in rights, believe anything is moral as long as an elected government makes it law, then consider this. Would you still feel that way if the democratically elected government decided it was okay to rape worik's wife/daughter/mother? Would you still feel that way if the democratically elected government decided worik's ethnic group should be sent to gas chambers for cleansing? If not, then clearly you do believe in absolute rights.
I mean, stop repeatedly voting for blatantly corrupt parties, for one.
The current LNP are so actively corrupt with their corporate interests, religious interests, repeated exposed in-house scandals, etc, yet the majority of the population continue to vote for them because they ignore it all and just keep supporting 'their team'. The Labor government tries to suggest that they're different, and end up with their own dramas of a similar style, but are kind of not as bad. Kind of.
There are other options out there, but we're all lead to believe that only the 'big parties' can form government. Which only remains true due to the self-fulfilling prophecy of people only voting en masse for the big two parties (and the preference system that funnels votes into those parties).
The likelihood of that changing? Low.
The other solution would be to dismantle the corporate media monopoly that glosses over the actual issues the country is facing, but that's probably even less likely to happen.
I suspect until just recently it was because of the negative gearing policies, but now that Labor has officially scrapped any changes I feel like the differences between the parties gets thinner and thinner.
3 things.
1. People always look after their back pocket. Any policy that reduce income or wealth is a vote loser
2. Rupert Murdoch owns a majority of print and TV media and has extreme bias for the conservative govt. People do not see any other viewpoints.
3. Extreme divide between rural and urban population. It is impossible to satisfy both. A pro-climate change policy in urban Sydney is a vote killer in regional Queensland.
Organize people who think similarly to you. Turn them in to activists who run for office, pressure politicians, protest, lobby and vote. I know “pressure groups” or “special interests” or whatever they call it in Australia are always derided. But people form these groups for a reason.
I see your point and how the language has been masculinized but the meaning still stands as of now.. until the next changes take place. Language is evolving and these will inevitably change as well at some point.
You’re talking about it like it’s far away. Yet here I am saying this is an out of date convention and everyone gets their hackles up as if it is such a horrific inconvenience to include others in their ideas. The change has already arrived, only some stragglers angrily clinging to the old way.
You can quote whatever you like however you like, but it ain't all men out there. Relying on such worldviews to understand the world leaves you with a truncated world.
As the other poster pointed out the word men has multiple meaning which depend on context. The meaning is clear to me and no need to modify it. Next time you quote it you can make your own changes.
I didn’t say it did have that, I said it is the same as doing that. Hilarious to accuse me of whimsical arguments while you morph me into the straw man you need to be right.
The foundations of the internet and computing were built by people from the cold war when modern civilization was a technical glitch away from ending at any given time. Half the stuff in networking is decades old, written by people who are decades older then that and raised by the generation before them. Implying the internet is a byproduct of the recent "good times" seems a bit disingenuous.
The internet (FAANG if you want a concrete definition) and modern medicine are both multi-trillion dollar industries; for very fundamental reasons. I'd argue their relative success would probably occur in both good and bad times.
The foundations of the internet were laid during the post war boom era. It was considered by some a golden age. The modern internet is a product of successive booms in the 90’s and 2000’s.
The internet came about because of the cold war and the attendant arms race. Empires that last were all born in blood and fire and terror, and universally spend more blood to maintain cohesion against the outside.
What type of la la fantasy histories have you been reading? Fat happy people maintain the status quo. Hungry desperate people innovate.
Anyway. The world wide web is probably what you meant. And yes, universities and science and medicine makes progress during peaceful times, and ultimately the quote is facile and glib. There is a nugget of truth there, however.
Establishing a frontier in human well being has historically required limiting the power of the state in ways that support the relative liberalizing of its culture. States historically require blood sacrifice before any power is ceded. It takes strong people to achieve and hold progress., and the quote encapsulates the notion that there is a place in the natural order of things for strong individuals to shake things up. For principles to be held to at great cost, however inconvenient or even fatal it may be for others who just want to perpetuate "good enough".
The fallacy is that good times can't produce good and strong people, which is wrong. It's just a simple matter of conviction being stronger when provoked by trauma than abstract rationalization.
Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Robert Goddard, Werner von Braun, William Shockley, John von Neumann, ... those just come off the top of my head, I could keep going for pages.
Yeah, a bunch of hungry desperate people there.
I mean sure, some were deeply flawed or had tragic lives, but that wasn't from being hungry and desperate. They were not poor, and they were supplied with ample resources to pursue their visions by governments or private companies.
That quote is just too much of an oversimplification. The real situation is far more complex and nuanced, and like I said in the other reply it matters a lot how you define strength and how you define good times.
I wonder how much Australia is influenced by people who loathe the US and move from it to Australia because it's far away and yet Anglophone and "western".
> I wonder how much Australia is influenced by people who loathe the US and move from it to Australia because it's far away and yet Anglophone and "western".
No, you don't get to blame Australia's insanity on the US. They're fully in control of their own destiny and are one of the richest, most privileged nations in world history. Australia will have nobody else to blame if they plunge further into fascism from here.
Probably very few. Liberals who are alienated with the U.S. would sooner move to Canada for the healthcare, conservatives alienated with the U.S. would sooner be dead than be alive in Australia without guns if their bumper stickers are to be believed.
In 1997 they banned “defensive” firearms. The guns you want because they work well. Semiautos, center fire handguns, pump shotguns. Bolt actions are still possible to get, but not great at self-defense, or overthrowing your government.
Side note… in 1997 these guns were banned, and crime fell. As it turns out though, not only was crime already going down, but there was an increase of 2x police per capita, and curiously crime in the USA fell at a greater rate with no gun ban or large increase in police, crime was high in the 90s for some reason, some people say lead paint bans but the causation is weak.
I don't think they hear anything that'd make them want to emigrate. We just hear that most of the country is desert, even though when I actually went there everyone (in the cities) turned out to be tanned Scots obsessed with beaches and coffee.
If there's places Americans want to go, it's Canada, Europe or Asia, though I think their opinion of Europe is a little overrated if anything.
100% agree. It's almost like Wall-E was written about Australia in 50 years time.
The irony being that 30% of the population was born outside of Australia with a decent part of that in countries which have experienced recent hard times.
No dual citizens in federal parliament. That 30% are, generally, extremely under-represented in the political system. This is by choice of interpretation of the current federal judiciary (High Court).
At a state level, in many states, rules for dual citizens are more complicated, but result in a similar situation.
I can understand the need for this legislation, but it does tilt the balance in favor of 3rd+ generation Australians (as many 2nd generation Australians can inherit their parent's citizenship).
Yes, if your country of non-Australian citizenship allows you to renounce it, that is recognised in Australian law. But it can be a complex process, with little value unless you have political ambitions (or maybe complex tax issues ;-) ).
I've lived here for 6 years and you got it 100%. I feel you mate, feels like their focus has been wrong year after year and it doesn't look like it's getting better at all.
One could argue that Australia has always been this way. The full quote is:
"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck."
written by Donald Horne in 1964. These words were true prior to 1964 and are still true in 2021.
What saves Australia is the word "mainly".
There are some first rate people in Australia, mostly not in positions of authority, who stop the ship from sinking. Examples are solar power, quantum information and medical researchers, pockets of the Public Service but less so in 2021, people like Donald Horne, ... Mostly things are second rate, but sometimes something first rate breaks though.
"Just as Samson after being shorn of his hair was left eyeless in Gaza, was this generation, stripped bare of all faith, to be left comfortless on Bondi Beach, citizens of the kingdom of nothingness, who booze and surf while waiting for the barbarians?"
Melbourne has been in lock down for over 200 days. Sydney is not that far behind.
Massive amounts of people are unable to work, and a lot of us haven't seen our interstate family in almost 2 years.
A few months before Covid started, 180,000 km2 of Australia was burned to the ground, enshrouding our capital and major cities in smoke, making breathing outdoors almost impossible, causing a mass shortage of P2 masks. Many people died. Many more lost their houses.
What sort of additional hardships do you want to prescribe for Australians exactly?
It will not happen. As luck would have it next generation energy will be renewables, Solar, Lithium and Hydrogen. Australia is chock full of these. Steel will still be required and Australia will start producing coal free steel from Hydrogen. The current government has a backwards policy right now but it will change rapidly. The wheels are in motion and can't be stopped.
In which 5 years did you live here? Some time in the 90s? We endured the GFC comparatively well thanks to shrewd economic leadership from the Labor government of the time but to say we haven't faced downturn in two generations is absurd. Speaking as someone who has been out of the office due to COVID since March 2020, I'm amazed you can say it seemed like it was going to pass us by "until recently". As for natural disasters passing us by "other than wildfires", those bushfires have killed hundreds of people, burned thousands of homes, killed over a billion animals, cost billions of dollars, and most victims of the most recent bushfire which scorched half the country still haven't received any relief. There are a lot of very misguided ideas about Australia in this thread, but the least someone driving by could do is spare us condescension.
Hope it goes well for you wherever you choose to go, although I don't think there are many places left that aren't like that, at least not any places that have an acceptable standard of living. Something about a city having a future at all makes the real estate vortex come to life.
Know of a place? Tell me, dear reader, I'd love to hear it.
I feel you mate. Sad part is Australia has all the potential to have a really good future but the only thing missing is competent leadership. The liberal government continues to fuck up time and time again and the Murdoch press just turns a blind eye.
Fucked up quarantine, fucked up vaccine rollout, fucked up climate policies, fucked up the news media bargaining code, and fucked up numerous policies just to prop up the housing market. And it'll be the younger generations that will certainly pay for these fuck ups.
I really hope we have an early election and Australians choose Labor over Liberal this time.
For US folks, The Liberal Party is Center Right and further to the left than the Republicans, Labor is Center Left and further to the left of the Democrats.
Under the current leadership the LNP inches closer to the GOP with each passing day, so, I don't expect they'll be perpetually to the left of the Republicans.
Sorry if this is a silly question but are the LP and the LNP the same party? When I try to look up LNP I see references to Queensland which confuses me if it's a national party. If not are they related?
> .. Labor is Center Left and further to the left of the Democrats.
Do you think? I'd have pegged things like Green New Deal, fairly strong consensus around fossil fuels and renewables, as strong US Democrat party line -- compared to AU's Labor being still wedded to a fossil fuel future, still keen to satiate Murdoch and co.
What broad policies / positions are you suggesting indicate AU Labor is more left than US Democrat?
People don't appreciate how left the Democrats are because almost everyone's political opinions are 5-10 years behind reality. The Democrats are one of the most successful left parties in the world currently; as soon as you count "respecting immigrants" then e.g. Europe loses cred no matter how good the healthcare systems are. And those systems weren't designed by the current generation.
On a lot of things, universal health care, how strongly they are in favor of nuclear disarmament, gun control, etc. Remember President Biden is the head of the Democratic Party, And the US itself has been pushed further to the right by a conservative dominated supreme court.
Sure, and that's objectively a weird position to take for someone who appears to be as empathetic as he is.
But it (as you observe) does not reflect 'the party policies' - simply the current elected leader. And while that's obviously important, it doesn't necessarily define policy of either party of (current) administration.
The fact it's at odds with what the majority of the rest of the party would advocate speaks to my earlier claim / question.
This isn't quite accurate. Really, Labor over the last five or six years (but mostly in just the last two) has actually moved basically centre-right as well, but still to the left of the Liberal/National coalition.
In terms of the Liberal and National parties (who are in coalition Federally, and the two state branches merged in Queensland), while they are slightly left of the GOP overall, there are definitely a fair few MPs and senators in the party that are just as far right-wing. For the 'moderates', they're mostly captured by business interests (especially the resources (coal, oil and gas) and property lobbies).
For Labor, the shift right is because a massive media campaign spread lies about some of their slightly more progressive policies last election, so instead of trying to correct it, the leader of the opposition who replaced the one who ran at the last election just decided to drop the policies. Also, Labor have voted in lock-step on all the mass-surveillance laws, censorship laws. Finally, despite being on about climate, they have voted for increasing grants and subsidies to new coal and gas exploration, such as in the Narrabi and Beetaloo basins, against the wishes of much of the population, farmers in the area, and the First Nations traditional owners of the land.
They are definitely the "lesser of two evils", but where I would have laughed at the thought of not voting 1st for them ten years ago, now I give my first preference to a minor party or independent (preferential voting is seriously a good idea, by the way).
I keep hearing this every now and then, but the incompetent leadership does not come from nowhere nor has conceived itself. The country leaders have been legitimately elected, which means the leadership is the direct reflection of the country people's will. People consciously elect incompetence that bears the incompetent leadership, for that is what they desire for one reason or another. There are a few progressive, young parties that could steer the future of Australia in the right direction with progressive policies that make sense in the 21st century. Guess what? An average Australian does not care about the progress, they care about their real estate portfolio in maintaining the status quo for a change is scary and frightens people. Politics have become a career ladder excercise with public servants serving their own self-interest rather than working out differences between differing views and opinions and working towards a modern future of the country. Australia has been become mired in complacency, pipe dreaming and discussing how Labour is better over Liberals (or the other way around) whereas both parties are more or less the same in the grand scheme of things.
> The country leaders have been legitimately elected, which means the leadership is the direct reflection of the country people's will.
I don't disagree. Although influencing the people's will is a lot easier when the main stream media is monopolised and heavily biased towards one political party. If we want a government that truly reflects the people's will we need a diverse media landscape. Also a reason why I support Kevin Rudd's push for the Murdoch royal commission.
We also need a population that takes an interest in what's going on an will vote out a corrupt politician regardless of their party. Most will excuse anything if it comes from their side.
I'm in SA and I do what I can to support Rex Patrick as I see strong independents like him being the only hope in the immediate future.
I don't want to single you out, but the monomaniacal hardon that middle aged Redditors and Kevin Rudd (same thing) have for Rupert Murdoch is fascinating from my outsider perspective. It seems like a relic of a bygone generation—think 2003 and "Faux News." Like, it's not the wrong news that's turning Australia shit. Mean old Newscorp didn't force Labor to vote for increased surveillance, to leave negative gearing alone, or to go soft on coal lol.
"Mean old Newscorp didn't force Labor to vote for increased surveillance, to leave negative gearing alone, or to go soft on coal lol."
On the contrary, Newscorp does exactly that. It's called wedge politics, and Newscorp is highly competent at wielding the stick that ensures that anyone who doesn't toe the line with the conservative parties is deemed a threat to the nation.
I would say a great deal of it is the media. Almost all the large outlets now are basically operating through a pro-Liberal/National political filter and pushing misinformation about the Government on people. There is huge complacency about the Government, and I think most of that is because many people literally have no idea what's going on. Probably less than one or two percent of the population would have actually heard of any of these mass surveillance or "national security" laws, the "eSafety" censorship laws, etc.
It used to be better, but Fairfax which had some fairly decent papers got bought out by Nine Media, whose chairman is retired Liberal party Treasurer Peter Costello. The paper's reporting has shifted to a very pro-Liberal Party bias since then. The News Corp papers were always politically slanted towards the Liberal/Nationals. ABC has been cowed by funding cuts and undermining by the Government appointing terrible board members and chairpersons, and they have literally pushed people out because they didn't toe the line (like Nick Ross, because he reported accurately on how bad the Liberal Party's policy on the NBN was, or Emma Alberiche because she reported on the fact that corporate tax cuts generally haven't been shown to increase economic growth when corporate tax cuts were basically the only policy the LNP had).
We'll see what happens this election. Murdoch might temporarily switch sides for a couple of months like they did in 2007, because he hates backing a loser (and I think Morrison's and the rest of this terrible Government's incompetence is a bit too obvious despite the protection racket the papers and TV news try to run). But if they do, almost as soon as Labor gets in, it will likely be back to attacks and undermining of Labor and pro-Liberal/National party bias...
> The country leaders have been legitimately elected, which means the leadership is the direct reflection of the country people's will
I think this is only true if the Australian voting system is Condorcet based. Otherwise I think technically you can elect someone overall less popular, but that has a very strong base of dedicated voters.
>. The country leaders have been legitimately elected, which means the leadership is the direct reflection of the country people's will. People consciously elect incompetence that bears the incompetent leadership
Counterpoints:
1. Australia's two big parties are closer to an oligarchy than an egalitarian system, these parties recruit from university politics so there's a whole pipeline that will seed out people who have non-party views. Having mostly uni-people will automatically restrict the party to a small percentage of the population.
2. Incompetence can be hidden from the voting populace. If you consume only Murdoch content (i.e., most private TV news, most published newspapers, public TV station boards are also getting packed with government people) then you will probably think that things are running great.
> the leadership is the direct reflection of the country people's will.
Every 4 years you get to influence the politicians for a few days and they do their best to make you happy. On all the other days, the lobbyists and party factions get to influence them.
> The House of Representatives on Tuesday passed the Bill, with a total of 60 amendments, and while Labor has thrown its support behind the Bill as a result of the amended document being a "better Bill", the Australian Greens have not.
`It really feels sometimes that the only thing the average Australian cares about is the price of their property portfolio.`
If this is the only accessible form of financial gain - why wouldn't they?
I strongly suspect that in order to have a dynamic economy a weak housing market is a pre-requisite. Given the choice it's much easier to plunk money down in a house and watch cash magically appear than it is to start a business or do anything creative.
Not in Australia but it's been kind of an insult to see my house earning more than the top tax bracket income I've been making from my one-man business for the past 3 years. Sometimes I wonder what the point of trying to earn money with work is. Of course it won't last, but it has a psychological demotivating effect.
All the while being bombarded with ads from real estate companies trying to FOMO you into buying a very average house for a price you really can't afford.
People are always feeling bad that they missed out on the hot new investment thing. At the time I bought, prices were already rising rapidly and people were complaining how they'd missed out, assuming the boom was about to end. The rise of cryptocurrency is probably creating a lot of unhappy missed-outers too. But these people somehow forget that they're still able to get in on the ground floor with the next hot new investment thing. I remember during the first couple of bitcoin bubbles, people complaining how early adopters were making so much and how they missed out. But then the next bubble would come, and the next, and the next. Some people are just too risk averse to ever win the bubble lottery.
I'm releasing a feature film exploring this in a few months (Aus ponzi economy, limited social mobility of next generation here). If anyone is interested in seeing please email hackernewsfilm@gmail and I'll keep you updated.
Born in AU so bias is to stay, which leads me to push more for political change required to try to address these problems. Most of your 10 years has been under a particularly bad (and honestly corrupt) federal gov.
Country has a large state capture problem from largely mining companies but also other special interests that have lobbied and . Anything that might threaten those interests is being pretty heavily targeted, including action on climate[0] (See "Gas led recovery", and the use of funds intended to renewables used for things like CCS/CCUS and "blue" hydrogen.). And this is bleeding into laws and enforcement.
Then there is the constant resistance to a federal anti-corruption agency as well as reducing the influence of money on federal politicians (see backbencher/ministers resolving door with lobbying firms).
The conclusion I've (sadly) come to, is that (in the short term at least) more money needs to be thrown at smaller parties and independents to try to combat this. Unlike the USA, Australia has precedent of minority governments and compulsory voting combined with a preference system means that gaining even a small number of lower house/senate seats can make a disproportional impact to the policies being set around Australia. Both major parties are so similar but just switching from Blue to Red is unlikely to result significant change in policies for some of the issues you've raised.
This always seemed like madness to me. You can force someone to vote, but you cannot force them to vote responsibly. They may just vote "screw you" just for revenge.
The right to vote includes the right to abstain from voting when one does not care.
Forced voting sounds like a recipe for bad election results. I would expect the same from paying people to vote.
> I would expect the same from paying people to vote.
That's already the case pretty much everywhere since populists promise benefits to whoever elects them. So de facto you are getting paid for your vote if you are in a special interest group.
I think that I would be okay with compulsory voting if there was a 'none of the above' option on the ballot. If "none of the above" wins the vote then all the people on that ballot are disqualified from running in any election for a period of time, say 10 years and there is a do-over on that particular electoral district election.
I'd like to hope that would clean up politics real quick.
Rather than a “None of the above” option (though I do find your disqualification concept interesting) I prefer an “I abstain” option. Food requires a small amount of effort but an effort nonetheless. Every time a voter picks up the ballot, you hey are faced with the question “do I really have nothing to contribute here?”
You must show up at a polling place (either prior to the election or on election day), and you must identify yourself to the polling officer, and receive a ballot paper.
You do NOT have to complete the paper: you can put it in the box untouched, you can write "screw you all" on it, etc.
So ... yeah, you are obliged to show up, but you don't have to actually vote.
Yeah, that happens. One of my close friends is disillusioned with the government, and usually just uses the ballot paper as a way to "politely share his thoughts on the matter" with whoever is unfortunate enough to read it. They don't verify that a vote was cast, just that you showed up.
I don’t see this as anywhere near the same thing though. These so called ‘donkey votes’ are derided, and categorised as together with voting errors and other invalid voting forms. The right to withhold your vote is as fundamental as the right to withold your labour. Voter turnout is an important metric in its own right, and is observed tactically in, say, the UK.
Compulsory voting simplifies competition, and destroys some forms of it. In particular, the ‘mandate’
The amount of electorates that swung, and the percentages that the winning representative (and party) received mean that's not true at all, in my opinion anyway. Happy to be convinced otherwise, but the "mandate" still exists.
I highly doubt most non-voters are intentionally "witholding" their vote. I think it's more often just laziness or lack of access (voting during work day etc.).
It has to be incredibly more meaningful to have statistics on how many people intentionally said "screw you" with a vote for "ficus" or w/e.
Yes, they are counted, because it is a perfectly valid vote.
This does indeed advantage the candidate who draws the top spot on the ballot (the positions are randomly assigned). In a preferential system it advantages the candidate in the final two that drew the higher position - it seems to be worth about 0.7% ( https://www.crikey.com.au/2010/08/02/whats-the-donkey-worth-... ).
You don't have to vote, the fine is like $40 and they'll usually wave it if you say you were working or unwell.
Compulsory voting still drives people to turn up and vote for the LNP where they otherwise probably wouldn't bother. Why vote when you can do something else more pleasant with your time.
I'm in Tasmania ex Adelaide, and the overwhelming majority of the population here are poorly educated working poor, and yet we have a Liberal Party state government because people turn up on election day and vote Liberal "because fuck those latte drinking hippie faggot cunts / brown people / coons / queue jumping boat-people".
I'm not evening kidding, the vile vitriol that comes out of peoples mouths here is shocking.
It can't be any worse than what we have in the USA. I mean for god sakes, Trump actually won the presidency. Something is definitely broken in the US system (primarily voter suppression, legal corporate bribery, and gerrymandering is my theory)
I would say the current party dynamics are a big problem, both the symptom and cause of other problems.
One party fights for total control, with near total resistance to the other party, playing a negative sum game in order to maintain power despite demographic disadvantages.
The other party has a wider spectrum of views, and is more open to bipartisanship. But it has difficulty strategically unifying when it would make the most difference. So it often negotiates from weakness despite having demographic advantages.
As far as I can tell, this dynamic is getting even worse and infecting most people and many institutions that would be much better not being politicized.
>Forced voting sounds like a recipe for bad election results.
The previous conservative, neoliberal PM, John Howard, said the same thing. Rationally, it doesn't make sense.
However, even he admitted that empirical, historical evidence has shown it to be a good thing that prevents either major political party from catering too hard to the extremes.
Mandatory voting means it is mostly a logistical exercise.
"You participated in the process."
Like building Ikea furniture, you now think that the process is better and more valid. Less civil unrest that way. Of course, you are still allowed to say whatever you like about how stupid any politician is in any role - even the PM. But you are more likely to accept the authority invested in them by the process when you are part of it.
Thirdly, you can still donkey vote if you are desperate to make your vote meaningless.
I strongly disagree. There is already informal voting (aka donkey vote), people who want to use their vote as a "screw you" have to choose between a number of candidates/parties, so who they are "screwing" is pretty hard to tell.
I actually think compulsory voting brings forward the importance of thinking about the consequences of voting, and voting for candidates that have the same values. Granted this can be manipulated (and is) with ads etc but getting people use to being involved I think is far better than making it optional and creating people that either never vote or a population that does when things are "bad" and an apathetic group when things are "good".
To clarify, donkey votes are perfectly valid. This is where the voter simply fills the boxes the same as they are displayed (first presented candidate gets number 1, second gets 2, etc.). A donkey vote is a formal vote, just one typically driven by the same factors that would drive an intentionally informal one. An example of an informal vote that I encountered during scrutineering a local council election is when one voter drew their own box, labelled it "Tony Abbott", and voted for that.
It’s not “forced” it’s “your responsibility in a democracy”.
We have preferential voting here, and plenty of minor parties to vote for, so your vote isn’t “wasted”. Living in a democracy means participating in voting to help decide what the country does, and honestly it’s a pretty minor requirement: the actual act is quick and easy, it’s on a weekend and anyone who has to work at is given the opportunity and the results are usually mostly finalised by the end of the day.
There are pros and cons to either approach. I've been wondering recently if voluntary voting in the US is partially responsible for the tribal political atmosphere? As I understand it, one of the big challenges both major parties face in the US is how to motivate their voting bases to actually turn up to vote at all. And as social media has shown us, there's nothing more engaging and motivating than outrage.
So both sides of US politics, and their surrogates in the media, are incentivised to stir up outrage against their opponent, leading to a more divided country in the long run.
On balance, I think it's better, because systems where voting is voluntary seem to really encourage voter disenfranchisement. Also, the system means that the logistics must be in place for the system to be able to handle everybody turning up to vote, so it would be very unusual (in my experience) having to wait in line for more than 20 minutes or so. As opposed to stories we saw in the US of voters having to wait hours to vote.
As others have said, it's an option to just submit a blank paper.
We don't have voting machines in Australia. You write on paper with a pencil (I believe you can bring a representative with you if you're vision impaired and things like that).
We definitely have voting machines [0] that started being trialed back in 2007, and more widely in recent years.
The process I experienced last time I voted in local elections was you validated where you lived and were given a one use barcode/qrcode (can't remember) which you scanned at the machine, made your selections and dropped the barcode paper in specific bins.
> The right to vote includes the right to abstain from voting when one does not care. Forced voting sounds like a recipe for bad election results. I would expect the same from paying people to vote
I've gone in a bit of a voting system rabbit hole recently, and this depends on the system of voting. There are some systems where abstaining from an election can help a voter's preferred choice win: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_criterion
So I think depending on the election system, it could make sense to have compulsory voting, even if the person voting simply puts all candidates at equal preference.
You can force someone to vote, but you cannot force them to vote responsibly.
How does this not also apply to similar civic obligations, like jury duty?
(I've always mentally put compulsory voting in the same box as compulsory jury duty. In both cases of course it's not really compulsory to take part, just to attend).
Voting is not compulsory. It is a myth. What is compulsory is visit the polling booth and scratch your name on the electoral roll to record your attendance. You DON'T have to actually vote.
Whilst officially Australia has compulsory voting, unofficially you merely have to sign your name off. If you fail to have your name signed off, the fine is $20 (for federal elections, $55 for the state of NSW). Voter turnout is still a way of measuring disengagement, as well as measuring the number of informal votes, and more importantly, the nature of the informal votes. You can write whatever you like on the ballot paper at the end of the day, so if voters feel that no party represents them, you can fill in nothing. If you do not like any party, you can submit a blank ballot, which does represent a decent percentage of informal votes - but I think that given you're already there, most people have some idea of who they like _less_ or _more_.
I think the cultural aspect of the _appearance_ of compulsory voting is important: not voting because it's raining and you'd rather stay in bed is very different to abstaining based on your political beliefs, and compulsory voting (in Australia) means you are less likely to encounter the former whilst still enabling the other. I would argue that this makes abstaining for political reasons a bit more explicit than non-compulsory voting (technically you can even write your reasons for not voting on the ballot paper, which would officially mean nothing but would certainly be evaluated in research on informal voting), but I do concede that this feels a bit disingenuous: the system works because you're told to vote even though you kinda don't really have to vote, but make sure you jump through the hoops to make it look like you voted.
Almost 11 years in Melbourne (from NZ) and I couldn't agree more.
The 220~ days (and counting) that Melbourne has been in lockdown has certainly worn me down, but even before C19 the political climate, attitude towards technology, cost of housing and the impact of increasing bushfires has taken an enormous toll on the country over the past decade that I've been here.
I'm a Kiwi who's lived in Australia for two thirds of my life.
New Zealand's economy and cost-of-living is markedly weaker and higher than Australia's; the property-is-the-only-investment idea is somehow even worse in NZ, at least lately
The day-to-day life in NZ is lovely though. At least where I'm from in Northland.
Australia and NZ are more similar than they are different, I feel.
- They have good access to nature/beaches
- Property prices are nuts, most people see property as their primary investment vehicle. This is a big cause of wealth inequality
- general populace has a relatively easygoing disposition
Aus has better weather (assuming you like warm and sunny), higher salaries and is somewhat less far from the world if you want to travel
NZ has a better human rights record, much cleaner grid, and doesn't seem to have the authoritarian bent that Aus does. It's like the slightly hippie/socialist/woke little sibling.
The USA is hard to gauge because its much bigger and more diverse. Housing affordability, access to nature etc all vary heaps by region. Culturally Australia has the most in common with the USA, although the general populace in the USA seem less apathetic about politics.
The Netherlands has rubbish weather for 2/3rds of the year and not a single mountain/hill/beach worth mentioning, but is extremely liveable. Income/CoL ratios tend to be higher than the Bay Area for a given quality-of-life, although you might be earning less in absolute terms. Cities and Towns are very well designed, even Amsterdam (outside the center) feels like a cosy village but you still get access to big-city things. Probably more socialist than NZ, with things like this happening https://nltimes.nl/2021/09/02/dutch-cities-want-ban-property...
Americans like to say that they are "free" but there are so many religious crazies.
Ultimately I can't live in a country where people are religious so that leaves only North Europe and the Netherlands is the most antichrist of them all.
In my experience New Zealand is more different from Australia than a lot of Australians seem to assume.
Generally speaking New Zealand is far more socially liberal than Australia, however there are greater financial / job opportunities in Australia due to it's size.
In New Zealand you're less likely to own a fancy new car or have has many expensive possessions but to me at least it didn't feel like you "need" them as much as in Australia.
There weren't many tech job opportunities in New Zealand given its small population, however I suspect the global rise in remote work coupled with New Zealand's relatively capable internet infrastructure may be changing this.
Entertainment wise New Zealand hands down has more stunning, enjoyable, accessible nature and outdoors - while Australia pre-covid has a far more international offerings (musicians, comedy etc...).
Property prices are absolutely insane in both countries if you want to live in city / inner suburbs.
It's hard to explain but I've always felt that if Australia was socially and politically the USA, New Zealand would perhaps be somewhere in Scandinavia.
What's stopping me from moving back to New Zealand? - My life (friends, work, cat) is in Melbourne, if I was offered a good job opportunity back in the South Island of NZ and moving costs covered - I'd certainly be considering it.
Of course this is all highly subjective and only based on my experiences / observations.
South Africans moving to NZ often mention the "tall poppy syndrome" in NZ. Do you feel like that is a fair comment?
This comment reminded me of the concept:
> In New Zealand you're less likely to own a fancy new car or have has many expensive possessions but to me at least it didn't feel like you "need" them as much as in Australia.
So I'm Australian but from the part no one ever visits (ie Perth). I say this because for most visitors Australia = Sydney, maybe Melbourne.
Anyway, I've gone to live overseas a couple of times now. The most recent time was to the US 11 years ago. I'm still here.
As many problems as the US has, the one big selling point it has is career opportunities and earning potential as a software engineer. Like... it doesn't even come close. I'll take what my US compensation buys me in NYC over whatever compensation I could get buys me in Sydney (in particular).
Property in Australia is like a game of musical chairs but the music stopped in Sydney in 1978 (in Perth and Melbourne it was more like 2003).
One thing I like about the US tax system is there is no negative gearing (mostly). Specifically if you earn over a certain amount ($150k but it starts sliding down at $100k) then you can't offset ordinary taxes with passive losses. I really think Australia desperately needs this system but negative gearing is so ingrained in Australian culture now that it's political suicide to try and change it. I believe Labor made noises about this in a recent Federal election and suffered the consequences.
It's a shame because Perth and even Melbourne used to have a relatively low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life. I honestly don't know how anyone does it now.
As for the politics, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Australia doesn't have the crazy evangelicals that the US does, for example. Like when the gay marriage issue was decided even the highly conservative former PM Tony Abbott basically came out and said the matter was settled and it's time to move on.
As for climate change, while I believe in it I also don't think anything will change out of pure altruism by any large group of people. And that's anywhere. It's not unique to Australia. Look at what's happened to the price of solar in the last decade.
I'd say the ugliest side of Australian politics and culture in general is actually the treatment of refugees and the so-called (this name still sends shivers down my spine) Pacific Solution.
Oh and we can't forget Australia's most pustulent export: Rupert Murdoch.
> Like when the gay marriage issue was decided even the highly conservative former PM Tony Abbott basically came out and said the matter was settled and it's time to move on.
Australia recognized same sex marriage in 2017. That was 3 years after after the USA did. I'm not sure I would call Australia as being progressive by that measure.
The USA recognized same sex marriage in 2015, but we did so via a Supreme Court ruling. The Court's composition has changed since then, and the new Court has signaled a willingness to overturn settled precedents.
While our current detent may persist, I would imagine that an action taken by the Australian Parliament would tend to be more durable.
> I would imagine that an action taken by the Australian Parliament would tend to be more durable.
I'm curious to understand why you'd think a law passed by elected lawmakers is more durable than a verdict by judges who have their position for life? Obacare was surely very controversial, but despite the best efforts by the conservative and an ideologically hostile Supreme Court, it remains in place after ten years.
> [...] but despite the best efforts by the conservative [...]
Those efforts were actually pretty half-hearted. They talked a big game, but they don't actually want to abolish it. (Reminds me of how the UK doesn't really want to face up to a no-deal Brexit, despite lots of brave talk. Or how no government in the UK has so far re-nationalised the railroads, despite re-nationalisation perennially polling high with the general public.)
This is a really good point. Conservatives had two full years to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They had campaigned as a party for "Repeal and Replace" for nearly 10 years, but then they didn't repeal it.
The Australian Constitution is heavyweight on the mechanics of federal government, and how heads of power are divided between the state and federal governments, and the role of the court to adjudicate, but quite lightweight on peoples "inalienable rights". There's no "bill of rights" - though there are certain principals like "natural justice" and "customary law". Parliaments are empowered to legislate, and that's what they do. So it's comparatively rare that the court will discover some basis to neuter legislation - though it does happen.
Simply put: two of the five justices who voted in favor of Obergefell (the case that legalized same-sex marriage) are no longer on the Court. They have been replaced with justices who would be more likely to vote the other way.
The realignment of the Court, plus this Court's willingness to overturn settled law, together signal that a new law prohibiting same-sex marriage might be allowed to stand if brought before today's Court, returning the US to a country where same-sex marriage is not universally legal.
So I would regard our current regime around same-sex marriage, civil rights, etc. to be subject to not being directly challenged at the Supreme Court.
In Australia's case, the same-sex marriage law was approved by 61% of voters in a national plebiscite, a non-binding referendum (officially it was called a "postal survey") before Parliament enacted it.
Legally, Parliament could repeal it tomorrow and ban same-sex marriage again. Politically, that would be impossible without another plebiscite, and there is no reason to believe a new plebiscite would deliver a different outcome; it would almost certainly return the same result, and likely by a bigger margin.
No conservative politician in Australia wants to talk about this. I'm sure some of them are still personally opposed to same-sex marriage, but they all realise trying to repeal it is hopeless, and so they'd rather talk about things that they have some hope of achieving.
So, for the record, I 100% support gay marriage and abortion rights.
What you have to realize about the US is that the Supreme Court deciding these issues is... controversial. Many view it as undemocratic (although it's worth noting that many of those same people don't feel the same way about the Supreme Court's pro-2nd Amendment interpretations of modern times).
We're still seeing the ripple effects of Roe v. Wade being decided almost 50 years ago.
As others have pointed out, Supreme Court precedent is only that until a later Supreme Court comes along and changes it and that could very well happen with the current court composition. And you need look no further than the Court's refusal to stay the Texas abortion law pending a full judicial review.
So the date this was decided doesn't really give any moral superiority here of the US over Australia for two reasons:
1. Australia's position was decided by a democratic process; and
2. With 62% (IIRC) of people approving of the change, the matter is effectively settled. No one can complain about it. As such you don't see any real conservative Christian blowback like you do in the US as witnessed by the statements of Tony Abbott and others.
>doesn't really give any moral superiority here of the US over Australia for two reasons:
I wouldn't call the US morally superior here anyways. In fact, i think anyone after the US is really late to the party. The first US law was MA legalizing gay marriage in 2004. It took 11 years of fighting after to get to supreme court.
> We're still seeing the ripple effects of Roe v. Wade being decided almost 50 years ago.
Abortion is far less of a political and cultural hot potato in Australia than in the US. While no doubt some of that is due to other cultural differences – for whatever reason, conservative Christianity has never been quite as strong an influence in Australia as in the US – I think a big factor is the difference in how abortion was legalised.
In Australia, there is no constitutional right to abortion. And yet abortion is legal nationwide. Its legality was achieved through a gradual process, involving state legislation, and state court decisions – those state court decisions were not based on constitutional law, rather the state courts simply decided to reinterpret the existing criminal laws against abortion to not apply to medical procedures. The federal courts stayed out of it completely, and constitutional rights never came into it, only statutory law – if they wanted to, the state parliaments could have overturned the state court decisions effectively legalising abortion, but they chose not to.
The fact that the process was much more gradual, and had greater democratic legitimacy, has helped make it less of a controversy. And since it happened through a series of state laws and state court decisions, opponents of legal abortion don't have one single highly visible event to focus all their opposition upon, like Roe v Wade is in the US. Almost every American has heard of Roe v Wade – even many non-Americans have – by contrast, few Australians know about the Menhennitt ruling (which de facto legalised abortion in the state of Victoria in 1969) or the Levine ruling (which did the same in New South Wales in 1971). American opponents of legal abortion focus most of their energy on trying to get justices appointed to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v Wade – the main purpose of this latest Texas law is to get a case before the Supreme Court which will give those justices an opportunity to do exactly that – its Australian opponents don't have any national focus, which in practice makes them a lot weaker.
It is totally consistent to support legal abortion, but to also think that Roe v Wade was a strategic mistake.
American liberals have a bizarre authoritarian idea of how governance/power works because they were spoiled for the Warren court for so long. They think of government as a tree of daddies and mommies of increasing wisdom and credentials with SCOTUS at the root, to gift you civil rights if you're pure of heart and can just word your petition correctly. They've completely given up on getting buy-in from the ignorant, downtrodden, misunderstood, and miseducated masses that vote for them (don't even ask about the ones who didn't.)
The recent ruling on the Texas heartbeat law might make a dent in that, although I doubt it.
Changes made by pure fiat don't last. Gay marriage in the US could absolutely turn out to have been temporary for just the reasons you explained.
Surely you could have mode your point ("Changes made by pure fiat don't last") without the diatribe overgeneralizing and insulting a large percentage of the American population?
> Australia recognized same sex marriage in 2017. That was 3 years after after the USA did. I'm not sure I would call Australia as being progressive by that measure.
The US was only the 17th country in the world to allow same-sex marriage nationwide; Australia was the 23rd. Still only 28 out of 193 UN member states have it fully nationwide – less than 15%. Only a 3 year gap, when any country having legal same-sex marriage is just over 20 years old. If we look at this in a global and historical context, both countries are very progressive on this particular issue. To argue that the US is in some significant way "more progressive" than Australia just because it got there a few years earlier, you have to be looking at things from a rather narrow perspective.
"Fully nationwide" above is only counting the main national territory of the country, not overseas territories. Even for the US, same-sex marriage is not legal in the territory of American Samoa – the territorial government of American Samoa claims that Obergefell v Hodges doesn't apply to them due to some legal technicalities, and it appears nobody has yet challenged that claim in court. Likewise, Netherlands, New Zealand, and UK all have legal same-sex marriage throughout their main national territory, but not in some of their overseas territories.
So if you want to be hyper-pedantic about it, the US still doesn't have legal same-sex marriage (throughout all of its territory), Australia does.
>I really think Australia desperately needs this system but negative gearing is so ingrained in Australian culture now that it's political suicide to try and change it. I believe Labor made noises about this in a recent Federal election and suffered the consequences.
The senior ministers of the ALP came to a similar conclusion.
Mid this year they announced no changes to negative gearing or capital gains tax offsets.
For the non-Australians following along, this means both major parties support rampant speculation on the residential property market.
negative gearing allows the average person investing to have the same tax advantages as a company investing (in anything), because for a company, only profits (revenue minus expenses) are taxed.
If there were no "negative gearing" for investment properties, then either there would be fewer such properties, or people would have to form businesses to perform such investments (which adds an extra bit of friction with accounting and tax).
Making it possible to deduct "expenses" from "revenue" of a person doing the investment makes sense.
> negative gearing allows the average person investing to have the same tax advantages as a company investing (in anything), because for a company, only profits (revenue minus expenses) are taxed.
From a quick Google, it looks like companies are not entitled to CGT discounts. This means that forming a business would increase the tax you pay for almost everyone.
>If there were no "negative gearing" for investment properties, then either there would be fewer such properties, or people would have to form businesses to perform such investments (which adds an extra bit of friction with accounting and tax).
This doesn't sound like a bad thing. It would discourage people from speculating on the property market and outbidding owner/occupiers (which is a net negative for society) and encourage them to invest their money in productive businesses (which is a net positive).
The problem with negative gearing is the 'average person' can't participate in negative gearing.
Negative gearing only works for those who have a high level of income with the corresponding high level of taxation.
Why it works so well for these individuals is they can greatly reduce their tax liability by using the property deductions negatively gearing has to offer.
As a secondary benefit, those same investors also win on the capital gain side of the equation as these negative gearing tax incentives create massive demand for property.
Your 'average person' living on the average wage can't benefit from negative gearing as their wage bracket does not attract a high enough level of taxation.
In fact it hurts this group of people only because those higher property prices also means they are priced out of the housing market.
I mostly agree with everything here but will point out that SE salaries have risen quite dramatically over the past 10 years in Aus. If you are a (genuinely) senior engineer you should be on $170k+. In a place like Brisbane (if you can handle the summers) that's a reasonably liveable salary. But yeah - I fear it's going to end up like the rest of the country fairly quickly...
One of my major gripes is that education here is not at all egalitarian.
> Property in Australia is like a game of musical chairs but the music stopped in Sydney in 1978
The central premise of musical chairs is that there are less chairs than people but every round everyone gets an opportunity to get a seat.
So in my analogy, the last round ended in Sydney in 1978 meaning if you weren't sitting then then you didn't get another chance at a seat.
I remember seeing property shows in the 2000s and there'd be a young couple in their mid-20s with a baby looking at houses that were up to $800K. You'd really need to be earning $200k+ then to afford that or, more realistically, $250k+. Not a lot of jobs in Australia (even Sydney) paid that then (and still don't for the record).
So how were such people affording houses? The Mum and Dad Bank is how. Their parents who were sitting down in 1970s were now sitting on considerable unrealized property wealth and this gets passed along to the children.
Some important context here: this applies to probably every Australian city but is particularly prevalent in Sydney I feel. And that is that the notion of what Sydney in keeps changing.
So when I say Sydney became unaffordable in the 1970s, I mean what people viewed as Sydney back then, which is inner Sydney, the North Shore and coastal suburbs. But these have now been so out of reach for people who aren't wealthy for so long that people don't think of them as Sydney anymore.
Now when people talk about the affordability of Sydney they're talking about the areas where "normal" people buy. Sydney has expanded far to the West, basically to the Blue Mountains (eg Penrith). It's also expanded south (eg Campelltown). But somewhere like Mosman isn't part of the normal person's mental picture of Sydney property where it was 40+ years ago.
This reminds me of something that happened to me in university. I mentioned to someone the suburbs I'd be staying in over the summer when university was out and they literally said "la di da" like it was fancy. To them it was because they were part of a newer generation who lived very far north (I remember they took 3 buses to get to university). To me, it was just where my grandparents lived and had done so for 40-50 years. When they bought that house it was literally the edge of the city, as in the other side of the street was bushland.
You see it on the train too. When I went to university the one where all the students and twentysomethings lived was 5 stops from the CBD. 15 years later it was 8-9 stops.
levels.fyi does not agree with you. I feel we are making more software engineers than jobs that are available. Many are offshoring product development to India.
You have to remember that tax regimes are different in different places. In the UK I’ve been on about $120 an hour, equivalent after tax to a salary of about $200k, and your health care is already paid.
Comparatively it seems like contractors in the USA get punished by the tax system.
1. Tax matters
2. COL matters
3. AUD-USD conversions aren't that straightfoward when discussing this.
$1200 a day puts you into the top few percent of salaries here in Australia. I don't really care what a "brisbane sized city in the states" might be doing, because moving there means I have to live in a country that I'm not a good fit for culturally.
The replies to you seem a bit off to me. $1000 a day is plenty to live on in Brisbane.
I do fear that housing here is going to end up like the other major Aus cities though. I think Brisbane house prices are rising at like $500 a day or something. An amount I couldn't have fathomed paying in rent weekly when I first moved to Sydney.
Yeah agreed. $200k a year is more than enough to live on. Heck, I'm saving 80% of my pay cheque -- specifically to save enough to offset this crazy property price capital growth.
But a simple example that shows how lucky I and others are: I can rapidly, from $0 (if I was silly enough to have no savings for this exercise) save up a deposit within a year or two, less if one has a partner.
Any of my friends and acquaintances, unless they also went into high-paying jobs and industries here in SEQ, or unless they have parents well-off enough to help them, are writing off being able to enter the property market for years or decades.
All of your points have a left-wing political bias (as expected on HN). The problem with this is even though the left and the right agree on end goals, they will continue to argue with each other and blame the other, and you are an example of that.
For example, you frame the housing issue as "the left-wing government tried to fix it, but was stopped!". This will result in constant back and forth between left and right and nothing will change. The reality is that no party even addressed the issue until it was forced on them. I remember that day distinctly. Both parties were completely silent. They had no answer - they all benefit from the current situation. They then both went back to their strategic meetings and came up with some garbage responses. The left was about changing taxes, and I think the right was about lowering the home deposit threshold or something like that. It is all just a play because neither political party wants anything to change.
With regard to gay marriage - Donald Trump ran and won in 2016 on a platform that included the recognition of gay marriage as a settled right. AU and US aren’t so different!
That's kinda my point. It is of course unknowable but I really wonder if Trump could've won the 2016 election if the Supreme Court hadn't handed down that decision.
This has happened before. Dubya largely got reelected in 2004 because Karl Rove tied the campaign to blowback against states and plebiscites in favour of gay marriage.
> It's a shame because Perth and even Melbourne used to have a relatively low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life.
I'm British and have just moved to Perth. I am looking at being able to get a house 2-3 times as large here compared to the UK, for similar outlay.
Add to that the weather and the sheer space... the QoL here seems so much higher than back home.
I have spent time in some parts of the US (about 4 months in Texas, probably about a year in other parts in total), but haven't lived in NYC. It always seemed nice, if you like the big city, but I had my fill of that in London some time ago.
Now over east? Yeah housing seems utterly inaccessible in Sydney and Melbourme. But out west here it doesn't look that insane by my (British) standards.
Australia by and large is also much less grubby than the UK.
(I say, 'grubby' not 'dirty', because I don't know whether the UK is actually dirty. Eg all the buildings just look dirty and drab compared to Australia. Perhaps it's a leftover from centuries of burning lots of coal?)
I agree, Perth has always seemed sparkling clean compared to most cities in the UK. Other Australian cities I've visited seemed that way as well.
I think partly it's the light - it's so bright here in Aus that things look cleaner anyway, but also the light and the heat keep things a little cleaner, UV sterilises and the sun bleaches after all.
Aus doesn't have as much of a legacy of concrete brutalism, either, lumpen concrete buildings in the UK that started out grey and end up brown, water-stained from all the rain and oppressive-looking.
And also I think better care is taken. Visiting London after having lived here in Perth for a couple of years about ten years back, I was struck by just how often as I walked around my nostrils were assaulted by smells of rotting rubbish or just plain urine.
So yeah, bunch of things, but it does feel much cleaner here.
I'm genuinely curious about this. My questions are:
1. What do you do for a living in Perth? What I guess I'm really trying to determine is what income bracket you're in.
2. Where in Perth are you looking at renting or buying? and
3. How much of your ability to buy is because you sold a house in the UK so have a huge deposit to put down?
I've known quite a few British people who have moved to Australia and pretty much all of them had (3).
I would say that QoL is generally much higher than the UK though. Houses and blocks are of course larger. Earning potential in London at least is pretty high though. But if you want a house you're probably commuting for an hour each way when the trains are running, which they generally aren't. Crossrail will be interesting.
> It's a shame because Perth and even Melbourne used to have a relatively low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life. I honestly don't know how anyone does it now.
The experience of living in Melbourne in 2000 as someone not on the property ladder is very different to now.
In 2000 it was possible to be on the poverty line and still live within an easy bike ride of the CBD. Now everyone I know lives increasingly on the fringes of the city.
This change is not unique to Melbourne but I can't help feel something is lost when you go to a house party and the only people you meet are ones who can afford property.
I'm increasingly assuming anyone who buys in Melbourne is doing so with the assistance of multi-generation wealth.
I'm at the age where a lot of friends are beginning to buy (in Melbourne). There's basically two classes: the people buying houses in the outer-inner-suburbs that would still be vastly outside their price range without massive help from both sets of parents; these buyers are unfailingly couples. And second, single friends buying without parental assistance, but buying off the plan apartments not much closer to the city but which at least offer a deposit low enough for someone to get on the property ladder. One is taking on a lot more risk than the other to enter the market.
> the people buying houses in the outer-inner-suburbs that would still be vastly outside their price range without massive help from both sets of parents; these buyers are unfailingly couples.
I suspect there is a big difference between the long term wealth implications of buying a house vs buying an apartment. There are never going to be more houses in outer-inner-suburbs. There is going to be a constant supply of new apartments as we move towards higher density living.
People who have wealthy parents are in the best position to make better housing investments.
An undiversified export economy, out of control house prices, a job-market primarily focused on two cities, a government intent on selling all public assets, very limited political interest in positive climate policies. The latter is simply addressed with "technology will help us out when we need it to".
And you suggest New Zealand?!
- Australian housing is a bargain compared to NZ ones.
- NZs job market is focused on one city, which is smaller, more expensive, lower wages and more crime than Brisbane or Perth.
There's a reason so many New Zealanders live in Australia and not vice versa.
Moved to Sydney from New Zealand and have been here for 6 years. I do like it here compared to New Zealand but I think I would move elsewhere given the chance.
The internet here is an actual joke, the politics are biased towards conservatism, don't think about owning an electric car but... the pay is quite good and it's a nice place to go out. Lots of nature and you can find nice apartments to rent if you look.
New Zealand by comparison is great but it's remote, expensive and has a low salary when compared to other western countries. It has been a while since I was there last, but public transport is hilariously bad - but if you enjoy nature and silence, it's there in abundance.
My company has offered to relocate me to NYC, which is interesting. Looking on YouTube at what the city looks like and it's pretty ugly if I am honest. Apartments seem to be small and you don't get modern style apartments even 45 minutes from Manhattan via public transport. I am concerned that my lifestyle would suffer living there.
Not so good with out of control house prices, fueled by safe-haven demand … at least we won’t run out of freshwater as fast as Oz will … still, Mosman is heaps above Kits / Point Grey in my opinion! NYC is really a dump though. West Coast is the best coast! If you’re from NZ you will likely love the areas around Vancouver, Whistler & Victoria BC!
> My company has offered to relocate me to NYC, which is interesting. Looking on YouTube at what the city looks like and it's pretty ugly if I am honest.
This is a great opportunity that you'd be silly to pass up because of some YouTube videos. You have to at least visit in person to give it a fair shot. NYC is the largest city in any western country. I guarantee you can find parts of it you'd like.
> Hey Canada, how you doing?
Pay in tech is way, way higher in NYC than in Canada.
I recall readinga book when I was young, it was all about a nuclear war - and the perspective of the characters was that AU was the last bastion of humanity to survive... and went on to talk about how the people were able to survive there...
So dystopian weird idea follows:
What if "they" are 'cleansing' Australia to make it clear for the oligarch elites to come in and claim the land!
It would be wonderful if HN had an ear for SCI-FI ideas as opposed to taking every gosh darn thing literally...
I understand the need to keep some "thought-bumpers" to prevent reddit-ization of HN (ironic given that HN is the seed of Reddit) -- but FFS lighten the heck up.
This is one view... but I suspect most people living somewhere that is a proper city as opposed to a resort would say similar things.
Net migration rate provides a more objective view of whether a country has an 'average future'. If you look at the global net migration rates, Australia and particularly the capital cities have some of the highest rates in the world, despite being far away from anywhere.
The factors driving this may not align at all with what you personally want from a country or a city, which is fair enough. But your comment seems like quite a generalisation to make from a very specific position.
The next election is critical, I think. Need a minority Labor Government with a strong crossbench - neither major party ruling in their own right will make any moves in the right direction for the country at this point...
We need a labor government to call a royal commission into Murdoch's influence in Australian politics. Truth in media laws and the immigration minister needs to revoke Australian citizenships of a few people in those orgs who could rightly be considered malicious non stat actors.
Out of all the things you mention, privatizing government owned assets it actually a good thing.
Or at least it can be a good thing, as long as the process ain't mismanaged too badly. Governments seldom do the simplest thing of just auctioning off eg a state-owned business or plot of land to the highest bidder.
Most of the time they insists on beauty contests where politicians want to judge bidders' plans. That's a recipe for corruption and cronyism.
Or they only sell off eg a business piecemeal, making a turnaround in private hands much harder.
This is going to happen sooner or later, the pandemic accelerated it, exploiting and abusing the liberty of people will be the new norm - 1984.
Observation: at least in NSW it seems that most people trust the government and cooperate with government orders (Digital Tran formation for public service is on the right track, see the delivery of digital driver licence and all other perks and all other self-service integrated services, at the cost of giving up some personal info and privacy (state government says that we can trust them for securing the data/info)...
I have been living in Sydney, Australia since 2008. Agree that country is facing tough and worrying economic outlook for the 2020's. It was seriously `lucky country` (mining boom, Rise of China, etc.) when I first landed in SYD, however, with the deterioration of Australia-China relationship, and the undiversified economy structure (mining, education, tourism, etc.), the "lucky country" is going downhill towards the "luckin coffee" direction LMAO.
The country is run by politicians holding law and/or accounting degrees with no social responsibility or morals (in comparison with Germany and northern Europe), who are good at making taxation (or similar) laws but with no vision for the country's future (geopolitical influence, economy, etc.). Most people underestimate the stupidity of government and central banks, keep printing $ (QE) and pump the money to the banking system, making the asset bubbles bigger, while failing to stimulate the real economy, most $ went into the construction industry)
All bubbles pop, there is no exit strategy for QE... Recently watched "The Big Short" again and seriously history is repeating itself, so similar. Good luck to the people live in the "lucky country", keep doing what you believe is right, manage risks well (I know many family highly leveraged into investment properties), stay healthy stay sharp ;-)
"The world is sinking, people ware partying."
Housing "un"affordability will cause negative consequences for the society: psychological problems -> family problems -> community problems -> social problems. Politicians don't care, only focus on winning the next election, they they come and go, they've got their exit route well covered...
Australia is still the same 'lucky country' written about over 50 years ago [0]. A second rate political and economic system survives on the back of huge unearned benefits - vast natural wealth, a comparatively small population, multi-culturalism, distant from war and most environmental issues, etc.
The result is still a very attractive place - lots of resources, educated people, safe, little poverty comparatively, etc. But people take it for granted and its sleep walking into a Corporatocracy with fast growing wealth gap.
The problem is that this legislation wasn't introduced to deal with COVID.
The intense international focus on our public health restrictions is a huge distraction, and undermines the message we want to send regarding authoritarianism.
It's snark but it's relevant. All of this shit has been pushed through during a climate where people are willing to let the government get away with a little more to help fight covid. And look what they're ramming through.
At the point where a critical mass of people realize this has nothing to do with public health and everything to do with seizing and consolidating power.
Anytime a government is unified in something, like it has been here, you should be highly skeptical. Politicians make calls for “unity” all the time and of course they do as everyone agreeing with them makes exercising power that much easier. The main objectives of any political elite/party in any form of government throughout all of history are to increase their power and to remain there. Division doesn’t mean dysfunction.
The Patriot Act was roundly supported and of course it was - it increases the political classes power across the board, legitimizing the increase for “safety”.
I don't see what that really achieves when all the chips and OSes are backdoored. Not to mention the fact that the entire backbone is meticulously tracked.
Or, realize that security is not only a tech problem. It’s also a people and societal problem. If we don’t live in societies that are conducive to personal liberty, it becomes extraordinarily hard to have any privacy.
If all encryption became illegal, for example, with a death penalty & minimal trial for those who are discovered to be using it — nobody is going to be using encryption. It doesn’t matter how technically savvy you are, very few people will risk death just on principle of “privacy”.
That’s an extreme example, but makes the point that you need both the tech and the society to support liberty and freedom. And it’s a similar dilemma that people are feeling today — what can you do if the government has compromised nearly everything? Those few uncompromised pieces probably don’t stand much of a chance. So instead, it really is a problem of people and society.
Just wondering will this new acts have negative consequences for global and independent internet agencies as Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) is well within Australian borders [1]? If it's function going to be severely affected by these new Australian acts APNIC should it be moved somewhere else without these dubious acts.
Long time FastMail user. Never got a straight answer on privacy so moved to Tutanota for now. Much better, end to end encryption- nice clients too.
FastMail seems to have automated default address collection, backup of drafts & deleted email, ability to archive email. With no at rest encryption this could be possibly used for data mining too.
This new law is the last straw. So far they have not bothered to address the issue. Till few years back FM used to be awesome but feel they have not moved with time.
These "data disruption warrants" are the most interesting to me:
> Data disruption means adding, copying, deleting or altering data held in a computer. This can only be done in order to frustrate the commission of offences or determine relevance of data. To assist disruption, a warrant can also authorise other facilitative activities, such as entering specified premises, using electronic equipment to obtain access to data, removing a computer from premises, copying data that has been obtained, and intercepting if necessary to carry out the things authorised in the warrant. A data disruption warrant also allows the officer to take actions to conceal the access and the activities, allowing the warrant to be conducted covertly.
> Data disruption warrants can be used to affect data offshore with the consent of an appropriate consenting foreign official (if the location of data is known or can be reasonably determined). They can also be issued internally in an emergency situation, and subsequently authorised by a Judge or AAT member. They can also permit the officer to seek assistance from a person with knowledge of a computer or a computer system to help in carrying out the warrant.
So they can get a warrant to come into your house while you're not home and put a keylogger in your keyboard USB cable, or put a bug on the UART of your router, etc. Or just hacking your cheap Netgear router with one of the hundreds of vulnerabilities that exist.
Scary shit. Sounds like they're pretty drunk with power. Does Australia really have a capable offensive security group like the NSA to pull these sorts of things off, though?
> So they can get a warrant to come into your house while you're not home and put a keylogger in your keyboard USB cable, or put a bug on the UART of your router, etc. Or just hacking your cheap Netgear router with one of the hundreds of vulnerabilities that exist.
That's actually not that weird.
If you are a suspected criminal and a judge give a warrant targeting you specifically, it's quite natural the police can now gather information on you by any mean possible.
It's not warrant-less, it's not mass surveillance, it sounds like regular police work. Or am I missing something?
Not being a legal expert, I can’t tell where the boundary is between enabling legitimate police work and giving (accidentally or deliberately) the police the power to plant fake evidence, the latter being what some of this sounds like. But, I’m not a legal expert, and “sounds like” is a way to make very large mistakes when looking outside of one’s own domain of expertise like I’m doing here.
(Also doesn’t help that I hear about stories like this from people who don’t like them, so I get a potentially biased first impression).
> A DATA DISRUPTION WARRANT enables the agencies to “add, copy, delete or alter” data on devices.
With the exception of the word “copy”, this makes it seem like the plan is to make it not merely possible but also legally acceptable for anyone given such a warrant to create/place that evidence (or delete things to make real data look incriminating by lack of context).
Again, I really know I can’t trust my interpretation of any legal text, all I can say is it does sound bad to an outsider like me.
I have no idea how Australia handles this, but in the U.S., the process of discovery is what is supposed to keep the police from just planting evidence. Prosecution needs to present all evidence that will be used against you, including exactly where it came from and chain of custody. If they can't, it gets thrown out. The only exception is they can't be compelled to give away the identity of confidential informants. But a confidential informant also can't testify anonymously, so the police would always need additional evidence beyond the word of a CI.
It's not a perfect system by any means. The police can and do plant evidence. But a lot of convictions also get thrown out and this is often why obviously guilty people get off on "technicalities" because the police don't follow procedure down to the letter.
The opposite end of the spectrum, not giving the police any power to do covert surveillance at all, is effectively just giving a license to the Mafia to do whatever it wants, as anyone who just commits all of their crimes privately will get away with it as long as they can sufficiently scare or kill anyone who would otherwise have been willing to testify.
It's a tradeoff either way, and we try to let there be a middle ground, where the police can bug your house, tap your phone, hack your router, but they need a warrant that has to be granted by a completely separate branch of government that is not in the same chain of command, and they have to prove to your lawyers that they obtained all of the evidence they have against you legally.
Indeed, I have no issue with the police having the power to read whatever data a warrant grants.
My problem is the linked page says:
> A DATA DISRUPTION WARRANT enables the agencies to “add, copy, delete or alter” data on devices.
Copy is fine, it’s the other three which are scary. Perhaps they shouldn’t be scary, perhaps they have well-defined meanings in law I’m just not familiar with (like how “Hacker News” has nothing to do with cyber crime), but I can only respond within the limits of my knowledge, and that seems scary.
I think the reason they want the ability to add, delete, and alter is so they can disrupt certain users, software, or services legally, like botnets or arms deals. It's probably too broad and could be abused though.
It's certainly better than simply compromising everyone but it's not like they're going to stop their mass surveillance activities. This is just a step towards legitimization of those activities.
It's time for computer security to include nation states in their threat model. We need tamper-evident hardware.
Scary shit. Sounds like they're pretty drunk with power. Does Australia really have a capable offensive security group like the NSA to pull these sorts of things off, though?
They do but the real question is whether its appropriate to source intelligence from a place like the NSA when the outcomes are meant to be used by the police.
Every time Australia is mentioned on hn the same two whiners appear to spray about how it's so horrible here because "nobody has any problems" and everything is "too easy and good", which makes them feel some kind of doomsday prepper type indignation. It seems pathological:
"These FOOLS are happy as long as they have extreme happiness, wealth, health, peace and general ease. Little do they know their sacred right to convenient encrypted communication is under grave threat".
There is a lot of trust in Australia that their elected officials and the public service / police will do the right thing. These new laws being introduced if used in the spirit they are intended could be good. The continual refusal of the current federal government to introduce a federal crime and misconduct commission as most of the states now have is a disturbing trend. For instance three local councils were placed under administration in my state after the elected leaders were found to be doing illegal things - the classic is the Lord Mayor of Ipswich being found with a suitcase containing $50,000 at an airport, he is now serving a jail term.
So these laws, a refusal to have a watchdog, scaling back of FOI request responses, searching journalists homes by the AFP, are a disturbing trend in the federal arena. Looked at dispassionately you can only assume they're trying to hide something.
> These new laws being introduced if used in the spirit they are intended could be good
We already know they won't. Here's [1] the Australian anti-terrorism Police arresting a young online journalist at his house, because he was asking probing questions to a politician that said politician did not like. Video of the incident clearly shows the Politician lied multiple times in his police statement (which is a crime).
Yet the anti-terrorism taskforce was used to arrest this person at his house.
The only power that’s safe from abuse by an errant politician is one that politicians as a category aren’t allowed to wield to begin with.
I think the best guiding principle for government is to ask yourself when faced with a proposed extension to the power of politicians this question: “would I be comfortable with politicians having this power if the Cabinet consisted of people who personally hated me”. If there’s any doubt, these powers can and will be used to abuse. The rights that protect the worst of society also protect the rest of it, we remove them at our peril.
One thing no one is mentioning is how China is the no.1 beneficiary of a pacified and monitored Australian populace. They are already completely dependent on the Aussie natural resource exports, and are deeply interested in Australia continuing to be friendly towards them, and could easily overwhelm them in a fight.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 394 ms ] threadBut yes, we can't cut the cord fast enough. Still, trade is another matter than shared mass surveillance. If the USG is sharing our data with the CCP, I'd very much want some people fired and perhaps jailed over it.
Economic improvement for the masses is merely a byproduct.
It ain't cheating if you're not spying on your own people.
The government does not give back power it manages to hoard for itself. This is the fundamental problem with modern progressive liberalism and anti-choice conservatism. When you give the government power, it WILL use said power against you.
Not a single government in human history has not turned on its citizens.
Why is this an increasing trend? Voting is mandatory…so are voters more trusting of their institutions or just apathetic?
Voting is compulsory at federal elections, by-elections and referendums for those on the electoral roll, as well as for State and Territory elections. Australia enforces compulsory voting.[24] People in this situation are asked to explain their failure to vote. If no satisfactory reason is provided (for example, illness or religious prohibition), a fine of up to $170 is imposed,[25] and failure to pay the fine may result in a court hearing and additional costs. About 5% of enrolled voters fail to vote at most elections
There was a surge in minor parties in the Senate about a decade ago. In the (very large) Senate ballot you were able to vote for a single party, and their official preferences registered with the Electoral Commission were automatically applied to the entire form. Minor parties with similar policies were obviously preferencing each other, and preferencing major parties very low. (The whole point of a minor party, sometimes a single issue party, is a significant deviation from the uncontested policy agreed upon by both major parties). So the process was changed and now the voter has to manually nominate at least 6 parties on the Senate ballot form. The effect of this is even the motivated voter with interest in the policies of a minor party cannot usually name 6 that they prefer over the 2 major parties, and so one (if not both) will end up getting a reasonably high vote preference when the previous scheme would have seen them near the bottom. This further secured the position of the two major parties.
In non mandatory voting systems the politicians need to motivate people to the polls. The default of the population is apathy so to generate action you appeal to the extremes who are the most likely to act. The more people you can make act the more you can get to vote for you.
But with mandatory voting the apathetic mass (who are most likely to be moderates as they don't really care but generally are reasonable educated people and don't agree with the extremist views) cast almost random votes which smoothes out the skew to the extremes non mandatory voting causes.
I would suggest reversing the Senate ballot 6 votes rule. We can have status quo in the lower house, and negotiation with minor parties representing the population on issues they deem most important - and handled incorrectly by the major parties - in the Senate.
It is important to note that you are making an argument for outcomes where the design of the system should be philosophical. What system best represents the will of the people? (Or whatever question best frames this problem. This is troublesome and often prejudicial.) It's the subsequent application of this system that is the people's voice. We should not be designing a system to get the political outcome you prefer.
There is no such thing as "a group of liberal supporters protesting" like you see with trump and biden supporters.
I don't get why you are talking about the US. This policy was passed by Australia. I am not saying that non mandatory voting will avoid extremist politics. All I am saying is that mandatory voting is not a silver bullet to avoiding extremism.
I agree with GP that this is less about the Australian population being extremist or facilitating extremism as much is it is about voter apathy and a lack of proper coverage or education on these bills.
Even the greens have been supporting objectionable laws relating to tech. I feel a good chunk of people do care but there is not a single thing that can be done about it.
All I am saying is that forcing people to vote has no impact on stopping extreme policies. If you were correct Australia wouldn't have passed this and other similar laws over the past few years.
I agree that voter apathy can lead to extreme policies passing. That point is irrelevant to what I was trying to convey that extreme policies are still passed despite mandatory voting.
Also, the intransigent moderates you mentioned create inertia biased toward status quo and inhibits appropriate policy action and change (see e.g. the slow-moving trainwreck of climate destabilization).
Strongmen love compulsory voting, it creates a false perception of legitimacy, because corruption or no corruption, if only 30% of a population is engaged in the issues and the other 70% could give two shits, that is a slamdunk for incumbents.
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-political-s...
Parent's assertion that "Voting at all in an unegaged populace is bad." still rubs me the wrong way.
Why discount the votes of engaged individuals just because the masses aren't? Baby, bath water, etc.
To be precise, there isn't a specific "Abstain" option on the ballot paper, but it is perfectly legal to leave the ballot blank. After all, if they could trace blank ballots back to the voter to punish them, it wouldn't be a secret ballot.
For context, "informal votes" (i.e. those votes which are rejected at the counting stage) have typically accounted for less than 5% of votes cast, and blank votes were about 20% of the votes cast in the 2001 federal election[0]. That suggests that about 1% of the population is "abstaining" in this way.
[0] https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joi...
Except this isn’t true. Non voters are significantly less educated than voters. This creates paradoxes like both Trump and Biden voters being wealthier and more educated than the average American.
Non-voters are less likely to be “extremist” in the sense of having strong party loyalties. But they’re much more likely to host a whole myriad range of beliefs that are disproportionately found amount the least educated and aware. They’re more likely to believe in psychics or be 9/11 truthers or to think Bill Gates is tracking people with Covid vaccine microchips.
Pure moderates aka centrists don't exist. Those people average out to be moderate but they're actually "cross-pressured" - they have crazy beliefs that are inconsistent because they never thought about them.
The one constant is that nobody in real life is a libertarian, even though you always run into them on the internet.
The previous system was being actively gamed. Because the Group Ticket Votes flowed between candidates in unnaturally high proportions, it was possible to snowball your way to election from a very small number of initial votes. How small? Wayne Dropulich of the Sports Party initially won election with 0.2% of the initial first preference votes.
This possibility meant that there was a large incentive to create a minor party and join a large preference-sharing network of parties which shared little in the way of ideology. No-one knew who was going to get the Senate seat when the music stopped, but it was a pretty good lottery to enter. You may remember Ricky Muir of the Motoring Enthusiasts Party, who won election based on above-the-line preference flows from these groups: Bank Reform Party, Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party, HEMP Party, Shooters and Fishers, Australian Stable Population Party, Senator Online, Building Australia Party, Family First Party, Bullet Train For Australia, Rise Up Australia Party, No Carbon Tax Climate Sceptics, Citizens Electoral Council, Palmer United Party, Democratic Labour Party, Katter's Australian Party, Socialist Equality Party, Australian Sex Party, Australian Voice Party, Wikileaks Party, Drug Law Reform, Stop CSG, Animal Justice Party, and the Australian Independents Party. That's right, the vegans of the Animal Justice Party together with the Shooters and Fishers - I'm sure that's all about well-considered ideology?
The problem was that the previous system gave you two choices - you could rank all of the candidates - often well over a hundred - or you could accept another party voting for you. The new system instead allows you to rank the groups, of which there is a far more manageable number (and the groups are far more recognisable to candidates in most instances than the candidates anyway) - or you can still rank all 100+ candidates, if you like - or as few as 6.
The system after the abolition of group ticket voting more closely reflects voters democratic choices. The big parties get a lot of seats for the entirely unsurprising reason that a lot of people vote for them!
How do we vote for and elect representatives in sufficient quantities that will throw out privacy and security overreaches like this?
Very few of the representatives in both houses will understand the technical means, underpinnings, and exploit and overreach potential of these bills because they simply don't understand the technology in the middle.
All a party/member needs to do is draft the bill and then cause enuf fear and panic in a sitting parliament for the large majority of representatives to pass it. Are these things even being challenged in parliament? Who objects to this who understands it?
Which is exactly the problem: A single example that is but a distant memory. No contemporaries that can challenge the status quo.
There would be several tech challenges, but it could provide a more pure form of the people’s will.
Imagine how elections would shift if only the elderly voted or middle age.
Imagine if only those with children could vote (as they have a reason for the future).
The voting base is important. Forcing people to vote sets up conditions where propaganda as opposed to an informed population is making the decisions.
That’s what happened to Australia
Quoting political scientist Waleed Aly:
"In a compulsory election, it does not pay to energize your base to the exclusion of all other voters. Since elections cannot be determined by turnout, they are decided by swing voters and won in the center... That is one reason Australia’s version of the far right lacks anything like the power of its European or American counterparts. Australia has had some bad governments, but it hasn’t had any truly extreme ones and it isn’t nearly as vulnerable to demagogues"
I think your point about compulsory voting creating ripe conditions for more propaganda is not borne out by reality - the USA is just as flooded with fake news as Australia.
In Australia we have an example of what happens when you force everyone to vote. It’s not going well, they literally have concentration camps, ask for papers, don’t let you leave your homes, etc.
> I think your point about compulsory voting creating ripe conditions for more propaganda is not borne out by reality - the USA is just as flooded with fake news as Australia.
I think you assume what you see on TV is legit news. I agree, you see the same “fake news” everywhere. The problem, is those who believe fake news are often not those voting because they don’t do their own research, they aren’t engaged. You want the engaged going to vote, because they’re engaging with society. Forcing everyone to vote is basically a recipe for getting the candidate that “gifts” the most to the people. It’ll be the downfall of nations.
Anyone who thinks this is actually what is happening in Australia is falling for propaganda.
> they literally have concentration camps
Offshore detention centres for refugees seeking asylum is a stain on Australia that cannot be excused or erased.
If you mean the quarantine centres they are finally building then.. they are nothing like concentration camps. They are a better alternative than the hotel quarantine system they have been trying and failing to make work until now.
And within 12 months we'll hopefully have vaccine rates hight enough travel for vaccinated people can get back to normal and they'll only be needed for people who choose not to be vaccinated and choose to come to Australia.
> ask for papers
I assume this is asking for vaccine certification? Seems reasonable, given our failure to get enough people vaccinated quickly enough.
> don’t let you leave your homes
I think this refers to home quarantine? That people in quarantine aren't allowed to leave their homes seems kind of the point?
I thought they were referring to the ability for businesses to ask about vaccine status.
The lack of vaccine passports is of little consolation when its citizens have already accepted this:
"The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a...
When I first moved to Australia I rankled at compulsory voting as I believe that not participating is a valid political act. Countries without compulsory voting talk about the turnout as relative to previous years, and if it falls too far there will be questions about a mandate to govern.
In Australia that can't happen as turnout is always high, this leads to very little opportunity to overhaul the mechanism of elections to make it more applicable to the community, or to overhaul political parties entirely. Red team or Blue team are guaranteed some high proportion of the country voting for them and it gives a false sense of relevance.
However I'm now fully in favour of compulsory voting. Why?
Look at America, what an absolute shambles of a democratic system. One party spending decades attempting to stop black people voting. Voter suppression and gerrymandering (also not possible in Australia) baked into the political system. No thanks.
Australian politicians are no better, they would reach for those tactics in a heartbeat, compulsory voting stops us from heading down that path. There is no utopia, the system has problems, but the trade-off is worth it.
No, it doesn't; sloppy, deliberately overbroad purges of voter rolls (without notification of the targets) are a key voter suppression technique, and are not at all impaired by compulsory voting.
I could of course just be blissfully unaware, and it actually occurs all the time.
AFAIK (which, I’ll admit, isn’t very far—my knowledge of domestic Australian politics is more of a very light random smattering than the result of any focussed study), you are correct that those don't tend to occur in Australia.
It’s always interesting to see this essentially fake narrative. No one is trying to stop anyone from voting. It’s made up, to try and role the base, the same way you describe —- it increases turnout for the left. So they push the fake narrative.
Anyway, I see your point. But the US is an entirely different beast. As much as people want to knock it, the system is extremely robust. The federal government really isn’t supposed to have a mandate. That’s essentially the entire left and right debate in the US. States rights vs federal rights.
The issue you’re seeing in the US are that the left are socialist/Marxists who want a strong federal gov (authoritarian). The right believes that’s anti-American, and believes we should have strong states and personal freedom (Republican). If the left stopped trying to enact federal control (through monetary, economic, political, etc), the right would be totally happy. California would do its thing and Tennessee would do theirs, the best would win.
Unfortunately, that’s not what we’re doing.
This literally goes all the way back to the founding with the federalists (John Adam’s) and anti-federalists (Thomas Jefferson). The system is dysfunctional by design, the goal was never to have a strong government and while its tense, you have more freedom and security than just about anywhere.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked, "What's the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?"
Carvin responded, "Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game."
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/voting-rights-case-...
But yes, to say it was Democrats or Republicans would be very technically inaccurate.
It isn’t a coincidence that the states that were practicing Jim Crow before are the same states trying to discourage voting today.
For instance:
"Texas ranks number 10 overall when it comes to engagement among African American voters, including being first overall in proportional representation of blacks in state legislature and national party conventions."
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/african-americans-in-texas-...
The reality on the ground is that all Western European nations have stricter voting laws / requirements than the US does and almost nobody on HN will dare to talk about that fact because it's inconvenient to the propaganda game.
It's the sick joke of eg Major League Baseball moving the All-Star game from Georgia to protest new voting laws, shifting it to Colorado which already had similar voting laws to those that Georgia wanted to implement. It's all bullshit propaganda.
The same is true of immigration restrictions. You're not supposed to talk about how strict most other affluent nations are when it comes to who they let into their countries to become citizens.
Can you imagine the global uproar if the US began a cultural genocide program against Muslims like Denmark is aggressively doing? Forcibly taking children away from their parents to be re-educated via nationalist propaganda and forced value systems.
How about something less sinister - a national ban on full face veils like France, with punishment by forced re-education. The US would be called draconian, Islamophobic and racist for such treatment. Meanwhile over there's Macron one step away from calling for a cultural crusade.
When the US does it, it's bad. When everybody else does it, it's logical and good and progressive.
The UK* has never required voting ID for elections, and it is possible to walk into a local polling station and be given a ballot paper after just stating your name and address. Sadly that may no longer be the case for future elections, because the UK Conservative party has decided to introduce a voter ID requirement, modelled on the success that the Republicans have had with it at decreasing turnout especially among the poor and minorities.
The fact that other Western European nations have voter ID laws is likely because they generally have mandatory national ID cards already, and it makes to use those to record who voted (how many times). If Republicans were first pushing for mandatory state ID, then later requiring those IDs at polling time would not be seen as so suspicious.
> The same is true of immigration restrictions.
I'm sure it's possible to find examples of policies in some European countries which are worse than the equivalent US policy, but to provide some factual comparison for how welcoming the US is of (poor) immigrants, let me point out that Sweden hosts 8.52 refugees per 1,000 people while the US hosts 0.92, ranking 13th and 68th respectively on the global league table for this.[0]
But you're right, the US would receive criticism for adopting more bigoted policies, just as France was condemned for its bigoted face veil policy.[1] If you live in the US, it shouldn't be surprising that you hear (and are more sensitivity to) criticism of the US more than criticism of countries like France.
* Technically voter ID was trialled in some English constituencies recently, and it has long been standard in Northern Ireland, so perhaps "Scotland" is a better example of a "Western European nation" here. On the other hand, not every US state requires voter ID, so I hope it's still fair for me to say "the US does" require it.
[0] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/People/Migra...
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-niqab...
In general, Europe has more strict voting ID laws (fact).
In general, Europe has more restricted immigration laws (fact). I mean in the US the debate isn't even about who to let in, rather if we should even have a border and allow people to come in as they please.
In general, Europe is more racist. When Orlando Patterson, a renowned race-baiter in the US, surveyed the evidence he found that America was less racist than any other white-majority country by far. Americans are more open than Europeans to living next to a neighbor of a difference race. And we have sharply rising level of intermarriages.
Your comment would probably be more convincing if you provided some citations for your claims, though. The EU average for refugee population, on the link I gave last time, is 2.3 per 1,000 people and the European average is 2.01 per, which are both twice as much as the US. I suppose it's possible that Europe is more welcoming of refugees than other immigrants, but I think your second "fact" is not self-evidently true. The only policy you might have in mind is that EU states can, in some circumstances, expel citizens from other states, despite freedom of movement[0] and the Schengen system, which doesn't have an equivalent in the US as far as I know.
Of all your claims, though, the one that I think most needs to be supported is the idea that not having a border is a mainstream position. I don't think you're saying that every inch of America's land and sea borders need to have an impenetrable physical barrier to even qualify as a border at all, so can you point to an example of an official mainstream party policy saying that there should be no limits on who can enter the country? I'm sure some people on Twitter have suggested that the US shouldn't have a border, but I don't think it has more political support as a policy than, for example, the "shoot to kill" policy suggested by Georgia state Rep. John Yates (R).[1]
[0] https://ukandeu.ac.uk/myth-busting-free-movement/
[1] https://www.laprogressive.com/georgia-lawmaker-national-guar...
I’ll gladly vote for a Republican if I feel like the other side is working against my interests, ideology isn’t a determining factor.
I can't tell if you're completely comfortable with the fact that no evidence exists supporting fraudulent voting, or if you just think it's A-OK to break a few black eggs in order to make the omelette of your desires.
In my anecdotal experience, people don't care about politics here and will most likely vote on either "I'd rather have a beer with X than Y so I'll vote for X" or "they're both as bad as each other so I'll just vote like my family always have."
We haven’t had a prime minister see through a full term in quite a while (they keep getting shuffled out mid-term), and right now everyone is so focussed on lockdowns impacting ~60% of the population that it’s hard to stay up to date and focussed on some of these more important bills being put through the system.
They are captive to their housing investment debts, so political campaigns are decided on policies around that.
As an Australian I’d be curious to know what the argument against them is? (Keeping in mind that most Australians don’t see ‘freedom’ as a terminal goal.)
(I'm not actually arguing a position here, just saying that this is not as clear cut as you might think).
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2014-5-september-october/g...
People arguing this position are assuming that requiring helmets will decrease the risk of injury, which I am well aware there is conflicting evidence around.
I mean you generally don't see people arguing compulsory helmets for car passengers. Even though the number of people requiring medical treatment head injuries caused by cars is orders of magnitude higher than it is for cyclists.
Because the lived experience of politicians on both sides is that the less time something spends in the limelight the less scrutiny it gets. Once something is determined to be supported by both parties (and almost universally when it involves increasing the power of government over citizens they are all in favor) it is not in anybody's interest to have it linger around for debate.
Most Australian politics is cynically focused on controlling the debate rather than solving important issues. So both sides will usually pick strategically controversial but unimportant things that they think favor them and then focus exclusively on those. Everything else is dealt with as expeditiously and in the most minimalist fashion possible. It does have the upside that a lot of "good government" where both sides agree happens in the background without anybody realising.
This whole clampdown feels completely anti-Australian to me. Australians I've met are all very open minded, free spirited folks and they are always flipping a birdie to the government.
Governmental parties are making plays for more power under the guise of working “for the people”, but sadly they are deluded.
Not sure what the answer is here, but just voicing that you’re 100% correct in my estimation. This pandemic and the tragedies yet to come will always be leveraged by those in power to gain more power.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28451769
> Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The Court's decision articulated the view that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the state.
> "[r]eal liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others."
I fail to see how a US Supreme Court ruling is relevant to this.
The recent hubbub surrounding Australia's restrictive COVID-19 measures were possibly the best thing that could happen for our government- when our vaccination numbers rise, the public health restrictions will rollback, whilst the digital legislation will continue on unabated.
They’re related in that both are examples of a level of authoritarianism that seems extreme by the standards of other Western countries.
This legislation is far less justifiable, and should have no reason to exist. By associating the two issues, you are weakening the case against it.
Seems like a flawed argument for at least a dozen more reasons.
People who oppose authoritarianism do so because it's not worth the cost, not because terrorism, child abuse, and disease aren't real problems.
1. ACLU actively gives their data to Facebook:
https://www.axios.com/aclu-data-shares-facebook-4f1d21f4-d43...
https://fortune.com/2021/04/02/aclu-shares-data-facebook-thi...
2. ACLU claims Second Amendment is Racist
> "Racism is foundational to the Second Amendment and its inclusion in the Bill of Rights."
https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1419294620417155074
Fun fact: Vermont ratified the individual right to gun ownership and the abolishing of slavery in their State Constitution at the same time in 1777. The second amendment actually helped defeat racism and the only thing racist about it is the disproportionate infringement against minorities.
> Vermont’s Declaration of Rights of 1777 set forth the following fundamental rights and abolished slavery: That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent, and unalienable rights, amongst which are the enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. Therefore, no male person, born in this country, or brought from over sea, ought to be holden by law, to serve any person, as a servant, slave, or apprentice, after he arrives to the age of twenty-one years; nor female, in like manner, after she arrives to the age of eighteen years.
> Vt. Constitution, Art. I, § 1 (1777). See Zilversmit at 116. The Vermont Declaration also provided: “That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State . . . .” Id., § 15.
3. ACLU used to defend free speech of even neo-nazis but have since then abandoned their principles:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/aclu-again-cowardly-abstain...
4. ACLU's most famous lawyer calls JK Rowling and Abigail Shrier "white supremacists" without any proof whatsoever:
https://twitter.com/abigailshrier/status/1358246098364583936...
The same lawyer has also called for banning of Abigail Shrier's book.
5. ACLU now claims ‘Vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties’:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/vaccine-mandates-actually-...
The ACLU, Prior to COVID, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics. Now, they have completely reversed its views, arguing vaccine mandates help civil liberties and bodily autonomy "is not absolute."
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-aclu-prior-to-covid-den...
The fact that this doesn’t serve anyone (other than their) interest is really just a side effect of the underlying cause.
We should champion this issue and we should fight to keep this kind of thing from happening. But the deeper issue here is one of human nature. How do we build a system that guards against ourselves? 50 years ago I would’ve pointed to our own government as an example, but I’m becoming less and less sure.
That’s why functional democracies are a patchwork of rules that try and prevent such consolidation.
What was happening 50 years ago?
The Vietnam War springs to mind.
Australians were being conscripted in to that war by our government.
So I wouldn’t hold that time up as a paragon of responsibilities government.
But that's not for everyone
Edit: Fixed for people who knew what I meant but want to bust my...
Or are you just saying ours are better, therefore it's fine to walk all over theirs?
Prison convicts were not the first people of Australia.
> The British arrived with Governors, ready to assume the role of governing. [...] Then, these governments set about building infrastructure in a way they never did in Britain. They were not managing a society that existed. They simply crushed the Indigenous ones that did, then proceeded as though no society was here in the first place. That set in motion a peculiarly Australian logic that government created society, not the other way around.
> All these traits are invaluable weapons against COVID. They’re also what makes it possible for us to legislate gun control after an isolated massacre, pass expansive counter-terrorism legislation without anything like the scrutiny of a serious public debate, and maintain a brutal policy on asylum seekers. [...]
> Perhaps America cannot control its guns for the same reason it can have a spectacular civil rights movement. And if that’s true, perhaps we stopped COVID for the same reason we stopped the boats.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/carefree-larrikin-is-a-myth-...
This statement alone should call the writer's knowledge into question. Whilst it was after a particular mass shooting, it was because of the increasing regularity of mass shootings that the laws were drafted.
See https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-13/election-2019-vote-co... amongst others.
An undiversified export economy, out of control house prices, a job-market primarily focused on two cities, a government intent on selling all public assets, very limited political interest in positive climate policies. The latter is simply addressed with "technology will help us out when we need it to".
It really feels sometimes that the only thing the average Australian cares about is the price of their property portfolio.
Or maybe 3 months into the Sydney lockdown is finally getting to me.
I’ve seen how quickly a country can erode (Syria, Ukraine, Hong Kong) and am questioning the future of this country.
Syria has always been a somewhat dangerous place. Ukraine got invaded by Russia. Hong Kong was taken from China by the British, became it's own nation and is currently being ... taken back against its own will in a sense.
Not that it couldn't happen. But Australia is not really a place I would imagine a violent uprising happening compared to most other places. I think we have too much social cohesion, even between those who are politically opposed.
The populous of Australia are fat and happy, and therefore unbothered by the extremely worrying creeping authoritarianism, an economy teetering on total collapse and incompetent local governance. I had real Brave New World vibes living over there.
As a result the general population is blindly letting the government erode our rights and are too pre-occupied with their own lives to actually realise what's happening.
what else are we supposed to do? how do you stop the government from doing that?
Protest - particularly direct action
Challenge them
Ultimately what is one supposed to do in a democracy (never mind Australia for a moment) when you’re just not part of the majority opinion on something?
The culture helps too. In Australia the "democracy is majority rules" meme (which is a lie) is very strong. Just ask the Australian Indians.
Fun fact: Māori people had the right to vote in Australia from the start, Aboriginal Australians (just how racist are they when there is no word in Australia for the first people?) did not get that right until 1967.
It is a tough fight for the Australians.
I don't have much idea what you mean here.
> Just ask the Australian Indians.
Uh, could you explain what you mean here?
> Aboriginal Australians...did not get that right until 1967
I thought that too until recently, but not true.
On the history of Indigenous Australians’ right to vote: https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/indigenous...
On the 1967 referendum:
While many people think that the Referendum gave Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples the right to vote, this wasn’t the case. Aboriginal people could vote at the state level before Federation in 1901; Queensland and Western Australia being the only states that expressly prevented Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from voting.
It wasn’t until 1962, when the electoral act was amended, that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were given the right to register and vote, but voting was not compulsory. Full voting rights were not granted federally until Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were required to register on the electoral roll in 1984. ...
When the Constitution first came into being in 1901 there were only two parts that referred to the First Peoples of Australia: Section 51 (xxvi) gave the Commonwealth power to make laws with respect to ‘people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any state, for whom it was deemed necessary to make special laws’; and Section 127 provided that ‘in reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted’. ...
On 27 May 1967, Australians voted to change the Constitution so that like all other Australians, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be counted as part of the population and the Commonwealth would be able to make laws for them. A resounding 90.77 per cent said ‘Yes’ and every single state and territory had a majority result for the ‘Yes’ vote.
https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/1967-referendum
Voting is important, but much more important is the rule of and access to the law.
"Australian Indians" means the same thing as "Australian Aborigines" Indian and Aborigine are synonyms.
You schooled me on the right to vote! My prejudice leaked out!! I will not let it become bigotry. But I think it is at the federal level. At federation (I thought it was 1905) they really wanted NZ to be a state, and in NZ Māori electorate was a thing, not a particularly democratic thing, but a thing. So to make NZ a state Māori had to able to vote at a federal level.
> "Australian Indians" means the same thing as "Australian Aborigines" Indian and Aborigine are synonyms.
Uh I'm not sure where you are, but in Australia it sure doesn't mean that. No-one here calls aborigines "Indians", and far as I know never has.
Hehe it's ok, I think most Australians probably believe that 1967 thing, if they know the date at all, I'm not sure why. The truth is somewhat complicated.
Gee, I had no idea NZ was involved in the pre-Federation conferences in Australia, although sounds like NZ just wasn't very into it. A wise decision!
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...
I think the only option is to emigrate. I didn’t and still don’t agree with most of the government policies in The Netherlands (regarding immigration, climate, EU, etc), but most Dutch voters apparently do. Eventually the best option is just to cut your losses and leave for greener pastures.
At least this way I am not forced anymore to have my hard earned money taxed on issues I don’t support.
In spite of the tendency for part of the US electorate to wish to federalize all government functions, there's still a lot of difference between US states.
That seems to work out pretty well. It isn't like California is identical to Arizona, at least currently.
If you do hope to move to The Netherlands in the future, if you believe it's a better place for you, I hope you can succeed. I would agree based on the news from Australia, that The Netherlands seems the better option of the two.
By giving up the opposition you create totalitarian state.
Otherwise, I forgot which philosopher said this, but the only real freedom is the freedom to choose where to live and the choice of many places with different viewpoints and social norms. That way each individual could pick what matched their preference best and move there.
Unfortunately the freedom to choose where to live is not really something the world provides. So you might be stuck where you are, but if you're lucky, you might manage to get into another place you prefer.
If that doesn't work, your last resort is the activist route. Make your case and change people's mind. It's happened in the past, but it's a tough road.
This is a good start.
Dudes strongmen literally attempt to kill the (15 year old) kid which can be seen in another video, so you know the act cuts deep as a form of protest...
Compulsory voting with good preference system already in place which means we have a ~90-97% participation rate.
>Protest - particularly direct action
Agree, but increasing using/changing laws to reduce this (declaring environment activists as "terror" groups).
>Challenge them
Not even sure what this means exactly but more people are organizing support for independents/minority parties over the major two. This combined with the ability to form minority governments I think is the best chance for progressive change, but a lot of money is being spent to keep the status quo.
What the hell? Nobody sitting at home in their house has the right to prevent other people meeting peacefully on the street. People like you are what's wrong with Australia, you authoritarian monster! Nobody has the right to stop other people meeting because they might spread a virus to eachother with a 99%+ survival rate that might somehow eventually find its way back to them.
It is also worth noting that people can still protest. They just can't do it while violating health orders. Yelling maskless at police on lockdown days is going to get you arrested. Other protests on non-lockdown days with people maintaining social distancing have proceeded fine apart from grumpy words and fear mongering by politicians.
In a pandemic there is no "street far from you". We are in thios together
Do you even understand what a right means? Rights, be it as defined by the US constitution or the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are inherent moral rights, it's not something the government can freely suspend based on some arbitrary utilitarian justification like case numbers. The whole point of those declarations of rights is protecting people from authoritarian governments; if the government has the power to suspend those rights, you have no rights!
Tell me in which declaration of rights is there a right to have armed police attack and lock up people peacefully assembling on the street?
And if you don't believe in rights, believe anything is moral as long as an elected government makes it law, then consider this. Would you still feel that way if the democratically elected government decided it was okay to rape worik's wife/daughter/mother? Would you still feel that way if the democratically elected government decided worik's ethnic group should be sent to gas chambers for cleansing? If not, then clearly you do believe in absolute rights.
An appropriate time to look at where we draw the line is when their choices put others in harm's way
The current LNP are so actively corrupt with their corporate interests, religious interests, repeated exposed in-house scandals, etc, yet the majority of the population continue to vote for them because they ignore it all and just keep supporting 'their team'. The Labor government tries to suggest that they're different, and end up with their own dramas of a similar style, but are kind of not as bad. Kind of.
There are other options out there, but we're all lead to believe that only the 'big parties' can form government. Which only remains true due to the self-fulfilling prophecy of people only voting en masse for the big two parties (and the preference system that funnels votes into those parties).
The likelihood of that changing? Low.
The other solution would be to dismantle the corporate media monopoly that glosses over the actual issues the country is facing, but that's probably even less likely to happen.
Is it possible that the LNP are constantly in power because they are corrupt?
Please look into the etymology of a word before making whimsical arguments.
You’ll have an awful time with Chinese where words have many different meanings depending on context.
Or sometimes they just kill each other in cycles of violence spanning generations.
> Good times create weak men.
Or they enable amazing things like the internet, modern medicine, and empires that last 1000 years.
Sorry, but I've seen this pithy quote before and I wish it would go away - it's simply not true.
Strong men fought for our rights, fought for the allies and which led to long lasting peace and security.
These are the times that breed weak generations who have no moral compass and have been squandering basic rights and civil liberties.
The internet (FAANG if you want a concrete definition) and modern medicine are both multi-trillion dollar industries; for very fundamental reasons. I'd argue their relative success would probably occur in both good and bad times.
What type of la la fantasy histories have you been reading? Fat happy people maintain the status quo. Hungry desperate people innovate.
Anyway. The world wide web is probably what you meant. And yes, universities and science and medicine makes progress during peaceful times, and ultimately the quote is facile and glib. There is a nugget of truth there, however.
Establishing a frontier in human well being has historically required limiting the power of the state in ways that support the relative liberalizing of its culture. States historically require blood sacrifice before any power is ceded. It takes strong people to achieve and hold progress., and the quote encapsulates the notion that there is a place in the natural order of things for strong individuals to shake things up. For principles to be held to at great cost, however inconvenient or even fatal it may be for others who just want to perpetuate "good enough".
The fallacy is that good times can't produce good and strong people, which is wrong. It's just a simple matter of conviction being stronger when provoked by trauma than abstract rationalization.
Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Robert Goddard, Werner von Braun, William Shockley, John von Neumann, ... those just come off the top of my head, I could keep going for pages.
Yeah, a bunch of hungry desperate people there.
I mean sure, some were deeply flawed or had tragic lives, but that wasn't from being hungry and desperate. They were not poor, and they were supplied with ample resources to pursue their visions by governments or private companies.
That quote is just too much of an oversimplification. The real situation is far more complex and nuanced, and like I said in the other reply it matters a lot how you define strength and how you define good times.
No, you don't get to blame Australia's insanity on the US. They're fully in control of their own destiny and are one of the richest, most privileged nations in world history. Australia will have nobody else to blame if they plunge further into fascism from here.
In 1997 they banned “defensive” firearms. The guns you want because they work well. Semiautos, center fire handguns, pump shotguns. Bolt actions are still possible to get, but not great at self-defense, or overthrowing your government.
Side note… in 1997 these guns were banned, and crime fell. As it turns out though, not only was crime already going down, but there was an increase of 2x police per capita, and curiously crime in the USA fell at a greater rate with no gun ban or large increase in police, crime was high in the 90s for some reason, some people say lead paint bans but the causation is weak.
Also, you forgot Paul Hogan. And Kylie Minogue. And Nick Cave.
Also, while absolutely nothing sticks in my mind about either, the names of Kevin Rudd and Kim Beazley have been retained in my memory.
If there's places Americans want to go, it's Canada, Europe or Asia, though I think their opinion of Europe is a little overrated if anything.
The irony being that 30% of the population was born outside of Australia with a decent part of that in countries which have experienced recent hard times.
https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/30-austra...
At a state level, in many states, rules for dual citizens are more complicated, but result in a similar situation.
I can understand the need for this legislation, but it does tilt the balance in favor of 3rd+ generation Australians (as many 2nd generation Australians can inherit their parent's citizenship).
Yes, if your country of non-Australian citizenship allows you to renounce it, that is recognised in Australian law. But it can be a complex process, with little value unless you have political ambitions (or maybe complex tax issues ;-) ).
"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck."
written by Donald Horne in 1964. These words were true prior to 1964 and are still true in 2021.
What saves Australia is the word "mainly".
There are some first rate people in Australia, mostly not in positions of authority, who stop the ship from sinking. Examples are solar power, quantum information and medical researchers, pockets of the Public Service but less so in 2021, people like Donald Horne, ... Mostly things are second rate, but sometimes something first rate breaks though.
(I've lived in Australia since birth.)
- Manning Clark on the settling of Australia.
Massive amounts of people are unable to work, and a lot of us haven't seen our interstate family in almost 2 years.
A few months before Covid started, 180,000 km2 of Australia was burned to the ground, enshrouding our capital and major cities in smoke, making breathing outdoors almost impossible, causing a mass shortage of P2 masks. Many people died. Many more lost their houses.
What sort of additional hardships do you want to prescribe for Australians exactly?
2. The moon
3. Mars
Hope it goes well for you wherever you choose to go, although I don't think there are many places left that aren't like that, at least not any places that have an acceptable standard of living. Something about a city having a future at all makes the real estate vortex come to life.
Know of a place? Tell me, dear reader, I'd love to hear it.
s/Australian?/US American?/g
Fucked up quarantine, fucked up vaccine rollout, fucked up climate policies, fucked up the news media bargaining code, and fucked up numerous policies just to prop up the housing market. And it'll be the younger generations that will certainly pay for these fuck ups.
I really hope we have an early election and Australians choose Labor over Liberal this time.
Federally the two parties are in coalition, so it's basically the same anyway, even though they are technically different parties in the other states.
Do you think? I'd have pegged things like Green New Deal, fairly strong consensus around fossil fuels and renewables, as strong US Democrat party line -- compared to AU's Labor being still wedded to a fossil fuel future, still keen to satiate Murdoch and co.
What broad policies / positions are you suggesting indicate AU Labor is more left than US Democrat?
Here's the 2021 Labor party platform https://alp.org.au/media/2594/2021-alp-national-platform-fin...
Here's the 2020 Democratic Party platform https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/08/202...
> ... universal health care, how strongly they are in favor of nuclear disarmament, gun control, etc
As I understand it, US Democrats are keen on those three, and in Australia, we've already embraced all of those.
Are you suggesting there's a policy mis-match, or that one of the two groups leans even more strongly towards these principles than the other group?
Either way, I'm not sure how this strongly differentiates them.
> ... the US itself has been pushed further to the right by a conservative dominated supreme court.
The USA's supreme court arrangement is indeed a curious artefact, for those of us outside its domain.
AFAICT it's been 'pushed' in one direction by political appointees in the previous presidents' term.
But it (as you observe) does not reflect 'the party policies' - simply the current elected leader. And while that's obviously important, it doesn't necessarily define policy of either party of (current) administration.
The fact it's at odds with what the majority of the rest of the party would advocate speaks to my earlier claim / question.
In terms of the Liberal and National parties (who are in coalition Federally, and the two state branches merged in Queensland), while they are slightly left of the GOP overall, there are definitely a fair few MPs and senators in the party that are just as far right-wing. For the 'moderates', they're mostly captured by business interests (especially the resources (coal, oil and gas) and property lobbies).
For Labor, the shift right is because a massive media campaign spread lies about some of their slightly more progressive policies last election, so instead of trying to correct it, the leader of the opposition who replaced the one who ran at the last election just decided to drop the policies. Also, Labor have voted in lock-step on all the mass-surveillance laws, censorship laws. Finally, despite being on about climate, they have voted for increasing grants and subsidies to new coal and gas exploration, such as in the Narrabi and Beetaloo basins, against the wishes of much of the population, farmers in the area, and the First Nations traditional owners of the land.
They are definitely the "lesser of two evils", but where I would have laughed at the thought of not voting 1st for them ten years ago, now I give my first preference to a minor party or independent (preferential voting is seriously a good idea, by the way).
It's possible I'm just splitting hairs though.
I keep hearing this every now and then, but the incompetent leadership does not come from nowhere nor has conceived itself. The country leaders have been legitimately elected, which means the leadership is the direct reflection of the country people's will. People consciously elect incompetence that bears the incompetent leadership, for that is what they desire for one reason or another. There are a few progressive, young parties that could steer the future of Australia in the right direction with progressive policies that make sense in the 21st century. Guess what? An average Australian does not care about the progress, they care about their real estate portfolio in maintaining the status quo for a change is scary and frightens people. Politics have become a career ladder excercise with public servants serving their own self-interest rather than working out differences between differing views and opinions and working towards a modern future of the country. Australia has been become mired in complacency, pipe dreaming and discussing how Labour is better over Liberals (or the other way around) whereas both parties are more or less the same in the grand scheme of things.
I don't disagree. Although influencing the people's will is a lot easier when the main stream media is monopolised and heavily biased towards one political party. If we want a government that truly reflects the people's will we need a diverse media landscape. Also a reason why I support Kevin Rudd's push for the Murdoch royal commission.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249062912_The_ideol...
It used to be better, but Fairfax which had some fairly decent papers got bought out by Nine Media, whose chairman is retired Liberal party Treasurer Peter Costello. The paper's reporting has shifted to a very pro-Liberal Party bias since then. The News Corp papers were always politically slanted towards the Liberal/Nationals. ABC has been cowed by funding cuts and undermining by the Government appointing terrible board members and chairpersons, and they have literally pushed people out because they didn't toe the line (like Nick Ross, because he reported accurately on how bad the Liberal Party's policy on the NBN was, or Emma Alberiche because she reported on the fact that corporate tax cuts generally haven't been shown to increase economic growth when corporate tax cuts were basically the only policy the LNP had).
We'll see what happens this election. Murdoch might temporarily switch sides for a couple of months like they did in 2007, because he hates backing a loser (and I think Morrison's and the rest of this terrible Government's incompetence is a bit too obvious despite the protection racket the papers and TV news try to run). But if they do, almost as soon as Labor gets in, it will likely be back to attacks and undermining of Labor and pro-Liberal/National party bias...
I think this is only true if the Australian voting system is Condorcet based. Otherwise I think technically you can elect someone overall less popular, but that has a very strong base of dedicated voters.
Counterpoints: 1. Australia's two big parties are closer to an oligarchy than an egalitarian system, these parties recruit from university politics so there's a whole pipeline that will seed out people who have non-party views. Having mostly uni-people will automatically restrict the party to a small percentage of the population.
2. Incompetence can be hidden from the voting populace. If you consume only Murdoch content (i.e., most private TV news, most published newspapers, public TV station boards are also getting packed with government people) then you will probably think that things are running great.
> the leadership is the direct reflection of the country people's will.
Every 4 years you get to influence the politicians for a few days and they do their best to make you happy. On all the other days, the lobbyists and party factions get to influence them.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/australias-hacking-bill-passes...
> The House of Representatives on Tuesday passed the Bill, with a total of 60 amendments, and while Labor has thrown its support behind the Bill as a result of the amended document being a "better Bill", the Australian Greens have not.
If this is the only accessible form of financial gain - why wouldn't they?
I strongly suspect that in order to have a dynamic economy a weak housing market is a pre-requisite. Given the choice it's much easier to plunk money down in a house and watch cash magically appear than it is to start a business or do anything creative.
It's not that they shouldn't care about their property portfolio, but it shouldn't be the only thing they care about.
For example, the AU government has given away millions to polluters with no appreciable return (https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12...).
It also has a terrible track record on human rights.
And that's just the last things I read... there's plenty more (this mandate for instance).
I can imagine that many people feel quite helpless.
It's lasted more than my entire lifetime so far. Is anyone predicting a reversal?
Country has a large state capture problem from largely mining companies but also other special interests that have lobbied and . Anything that might threaten those interests is being pretty heavily targeted, including action on climate[0] (See "Gas led recovery", and the use of funds intended to renewables used for things like CCS/CCUS and "blue" hydrogen.). And this is bleeding into laws and enforcement.
Then there is the constant resistance to a federal anti-corruption agency as well as reducing the influence of money on federal politicians (see backbencher/ministers resolving door with lobbying firms).
The conclusion I've (sadly) come to, is that (in the short term at least) more money needs to be thrown at smaller parties and independents to try to combat this. Unlike the USA, Australia has precedent of minority governments and compulsory voting combined with a preference system means that gaining even a small number of lower house/senate seats can make a disproportional impact to the policies being set around Australia. Both major parties are so similar but just switching from Blue to Red is unlikely to result significant change in policies for some of the issues you've raised.
[0] https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/wa-cou...
This always seemed like madness to me. You can force someone to vote, but you cannot force them to vote responsibly. They may just vote "screw you" just for revenge.
The right to vote includes the right to abstain from voting when one does not care.
Forced voting sounds like a recipe for bad election results. I would expect the same from paying people to vote.
That's already the case pretty much everywhere since populists promise benefits to whoever elects them. So de facto you are getting paid for your vote if you are in a special interest group.
You must show up at a polling place (either prior to the election or on election day), and you must identify yourself to the polling officer, and receive a ballot paper.
You do NOT have to complete the paper: you can put it in the box untouched, you can write "screw you all" on it, etc.
So ... yeah, you are obliged to show up, but you don't have to actually vote.
https://www.quora.com/As-voting-is-compulsory-in-Australia-a...
The amount of electorates that swung, and the percentages that the winning representative (and party) received mean that's not true at all, in my opinion anyway. Happy to be convinced otherwise, but the "mandate" still exists.
It has to be incredibly more meaningful to have statistics on how many people intentionally said "screw you" with a vote for "ficus" or w/e.
I agree, you should be able to withhold as a protest, in practice it’s 100% meaningless.
It's a ballot that's just been numbered unthinkingly from top to bottom.
This does indeed advantage the candidate who draws the top spot on the ballot (the positions are randomly assigned). In a preferential system it advantages the candidate in the final two that drew the higher position - it seems to be worth about 0.7% ( https://www.crikey.com.au/2010/08/02/whats-the-donkey-worth-... ).
Compulsory voting still drives people to turn up and vote for the LNP where they otherwise probably wouldn't bother. Why vote when you can do something else more pleasant with your time.
I'm in Tasmania ex Adelaide, and the overwhelming majority of the population here are poorly educated working poor, and yet we have a Liberal Party state government because people turn up on election day and vote Liberal "because fuck those latte drinking hippie faggot cunts / brown people / coons / queue jumping boat-people".
I'm not evening kidding, the vile vitriol that comes out of peoples mouths here is shocking.
I would say the current party dynamics are a big problem, both the symptom and cause of other problems.
One party fights for total control, with near total resistance to the other party, playing a negative sum game in order to maintain power despite demographic disadvantages.
The other party has a wider spectrum of views, and is more open to bipartisanship. But it has difficulty strategically unifying when it would make the most difference. So it often negotiates from weakness despite having demographic advantages.
As far as I can tell, this dynamic is getting even worse and infecting most people and many institutions that would be much better not being politicized.
The previous conservative, neoliberal PM, John Howard, said the same thing. Rationally, it doesn't make sense.
However, even he admitted that empirical, historical evidence has shown it to be a good thing that prevents either major political party from catering too hard to the extremes.
"You participated in the process."
Like building Ikea furniture, you now think that the process is better and more valid. Less civil unrest that way. Of course, you are still allowed to say whatever you like about how stupid any politician is in any role - even the PM. But you are more likely to accept the authority invested in them by the process when you are part of it.
Thirdly, you can still donkey vote if you are desperate to make your vote meaningless.
I actually think compulsory voting brings forward the importance of thinking about the consequences of voting, and voting for candidates that have the same values. Granted this can be manipulated (and is) with ads etc but getting people use to being involved I think is far better than making it optional and creating people that either never vote or a population that does when things are "bad" and an apathetic group when things are "good".
Australia feels culturally like the closest country to the US, though, so this particular political difference is being canceled out by other things.
We have preferential voting here, and plenty of minor parties to vote for, so your vote isn’t “wasted”. Living in a democracy means participating in voting to help decide what the country does, and honestly it’s a pretty minor requirement: the actual act is quick and easy, it’s on a weekend and anyone who has to work at is given the opportunity and the results are usually mostly finalised by the end of the day.
I think living in a democracy means the right to peacefully decline to take part.
If people don’t want to vote you should reflect on why, not use force against them.
So both sides of US politics, and their surrogates in the media, are incentivised to stir up outrage against their opponent, leading to a more divided country in the long run.
Politicians and parties still attempt to create outrage as a way of attracting or sustaining attention, and diminishing their opponents.
I agree that a lot of effort goes into getting out the vote in the US, and that's much less a factor here, but the same tactics still tend to be used.
As others have said, it's an option to just submit a blank paper.
The process I experienced last time I voted in local elections was you validated where you lived and were given a one use barcode/qrcode (can't remember) which you scanned at the machine, made your selections and dropped the barcode paper in specific bins.
[0] https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...
I've gone in a bit of a voting system rabbit hole recently, and this depends on the system of voting. There are some systems where abstaining from an election can help a voter's preferred choice win: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_criterion
So I think depending on the election system, it could make sense to have compulsory voting, even if the person voting simply puts all candidates at equal preference.
Sure, but how is that worse than them not turning up at all?
> The right to vote includes the right to abstain from voting when one does not care.
And you're free to cast an invalid vote.
> Forced voting sounds like a recipe for bad election results.
Forced voting eliminates some variables from elections, including:
* inequality regarding who can afford to take the time to vote.
* which parties can rile up the most people so that they're actually motivated to vote.
* to some extent, the ability to disenfranchise groups of people who tend to vote against you.
I'm curious as to how it'd make the election results worse.
How does this not also apply to similar civic obligations, like jury duty?
(I've always mentally put compulsory voting in the same box as compulsory jury duty. In both cases of course it's not really compulsory to take part, just to attend).
I think the cultural aspect of the _appearance_ of compulsory voting is important: not voting because it's raining and you'd rather stay in bed is very different to abstaining based on your political beliefs, and compulsory voting (in Australia) means you are less likely to encounter the former whilst still enabling the other. I would argue that this makes abstaining for political reasons a bit more explicit than non-compulsory voting (technically you can even write your reasons for not voting on the ballot paper, which would officially mean nothing but would certainly be evaluated in research on informal voting), but I do concede that this feels a bit disingenuous: the system works because you're told to vote even though you kinda don't really have to vote, but make sure you jump through the hoops to make it look like you voted.
The 220~ days (and counting) that Melbourne has been in lockdown has certainly worn me down, but even before C19 the political climate, attitude towards technology, cost of housing and the impact of increasing bushfires has taken an enormous toll on the country over the past decade that I've been here.
New Zealand's economy and cost-of-living is markedly weaker and higher than Australia's; the property-is-the-only-investment idea is somehow even worse in NZ, at least lately
The day-to-day life in NZ is lovely though. At least where I'm from in Northland.
Australia and NZ are more similar than they are different, I feel.
Both places are are similar in that:
Aus has better weather (assuming you like warm and sunny), higher salaries and is somewhat less far from the world if you want to travelNZ has a better human rights record, much cleaner grid, and doesn't seem to have the authoritarian bent that Aus does. It's like the slightly hippie/socialist/woke little sibling.
The Netherlands has rubbish weather for 2/3rds of the year and not a single mountain/hill/beach worth mentioning, but is extremely liveable. Income/CoL ratios tend to be higher than the Bay Area for a given quality-of-life, although you might be earning less in absolute terms. Cities and Towns are very well designed, even Amsterdam (outside the center) feels like a cosy village but you still get access to big-city things. Probably more socialist than NZ, with things like this happening https://nltimes.nl/2021/09/02/dutch-cities-want-ban-property...
Ultimately I can't live in a country where people are religious so that leaves only North Europe and the Netherlands is the most antichrist of them all.
Generally speaking New Zealand is far more socially liberal than Australia, however there are greater financial / job opportunities in Australia due to it's size.
In New Zealand you're less likely to own a fancy new car or have has many expensive possessions but to me at least it didn't feel like you "need" them as much as in Australia.
There weren't many tech job opportunities in New Zealand given its small population, however I suspect the global rise in remote work coupled with New Zealand's relatively capable internet infrastructure may be changing this.
Entertainment wise New Zealand hands down has more stunning, enjoyable, accessible nature and outdoors - while Australia pre-covid has a far more international offerings (musicians, comedy etc...).
Property prices are absolutely insane in both countries if you want to live in city / inner suburbs.
It's hard to explain but I've always felt that if Australia was socially and politically the USA, New Zealand would perhaps be somewhere in Scandinavia.
What's stopping me from moving back to New Zealand? - My life (friends, work, cat) is in Melbourne, if I was offered a good job opportunity back in the South Island of NZ and moving costs covered - I'd certainly be considering it.
Of course this is all highly subjective and only based on my experiences / observations.
</rant>
This comment reminded me of the concept:
> In New Zealand you're less likely to own a fancy new car or have has many expensive possessions but to me at least it didn't feel like you "need" them as much as in Australia.
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/datablog/ng-inter...
Anyway, I've gone to live overseas a couple of times now. The most recent time was to the US 11 years ago. I'm still here.
As many problems as the US has, the one big selling point it has is career opportunities and earning potential as a software engineer. Like... it doesn't even come close. I'll take what my US compensation buys me in NYC over whatever compensation I could get buys me in Sydney (in particular).
Property in Australia is like a game of musical chairs but the music stopped in Sydney in 1978 (in Perth and Melbourne it was more like 2003).
One thing I like about the US tax system is there is no negative gearing (mostly). Specifically if you earn over a certain amount ($150k but it starts sliding down at $100k) then you can't offset ordinary taxes with passive losses. I really think Australia desperately needs this system but negative gearing is so ingrained in Australian culture now that it's political suicide to try and change it. I believe Labor made noises about this in a recent Federal election and suffered the consequences.
It's a shame because Perth and even Melbourne used to have a relatively low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life. I honestly don't know how anyone does it now.
As for the politics, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Australia doesn't have the crazy evangelicals that the US does, for example. Like when the gay marriage issue was decided even the highly conservative former PM Tony Abbott basically came out and said the matter was settled and it's time to move on.
As for climate change, while I believe in it I also don't think anything will change out of pure altruism by any large group of people. And that's anywhere. It's not unique to Australia. Look at what's happened to the price of solar in the last decade.
I'd say the ugliest side of Australian politics and culture in general is actually the treatment of refugees and the so-called (this name still sends shivers down my spine) Pacific Solution.
Oh and we can't forget Australia's most pustulent export: Rupert Murdoch.
Australia recognized same sex marriage in 2017. That was 3 years after after the USA did. I'm not sure I would call Australia as being progressive by that measure.
The USA recognized same sex marriage in 2015, but we did so via a Supreme Court ruling. The Court's composition has changed since then, and the new Court has signaled a willingness to overturn settled precedents.
While our current detent may persist, I would imagine that an action taken by the Australian Parliament would tend to be more durable.
I'm curious to understand why you'd think a law passed by elected lawmakers is more durable than a verdict by judges who have their position for life? Obacare was surely very controversial, but despite the best efforts by the conservative and an ideologically hostile Supreme Court, it remains in place after ten years.
Those efforts were actually pretty half-hearted. They talked a big game, but they don't actually want to abolish it. (Reminds me of how the UK doesn't really want to face up to a no-deal Brexit, despite lots of brave talk. Or how no government in the UK has so far re-nationalised the railroads, despite re-nationalisation perennially polling high with the general public.)
The realignment of the Court, plus this Court's willingness to overturn settled law, together signal that a new law prohibiting same-sex marriage might be allowed to stand if brought before today's Court, returning the US to a country where same-sex marriage is not universally legal.
So I would regard our current regime around same-sex marriage, civil rights, etc. to be subject to not being directly challenged at the Supreme Court.
Legally, Parliament could repeal it tomorrow and ban same-sex marriage again. Politically, that would be impossible without another plebiscite, and there is no reason to believe a new plebiscite would deliver a different outcome; it would almost certainly return the same result, and likely by a bigger margin.
No conservative politician in Australia wants to talk about this. I'm sure some of them are still personally opposed to same-sex marriage, but they all realise trying to repeal it is hopeless, and so they'd rather talk about things that they have some hope of achieving.
What you have to realize about the US is that the Supreme Court deciding these issues is... controversial. Many view it as undemocratic (although it's worth noting that many of those same people don't feel the same way about the Supreme Court's pro-2nd Amendment interpretations of modern times).
We're still seeing the ripple effects of Roe v. Wade being decided almost 50 years ago.
As others have pointed out, Supreme Court precedent is only that until a later Supreme Court comes along and changes it and that could very well happen with the current court composition. And you need look no further than the Court's refusal to stay the Texas abortion law pending a full judicial review.
So the date this was decided doesn't really give any moral superiority here of the US over Australia for two reasons:
1. Australia's position was decided by a democratic process; and
2. With 62% (IIRC) of people approving of the change, the matter is effectively settled. No one can complain about it. As such you don't see any real conservative Christian blowback like you do in the US as witnessed by the statements of Tony Abbott and others.
I wouldn't call the US morally superior here anyways. In fact, i think anyone after the US is really late to the party. The first US law was MA legalizing gay marriage in 2004. It took 11 years of fighting after to get to supreme court.
Abortion is far less of a political and cultural hot potato in Australia than in the US. While no doubt some of that is due to other cultural differences – for whatever reason, conservative Christianity has never been quite as strong an influence in Australia as in the US – I think a big factor is the difference in how abortion was legalised.
In Australia, there is no constitutional right to abortion. And yet abortion is legal nationwide. Its legality was achieved through a gradual process, involving state legislation, and state court decisions – those state court decisions were not based on constitutional law, rather the state courts simply decided to reinterpret the existing criminal laws against abortion to not apply to medical procedures. The federal courts stayed out of it completely, and constitutional rights never came into it, only statutory law – if they wanted to, the state parliaments could have overturned the state court decisions effectively legalising abortion, but they chose not to.
The fact that the process was much more gradual, and had greater democratic legitimacy, has helped make it less of a controversy. And since it happened through a series of state laws and state court decisions, opponents of legal abortion don't have one single highly visible event to focus all their opposition upon, like Roe v Wade is in the US. Almost every American has heard of Roe v Wade – even many non-Americans have – by contrast, few Australians know about the Menhennitt ruling (which de facto legalised abortion in the state of Victoria in 1969) or the Levine ruling (which did the same in New South Wales in 1971). American opponents of legal abortion focus most of their energy on trying to get justices appointed to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v Wade – the main purpose of this latest Texas law is to get a case before the Supreme Court which will give those justices an opportunity to do exactly that – its Australian opponents don't have any national focus, which in practice makes them a lot weaker.
It is totally consistent to support legal abortion, but to also think that Roe v Wade was a strategic mistake.
The recent ruling on the Texas heartbeat law might make a dent in that, although I doubt it.
Changes made by pure fiat don't last. Gay marriage in the US could absolutely turn out to have been temporary for just the reasons you explained.
The US was only the 17th country in the world to allow same-sex marriage nationwide; Australia was the 23rd. Still only 28 out of 193 UN member states have it fully nationwide – less than 15%. Only a 3 year gap, when any country having legal same-sex marriage is just over 20 years old. If we look at this in a global and historical context, both countries are very progressive on this particular issue. To argue that the US is in some significant way "more progressive" than Australia just because it got there a few years earlier, you have to be looking at things from a rather narrow perspective.
"Fully nationwide" above is only counting the main national territory of the country, not overseas territories. Even for the US, same-sex marriage is not legal in the territory of American Samoa – the territorial government of American Samoa claims that Obergefell v Hodges doesn't apply to them due to some legal technicalities, and it appears nobody has yet challenged that claim in court. Likewise, Netherlands, New Zealand, and UK all have legal same-sex marriage throughout their main national territory, but not in some of their overseas territories.
So if you want to be hyper-pedantic about it, the US still doesn't have legal same-sex marriage (throughout all of its territory), Australia does.
The senior ministers of the ALP came to a similar conclusion. Mid this year they announced no changes to negative gearing or capital gains tax offsets.
For the non-Australians following along, this means both major parties support rampant speculation on the residential property market.
If there were no "negative gearing" for investment properties, then either there would be fewer such properties, or people would have to form businesses to perform such investments (which adds an extra bit of friction with accounting and tax).
Making it possible to deduct "expenses" from "revenue" of a person doing the investment makes sense.
From a quick Google, it looks like companies are not entitled to CGT discounts. This means that forming a business would increase the tax you pay for almost everyone.
>If there were no "negative gearing" for investment properties, then either there would be fewer such properties, or people would have to form businesses to perform such investments (which adds an extra bit of friction with accounting and tax).
This doesn't sound like a bad thing. It would discourage people from speculating on the property market and outbidding owner/occupiers (which is a net negative for society) and encourage them to invest their money in productive businesses (which is a net positive).
Negative gearing only works for those who have a high level of income with the corresponding high level of taxation.
Why it works so well for these individuals is they can greatly reduce their tax liability by using the property deductions negatively gearing has to offer.
As a secondary benefit, those same investors also win on the capital gain side of the equation as these negative gearing tax incentives create massive demand for property.
Your 'average person' living on the average wage can't benefit from negative gearing as their wage bracket does not attract a high enough level of taxation.
In fact it hurts this group of people only because those higher property prices also means they are priced out of the housing market.
One of my major gripes is that education here is not at all egalitarian.
> Property in Australia is like a game of musical chairs but the music stopped in Sydney in 1978
Can you explain this analogy?
At least that's how I interpret it.
So in my analogy, the last round ended in Sydney in 1978 meaning if you weren't sitting then then you didn't get another chance at a seat.
I remember seeing property shows in the 2000s and there'd be a young couple in their mid-20s with a baby looking at houses that were up to $800K. You'd really need to be earning $200k+ then to afford that or, more realistically, $250k+. Not a lot of jobs in Australia (even Sydney) paid that then (and still don't for the record).
So how were such people affording houses? The Mum and Dad Bank is how. Their parents who were sitting down in 1970s were now sitting on considerable unrealized property wealth and this gets passed along to the children.
So when I say Sydney became unaffordable in the 1970s, I mean what people viewed as Sydney back then, which is inner Sydney, the North Shore and coastal suburbs. But these have now been so out of reach for people who aren't wealthy for so long that people don't think of them as Sydney anymore.
Now when people talk about the affordability of Sydney they're talking about the areas where "normal" people buy. Sydney has expanded far to the West, basically to the Blue Mountains (eg Penrith). It's also expanded south (eg Campelltown). But somewhere like Mosman isn't part of the normal person's mental picture of Sydney property where it was 40+ years ago.
This reminds me of something that happened to me in university. I mentioned to someone the suburbs I'd be staying in over the summer when university was out and they literally said "la di da" like it was fancy. To them it was because they were part of a newer generation who lived very far north (I remember they took 3 buses to get to university). To me, it was just where my grandparents lived and had done so for 40-50 years. When they bought that house it was literally the edge of the city, as in the other side of the street was bushland.
You see it on the train too. When I went to university the one where all the students and twentysomethings lived was 5 stops from the CBD. 15 years later it was 8-9 stops.
Its even more so right now, if you're up for contracting. $1000+ a day is common. Kind of nuts, but hey its been good for my wallet.
But, more importantly, Big Tech senior engineer total comp is rapidly pushing to $US500K+.
Is it really though? I'm looking on glassdoor and it's saying average is $130k with high at $180k. And yes I realise that just salary not total comp.
levels.fyi is widely known to be accurate.
Comparatively it seems like contractors in the USA get punished by the tax system.
$1200 a day puts you into the top few percent of salaries here in Australia. I don't really care what a "brisbane sized city in the states" might be doing, because moving there means I have to live in a country that I'm not a good fit for culturally.
I do fear that housing here is going to end up like the other major Aus cities though. I think Brisbane house prices are rising at like $500 a day or something. An amount I couldn't have fathomed paying in rent weekly when I first moved to Sydney.
But a simple example that shows how lucky I and others are: I can rapidly, from $0 (if I was silly enough to have no savings for this exercise) save up a deposit within a year or two, less if one has a partner.
Any of my friends and acquaintances, unless they also went into high-paying jobs and industries here in SEQ, or unless they have parents well-off enough to help them, are writing off being able to enter the property market for years or decades.
Its worrying, for sure.
For example, you frame the housing issue as "the left-wing government tried to fix it, but was stopped!". This will result in constant back and forth between left and right and nothing will change. The reality is that no party even addressed the issue until it was forced on them. I remember that day distinctly. Both parties were completely silent. They had no answer - they all benefit from the current situation. They then both went back to their strategic meetings and came up with some garbage responses. The left was about changing taxes, and I think the right was about lowering the home deposit threshold or something like that. It is all just a play because neither political party wants anything to change.
Sounds like Vancouver
This has happened before. Dubya largely got reelected in 2004 because Karl Rove tied the campaign to blowback against states and plebiscites in favour of gay marriage.
I'm British and have just moved to Perth. I am looking at being able to get a house 2-3 times as large here compared to the UK, for similar outlay.
Add to that the weather and the sheer space... the QoL here seems so much higher than back home.
I have spent time in some parts of the US (about 4 months in Texas, probably about a year in other parts in total), but haven't lived in NYC. It always seemed nice, if you like the big city, but I had my fill of that in London some time ago.
Now over east? Yeah housing seems utterly inaccessible in Sydney and Melbourme. But out west here it doesn't look that insane by my (British) standards.
(I say, 'grubby' not 'dirty', because I don't know whether the UK is actually dirty. Eg all the buildings just look dirty and drab compared to Australia. Perhaps it's a leftover from centuries of burning lots of coal?)
I think partly it's the light - it's so bright here in Aus that things look cleaner anyway, but also the light and the heat keep things a little cleaner, UV sterilises and the sun bleaches after all.
Aus doesn't have as much of a legacy of concrete brutalism, either, lumpen concrete buildings in the UK that started out grey and end up brown, water-stained from all the rain and oppressive-looking.
And also I think better care is taken. Visiting London after having lived here in Perth for a couple of years about ten years back, I was struck by just how often as I walked around my nostrils were assaulted by smells of rotting rubbish or just plain urine.
So yeah, bunch of things, but it does feel much cleaner here.
You are right about the smell of urine and pot in London.
1. What do you do for a living in Perth? What I guess I'm really trying to determine is what income bracket you're in.
2. Where in Perth are you looking at renting or buying? and
3. How much of your ability to buy is because you sold a house in the UK so have a huge deposit to put down?
I've known quite a few British people who have moved to Australia and pretty much all of them had (3).
I would say that QoL is generally much higher than the UK though. Houses and blocks are of course larger. Earning potential in London at least is pretty high though. But if you want a house you're probably commuting for an hour each way when the trains are running, which they generally aren't. Crossrail will be interesting.
The experience of living in Melbourne in 2000 as someone not on the property ladder is very different to now.
In 2000 it was possible to be on the poverty line and still live within an easy bike ride of the CBD. Now everyone I know lives increasingly on the fringes of the city.
This change is not unique to Melbourne but I can't help feel something is lost when you go to a house party and the only people you meet are ones who can afford property.
I'm increasingly assuming anyone who buys in Melbourne is doing so with the assistance of multi-generation wealth.
I suspect there is a big difference between the long term wealth implications of buying a house vs buying an apartment. There are never going to be more houses in outer-inner-suburbs. There is going to be a constant supply of new apartments as we move towards higher density living.
People who have wealthy parents are in the best position to make better housing investments.
An undiversified export economy, out of control house prices, a job-market primarily focused on two cities, a government intent on selling all public assets, very limited political interest in positive climate policies. The latter is simply addressed with "technology will help us out when we need it to".
And you suggest New Zealand?!
- Australian housing is a bargain compared to NZ ones.
- NZs job market is focused on one city, which is smaller, more expensive, lower wages and more crime than Brisbane or Perth.
There's a reason so many New Zealanders live in Australia and not vice versa.
The internet here is an actual joke, the politics are biased towards conservatism, don't think about owning an electric car but... the pay is quite good and it's a nice place to go out. Lots of nature and you can find nice apartments to rent if you look.
New Zealand by comparison is great but it's remote, expensive and has a low salary when compared to other western countries. It has been a while since I was there last, but public transport is hilariously bad - but if you enjoy nature and silence, it's there in abundance.
My company has offered to relocate me to NYC, which is interesting. Looking on YouTube at what the city looks like and it's pretty ugly if I am honest. Apartments seem to be small and you don't get modern style apartments even 45 minutes from Manhattan via public transport. I am concerned that my lifestyle would suffer living there.
Hey Canada, how you doing?
This is a great opportunity that you'd be silly to pass up because of some YouTube videos. You have to at least visit in person to give it a fair shot. NYC is the largest city in any western country. I guarantee you can find parts of it you'd like.
> Hey Canada, how you doing?
Pay in tech is way, way higher in NYC than in Canada.
Just gotta wait for these borders to open back up.
Maybe the sample average of the people you hang around is quite different from the population average.
The average Australian can't even afford to have a property portfolio, let alone caring about one.
So dystopian weird idea follows:
What if "they" are 'cleansing' Australia to make it clear for the oligarch elites to come in and claim the land!
:-)
I understand the need to keep some "thought-bumpers" to prevent reddit-ization of HN (ironic given that HN is the seed of Reddit) -- but FFS lighten the heck up.
Net migration rate provides a more objective view of whether a country has an 'average future'. If you look at the global net migration rates, Australia and particularly the capital cities have some of the highest rates in the world, despite being far away from anywhere.
The factors driving this may not align at all with what you personally want from a country or a city, which is fair enough. But your comment seems like quite a generalisation to make from a very specific position.
Or at least it can be a good thing, as long as the process ain't mismanaged too badly. Governments seldom do the simplest thing of just auctioning off eg a state-owned business or plot of land to the highest bidder.
Most of the time they insists on beauty contests where politicians want to judge bidders' plans. That's a recipe for corruption and cronyism.
Or they only sell off eg a business piecemeal, making a turnaround in private hands much harder.
Observation: at least in NSW it seems that most people trust the government and cooperate with government orders (Digital Tran formation for public service is on the right track, see the delivery of digital driver licence and all other perks and all other self-service integrated services, at the cost of giving up some personal info and privacy (state government says that we can trust them for securing the data/info)...
I have been living in Sydney, Australia since 2008. Agree that country is facing tough and worrying economic outlook for the 2020's. It was seriously `lucky country` (mining boom, Rise of China, etc.) when I first landed in SYD, however, with the deterioration of Australia-China relationship, and the undiversified economy structure (mining, education, tourism, etc.), the "lucky country" is going downhill towards the "luckin coffee" direction LMAO.
The country is run by politicians holding law and/or accounting degrees with no social responsibility or morals (in comparison with Germany and northern Europe), who are good at making taxation (or similar) laws but with no vision for the country's future (geopolitical influence, economy, etc.). Most people underestimate the stupidity of government and central banks, keep printing $ (QE) and pump the money to the banking system, making the asset bubbles bigger, while failing to stimulate the real economy, most $ went into the construction industry)
All bubbles pop, there is no exit strategy for QE... Recently watched "The Big Short" again and seriously history is repeating itself, so similar. Good luck to the people live in the "lucky country", keep doing what you believe is right, manage risks well (I know many family highly leveraged into investment properties), stay healthy stay sharp ;-)
"The world is sinking, people ware partying."
NOTE: Recently Deirdré Straughan moved to Australia with Brendan Gregg, you may be interested to know some of the reasons behind the move, I assure you that will be good reads: https://www.beginningwithi.com/category/women-in-technology/The result is still a very attractive place - lots of resources, educated people, safe, little poverty comparatively, etc. But people take it for granted and its sleep walking into a Corporatocracy with fast growing wealth gap.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country
I'm leaving early next year. A surprising number of my friends are planning to leave soon too, particularly the highly skilled and employable ones.
All snark aside, I ask what I’ve asked everybody: at what point is the cure not worth it anymore?
GP did not mention vaccines.
Different people are impacted by lockdown in different ways. Consider those that might have different experiences to yours.
The intense international focus on our public health restrictions is a huge distraction, and undermines the message we want to send regarding authoritarianism.
At the point where a critical mass of people realize this has nothing to do with public health and everything to do with seizing and consolidating power.
The Patriot Act was roundly supported and of course it was - it increases the political classes power across the board, legitimizing the increase for “safety”.
If all encryption became illegal, for example, with a death penalty & minimal trial for those who are discovered to be using it — nobody is going to be using encryption. It doesn’t matter how technically savvy you are, very few people will risk death just on principle of “privacy”.
That’s an extreme example, but makes the point that you need both the tech and the society to support liberty and freedom. And it’s a similar dilemma that people are feeling today — what can you do if the government has compromised nearly everything? Those few uncompromised pieces probably don’t stand much of a chance. So instead, it really is a problem of people and society.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNIC
Politicians are chosen to stand for election by a small number of corrupt branch stackers, not by the people.
The people are given a choice between party a or b, which are two cheeks of the same arse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28410178
FastMail seems to have automated default address collection, backup of drafts & deleted email, ability to archive email. With no at rest encryption this could be possibly used for data mining too.
This new law is the last straw. So far they have not bothered to address the issue. Till few years back FM used to be awesome but feel they have not moved with time.
> Data disruption means adding, copying, deleting or altering data held in a computer. This can only be done in order to frustrate the commission of offences or determine relevance of data. To assist disruption, a warrant can also authorise other facilitative activities, such as entering specified premises, using electronic equipment to obtain access to data, removing a computer from premises, copying data that has been obtained, and intercepting if necessary to carry out the things authorised in the warrant. A data disruption warrant also allows the officer to take actions to conceal the access and the activities, allowing the warrant to be conducted covertly.
> Data disruption warrants can be used to affect data offshore with the consent of an appropriate consenting foreign official (if the location of data is known or can be reasonably determined). They can also be issued internally in an emergency situation, and subsequently authorised by a Judge or AAT member. They can also permit the officer to seek assistance from a person with knowledge of a computer or a computer system to help in carrying out the warrant.
- https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio...
So they can get a warrant to come into your house while you're not home and put a keylogger in your keyboard USB cable, or put a bug on the UART of your router, etc. Or just hacking your cheap Netgear router with one of the hundreds of vulnerabilities that exist.
Scary shit. Sounds like they're pretty drunk with power. Does Australia really have a capable offensive security group like the NSA to pull these sorts of things off, though?
Would love to distrubute zk-chain validators via self replicating router malware lol
That's actually not that weird.
If you are a suspected criminal and a judge give a warrant targeting you specifically, it's quite natural the police can now gather information on you by any mean possible.
It's not warrant-less, it's not mass surveillance, it sounds like regular police work. Or am I missing something?
(Also doesn’t help that I hear about stories like this from people who don’t like them, so I get a potentially biased first impression).
> A DATA DISRUPTION WARRANT enables the agencies to “add, copy, delete or alter” data on devices.
With the exception of the word “copy”, this makes it seem like the plan is to make it not merely possible but also legally acceptable for anyone given such a warrant to create/place that evidence (or delete things to make real data look incriminating by lack of context).
Again, I really know I can’t trust my interpretation of any legal text, all I can say is it does sound bad to an outsider like me.
It's not a perfect system by any means. The police can and do plant evidence. But a lot of convictions also get thrown out and this is often why obviously guilty people get off on "technicalities" because the police don't follow procedure down to the letter.
The opposite end of the spectrum, not giving the police any power to do covert surveillance at all, is effectively just giving a license to the Mafia to do whatever it wants, as anyone who just commits all of their crimes privately will get away with it as long as they can sufficiently scare or kill anyone who would otherwise have been willing to testify.
It's a tradeoff either way, and we try to let there be a middle ground, where the police can bug your house, tap your phone, hack your router, but they need a warrant that has to be granted by a completely separate branch of government that is not in the same chain of command, and they have to prove to your lawyers that they obtained all of the evidence they have against you legally.
My problem is the linked page says:
> A DATA DISRUPTION WARRANT enables the agencies to “add, copy, delete or alter” data on devices.
Copy is fine, it’s the other three which are scary. Perhaps they shouldn’t be scary, perhaps they have well-defined meanings in law I’m just not familiar with (like how “Hacker News” has nothing to do with cyber crime), but I can only respond within the limits of my knowledge, and that seems scary.
It's time for computer security to include nation states in their threat model. We need tamper-evident hardware.
They do but the real question is whether its appropriate to source intelligence from a place like the NSA when the outcomes are meant to be used by the police.
So these laws, a refusal to have a watchdog, scaling back of FOI request responses, searching journalists homes by the AFP, are a disturbing trend in the federal arena. Looked at dispassionately you can only assume they're trying to hide something.
That "if" is doing a lot of work. Gov't power will be abused. That's like, rule one of government.
We already know they won't. Here's [1] the Australian anti-terrorism Police arresting a young online journalist at his house, because he was asking probing questions to a politician that said politician did not like. Video of the incident clearly shows the Politician lied multiple times in his police statement (which is a crime).
Yet the anti-terrorism taskforce was used to arrest this person at his house.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXtq4a8829g
Please find me an example of a government throughout any point in human history that has not turned on its citizens.
I think the best guiding principle for government is to ask yourself when faced with a proposed extension to the power of politicians this question: “would I be comfortable with politicians having this power if the Cabinet consisted of people who personally hated me”. If there’s any doubt, these powers can and will be used to abuse. The rights that protect the worst of society also protect the rest of it, we remove them at our peril.
You’re not supposed to say that.
It would be as uncouth as reminding people that China borders Afghanistan and is [censored].
https://www.hudson.org/research/17228-how-china-overreached-...