A Meaningless Title

"It's terrible! Labor are all communists and they're going to ruin this country!

But I'll have to vote for them, because Dutton's pure evil!"

So, Australia's finally on the path to same-sex marriage! Yay!

And, this being Australia, we're doing it in the dumbest possible way! Yay- aww.

See, it's become obvious that same-sex marriage is only a matter of time, and it's becoming increasingly untenable to delay it any further, not to mention it being kind of embarrassing to be one of the last holdouts in the West.

And, hey, our Prime Minister at the moment is pretty socially liberal, and the opposition would fully support a same sex marriage bill, and there's no constitutional issues like there were in Ireland. So, no problem, right?

Oh, except our Prime Minister is also holding onto power by the skin of his teeth, with a majority of just one seat in parliament and constantly declining polls. So... basically, he's got to sell his soul to the social regressives in his own party to stay in office. Instead of just having a bill go through parliament, we're going to have a national plebiscite on the issue! That won't be legally binding. And which members of the government have said they won't necessarily respect if it returns a 'yes' result.

Oh, but they can't actually do that, because a plebiscite would require senate approval, and they don't have the numbers – Labor and the Greens basically feeling it would be a complete waste of time and money, that government money would be used to fund a 'no' campaign, that it would just be nasty and divisive for no benefit, and can we just pass a bill already?!

So, what are we doing instead? Well, we're having a voluntary postal survey! It's not a plebiscite because it's being run by the Bureau of Statistics, not the Electoral Office! Who may or may not actually be capable of running something on this scale! And it's going to cost tens of millions of dollars! And conservative members of the government have said they still won't respect a 'yes' vote unless it wins overwhelmingly! And it may well be unconstitutional to do an end-run around the senate like this!

So now the question is, is it even worth legitimising this sort of hateful nonsense by participating, or should we just boycott the damn thing? At this point, I don't even know. Basic rights shouldn't be put to a poll, especially not such an amature-hour half-assed one like this. And Labor probably will just pass legislation for same-sex marriage when they win office next anyway. On the other hand, if we are going to have this idiocy, better we win it... I honestly don't know. I want this to succeed, but I can certainly understand the impulse to boycott.

On the plus side, Bill Shorten's really impressed me with his statements against the poll and in support of the LBGT community. So maybe there's still some hope that Australia's government won't always be held hostage by its worst representatives...

Maybe we were wrong.

Maybe it was always a sham. Debates and policies, respect and civility, truth and reason. Maybe none of that ever mattered. Maybe anyone could have done what he did, they just always thought they needed the rest.

Maybe there was never any more to leadership than being the loudest voice in the room.

Maybe we just wanted to believe that somehow naked demagoguery didn't work any more, that we'd become better than that.

Maybe we should have seen this coming. Maybe we should have remembered that progress was just a story we told ourselves to bring order to chaotic events.

Maybe we were foolish.

Maybe we'll get a second chance.

Maybe.

Things Tony Abbott, newly elected Prime Minister, has said over the years:

"If we’re honest, most of us would accept that a bad boss is a little bit like a bad father or a bad husband … you find that he tends to do more good than harm. He might be a bad boss but at least he’s employing someone while he is in fact a boss." - 2002

"I think there does need to be give and take on both sides, and this idea that sex is kind of a woman’s right to absolutely withhold, just as the idea that sex is a man’s right to demand I think they are both they both need to be moderated, so to speak." - 2009

"I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons" - 2010

"Jesus knew that there was a place for everything and it’s not necessarily everyone’s place to come to Australia." - 2010

"Climate change is absolute crap" - 2010

"Now, I know that there are some Aboriginal people who aren’t happy with Australia Day. For them it remains Invasion Day. I think a better view is the view of Noel Pearson, who has said that Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this country’s British Heritage." - 2010

"There may not be a great job for them [Aborigines] but whatever there is, they just have to do it, and if it’s picking up rubbish around the community, it just has to be done." - 2010

But, hey, at least he'll stop the boats, right?

There’s a Falun Gong/Anti-Communist China protest pretty much permanently set up near where I do my shopping, and I took a look at their signs today to see what, specifically, they were protesting. There were, as you might expect, signs protesting the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and the lack of respect for human rights in China, but the largest single sign was not exactly what I was expecting.

As far as I could tell, their primary complaint about the government of the People’s Republic of China was that… it agreed in 1991 to cede its claims to parts of Outer Manchuria and Mongolia lost to Russia by the Qing Empire in the mid-nineteenth century.

Truly, the most contemptible act committed by the PRC.

There are two things I remember about the lead up to the Iraq War. The first was how the justification seemed to change every week. It was about terrorism. It was about weapons of mass destruction. It was about democracy. It was about this, it was about that. A new rationale would come out, would be rejected, and it would be replaced by another just as flimsy. “Yellowcake Uranium from Africa” and the “forty-five minutes” claims were punch lines almost immediately, yet none of this seemed to stop the drumbeat to war. There was no sincerity about the process; nobody believed Bush or anyone on his team really believed any of this, all that mattered was that they could find some excuse, any excuse, that could withstand scrutiny long enough for the war to start.

The second thing was the protests. They were everywhere, but everyone knew they were futile. It just seemed like part of the ritual of the war, part of the performance that had to be held before the war could start, the illusion of dissent and debate. I think to a lot of people, the start of the war itself was almost a relief; at least now discussion of the war could be based in something real, something that was really happening, rather than the bizarre performance that preceded it.

Forget September 11. This was the formative political event for a lot of people today; the realisation that the powerful would do what they liked regardless of the consequences, regardless of the protests. That the idea of liberal democracy has become something else, some strange mockery of its values, that we’ve reached the point where it’s no longer necessary to quash dissent – tolerate it long enough, maintain the pretence of discussion, and then proceed with whatever you wanted in the first place.

I don’t know how we can break out of that process again, or if it’s even possible any more to halt tragedies like Iraq when the powerful have set their minds to it...

So. The world-wide protests against the film The Innocence of Muslims has reached Australia, with violent protests in Sydney this weekend. Don’t want to weigh into that issue, but I do want to comment on one thing that’s come up during reporting of the story.

( Flags and symbols... )

We all like the narrative of the popular uprising toppling the evil dictator; dealing with the political vacuum that results is a far less popular theme. Case in point, Egypt’s elections. Personally, I’m less concerned with who ends up winning than whether the military ever plans on giving any meaningful power to the elected government. Still, it is a little disheartening to see the Egyptian revolution end in a contest between an old regime loyalist and a religious hardliner.

One thing that has struck me is the reason it’s come down to these two choices – the lack of unity among the liberal/secular/revolutionary block, who failed to support a single candidate for president and whose votes ended up divided between half a dozen candidates. It occurred to me that this wouldn’t have happened in Australia – our instant run-off system eliminates candidates one by one, rather than eliminating everyone but the top two. In an Australian system, the smaller parties would have been able to form alliances among themselves, and could well have ended up with enough combined support for one of their candidates to take a majority of the vote. Even if the candidates couldn’t have come to an agreement, the voters still would be more likely to direct preferences towards other liberal candidates rather than towards the hardliners and conservative candidates.

To my knowledge, instant run-off voting is only used at a national level in Australia and New Guinea. I can understand it not being a perfect choice for new democracies. It is more complicated – Australian elections have a much higher than normal rate of invalid ballots being cast – and the added complexity of interpreting the ballots could be a problem in close elections or cases of electoral fraud. Still, it does solve some of the problems of elections with large numbers of candidates, and would eliminate problems such as Egypt, where large but poorly organised factions can feel excluded entirely from the final choice. It’s a shame the system hasn’t caught on more.

Today, in Libya, Colonel Gaddafi met his end in what, one can hope, is the end of a brutal dictatorship and the beginning of a free, open and democratic society.

Today, in Melbourne, riot police used force to shut down peaceful protests against the unelected elite, in preparation for the arrival of the monarch.

Another election, another long delay before the results are known. While a hung parliament is still a possibility, though, it seems to me pretty much inevitable that the Liberals will take power.

I suppose if we have to have a Liberal government, Baillieu is at least tolerable. And the state Labor government needed a kick in the pants. I’m not convinced these results are part of a national trend – considering Victoria actually swung towards Labor in the federal election, I suspect this result reflects more that the electorate feels it’s time for a change. And there are more than enough local issues for people to be dissatisfied with – the complete mess that Myki turned out to be, for example…

Disapointing that the Greens did so poorly – though with both parties failing to make preference deals with them, and Labor seeming to spend more time campaigning against them than the Liberals, hardly surprising. Plus, in a close election, you get a decrease in third party votes, due to people failing to understand how our electoral system works…

Plus, I have a theory – see, I didn’t vote Green. I voted Sex Party, with Greens as a second preference. The Sex Party seemed to pick up about 1.5-2.5 per cent of the vote everywhere they ran candidates, and those votes had to have come out of somewhere… I’m wondering if there was a small swing towards the Greens that doesn’t show up in the figures because just as many traditional Green voters switched their first preference to the Sex Party.