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Peter Dutton - How Long?
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Your own version of politics?
Not really. Politics in its purest form. Let the electorate decide on policy and suitability of candidates
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The 15 questions sent to Albo are the most obvious.
I question whether you can see the wood for the trees, from the top of the soapbox you borrowed from last preacher equally certain of the worth of his cause.
The electorate do & losing doesnt make candidates morally bankrupt.
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Yes. Clearly it was my subjective view to why they are losing multiple elections, and also not polling at all well compared to their competition.
What do you think is the reason for their lacklustre performance?
Poor Dutton,
Even the Fin can/has answer those questions. Dutton doesn't really want answers (anyone with half a brain could have found the answers themselves, especially if you're the leader of a political party with an upcoming referendum, you should take a glance at the material).
He wants it to look like there's not enough detail. After these 15 questions have been answered, he'll ask another 15, and another 15, all equally inane and answerable. But the point is to ask questions, not the substance of the questions.
The Fin is a good example of the schism in the Conservative side of politics. The AFR is the bastion of the upper-financial-class (inner-city Libs). And on this and other social issues, the Fin is aligned against the Liberals. Or, more accurately, the LNP are aligning themselves against readers of the AFR. The Teals now represent readers of the Fin, hence they have very few inner-city seats left. All so they can pretend to be dumb for their socially conservative members.
Answers to Dutton’s 15 questions on the Voice
The Coalition says the points Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has asked about the Voice ‘won’t go away’. Here are some answers using input from all sides.
Father Jack
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I wonder how well misleading comments like Dutton saying he didn't challenge Turnbull because Turnbull resigned actually play these days. Doesn't it make a politician just look tricky instead of noble like Dutton presumably intended?
It is extraordinary that the rest of the press take comments like those from Phil Coorey or Peta Credlin at face value.
Coorey gets hand-fed stories by the Libs and publishes them like they're journalism.
When the press pack on Sunday and Monday started up with "There's no alternative to Dutton in the Liberal Party", that was hand-fed stuff from Dutton's office that they all un-critically published.
The reality is that there's probably nobody as toxic to the Liberal Party in Victoria as Peter Dutton. Dutton's office would have that info from polling and be keeping it to themselves, then feed a story to Coorey and Sky that Dutton is the way forward and the press-pack falls-in-line and it becomes a vicious cycle of losing, but saying they just need to go further.
It works for them in the short term that Dutton keeps his job, but it's killing them in the long-term where they're all so out of touch with reality that seats across the cities are being lost. We're in a situation where Dutton will lose every seat in Melbourne comfortably and the press and Liberal Party are saying there isn't a problem, he's still the best person and everybody just nods along.
The voters and social media are a mix of bemused and astonished that they LNP are continually deluding themselves.
- Banned
- #735
Classic Rundle in Crikey ....
Opinion / Politics
GUY RUNDLE
APR 03, 2023
LIBERAL CANDIDATE FOR ASTON ROSHENA CAMPBELL (IMAGE: AAP/JULIAN SMITH)
Susan Sontag once wrote a serious and moving essay, Regarding the Pain of Others. Were the title to be used for a study of Saturday’s Aston byelection, it would consist entirely of “hahahah-ahahahahaha”. For anyone whose leftish heart is still beating even faintly, this was a good one. Folks in bars across Melbourne were watching the coverage on their phones.
The result turned early and turned strong, so the rest was pure sadism, full of hilarious moments. “I really, I don’t, I’m lost for words,” said Keith Wolahan, the boy-faced ex-soldier member for Menzies, on the ABC panel when they threw to him. When they came back from a cross to Antony Green, Wolahan was gone. On Sky News, Credlin was holding forth about the Abbott government to a court of tame men, the madwoman let down from the attic to talk about the rotten boroughs. “When Tony became opposition leader, we…”
Still televised, from the Rowville, uh, what was that — it looked the Liberal do was being held in a breeze-block changing room — Peter Dutton, down from Queensland, gave a terrible speech, his point being that the Liberal Party had at least held together, a modest aim indeed.
Losing candidate Roshena Campbell then gave a speech, and showed why she was. Cliched, stagey and self-regarding, she never connected during the campaign. People sussed her: Melbourne city councillor, Brunswick resident, barrister. Dropped in so the local party wouldn’t select yet another man (Emanuele Cicchiello; a local professional woman applicant, Ranjana Srivastava, was seen as too much of an unknown quantity), she comes off as an inner-city hip professional with a few centre-right economic opinions.
Did the Liberal centre have an inkling it might lose this? Apparently the very core did, but the wider penumbra did not, with passes to the Saturday night shindig being given out willy-nilly (when a loss is likely, the location becomes secret, like a speakeasy). And a possibility is that they consciously took the risk of dropping in a candidate like Campbell as a way of reconnecting to the teal seats.
Twenty-four hours later, some were trying to spin it. John Ferguson, the world’s oldest copy-boy, filed a rat-a-tat piece in The Australian that read as if he had dictated it from his phone at a pub bar to the world’s last copy-taker, noting, “This was an earthquake for the Liberal Party, but not as surprising as the political establishment is suggesting.”
Also in the Oz, the ever reliably wrong Tom Tomasevitch Switzerov reassured the faithful that things are not as bad as they look. The Liberal Party becomes a ruthless, focused organisation when it needs to be, Switzer noted. People were writing it off in 1993. What does it need to do? “Call out the corporates who act like social activists. Condemn the ‘sensitivity readers’ who censor children’s books.” Yep, that was all they were talking about at the Boronia Mall*.
OK, let’s stipulate that that’s a bit right. The Australian political system reproduces itself in a stable fashion because it’s designed to. Compulsory voting, exhaustive preferencing and public funding pegged to the primary vote ensure that a major party can keep going with almost no real membership at all, and that there is insufficient incentive for a real, right-down-the-middle split.
But that’s also a problem. It means that political decline never comes to the point of complete crisis, requiring resolution. The Aston result is truly dire. The vote was in part a rejection of Dutton as a leader, of the party’s reactionary position on climate change, of the candidate drop-in, and of some Anglo/European-descended preference for a non-Chinese candidate (like it or not).
But the Liberals could have kept Aston. If they’d run with a local candidate — doing retail politics, campaigning for the neglected middle-outer east, and making some dissenting noises on climate change, and also on the rush to war with China — they might have reversed the 8% swing against them in the 2022 election and made it the starting point of a fightback.
The trouble would have been finding a local candidate like that, given the state of the party branches and those willing to run. For the Liberal Party, holding an open preselection is now like tapping a ship’s biscuit: all that will come out are the weevils — the reactionary, conspiratorial, fundamentalist and resentful types now crowding out the party’s membership lists.
Losing Aston means the keystone has fallen out of the party’s outer-eastern realm. This was a contiguous five-seat bloc, stretching from Menzies and Deakin, starting around Doncaster and Ringwood, passing through Aston, and going to Latrobe and Casey, based around Melbourne’s very-outer suburbs and exurbs. In fact, it’s worse. Both Menzies and Deakin are on 1%, Casey on 3%, and only Latrobe, centred on Pakenham, is safe on a 60-40% margin.
This is all the Liberals have in Melbourne. All of it. The demographics are shifting too, with Menzies and Deakin becoming younger, less Anglo, less European, and the latter’s party apparatus centred around Michael Sukkar and the clownish sinister happy-clappy right. They are now open to challenge not only from Labor but from a suburban-styled community independent, less socially progressive than the teals but still in the sensible centre on climate change and the rest.
The Liberal Party of Australia, the actual Liberal Party, is now down to 25 seats in the 151-seat Parliament. The Liberal National Party, most of whose grunt and energy comes from its National core, has 21 seats. Yes, Australian lower house politics, post World War II, has become one of the most stable systems in the world. But there is surely a point, where smooth reproduction is interrupted to some degree that the force turns from centripetal to centrifugal, driving candidates away from the Liberal core, to run as “cerulean” independents — bluer than teal but more centrist than the party. Were that to occur, the right really could come apart, 1944 in reverse.
For those on the left, the loss in Aston holds out a glittering possibility. The Tasmanian Rockcliff government (it may change in the three hours before this is published) is on a 13-12 margin, and one of several members could always go independent. In the next election, the election there will be contested with 35 seats on five multi-member electorates of seven members each. The quota will be about 10,000. You could get a quoll elected.
Could we have the grand slam? Labor wins 2025, Tasmania falls, Queensland holds, and then, mirabile dictu, Labor takes the mayoralty of Brisbane, currently held by the right. That would leave the Liberal Party without branded government of any description in Australia, above some stray local councils. Once you’ve thought of this possibility, it is impossible to stop.
For the Liberals who aren’t crazies, this vote should affirm one thing. They should regard the 2025 election as lost, and most likely a reversal, and simply devote themselves to five years of the bloodiest, most relentless internal struggles to remove or limit the religious groups that have taken over core positions in the party. They should go full Trot, and regard actual national politics as a mere distraction from the real fight within.
They have no alternative. But they also have the luxury. Because let’s face it, while they may have lost the battle for the baubles, they’ve won the politics. The Albanese is a left-Howardist government, integrating a centre-right social order with a higher integration of the nation into a racially-based international alliance of AUKUS.
We won’t be reviving local industry, reversing iniquitous schools funding, or attacking the corrosive inequality of housing and superannuation that builds inequality day by day, putting anything resembling a social democratic country further out of reach. We lost the politics to get the power. Regarding the pain of others.
*Switzer hilariously repeats a common error, suggesting: “Meanwhile, the cultural left has made a ‘long march through the institutions’, unconsciously following the model laid out by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci nearly a century ago.”
Two things. Firstly, Gramsci never said that. There is no record of it. A moment’s thought would tell you why. The phrase is a repurposing of Mao’s famous 1930s “long march”, and was used by German left leader Rudi Dutschke in 1967 to suggest an alternative strategy for the left, with no prospect of revolution. Secondly, what do you mean “unconsciously”? From the late 1970s onwards, the left and progressives have been very consciously pursuing this strategy. That’s where your Gramsci comes in. Progressives didn’t acquire this empire in a fit of absent-mindedness. Why does Switzer get this quote wrong and misunderstand what has occurred? Because he’s a little complacent and a little intellectually mediocre, and that is one of the right’s problems at the moment.
Guy Rundle
CORRESPONDENT-AT-LARGE
Guy Rundle is correspondent-at-large for Crikey. He is also an associate editor at Arena Quarterly and contributes to a variety of publications in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Opinion / Politics
After Aston, the right has — hahaha, I can’t finish this headline
The Liberal Party isn't going to split. But its secular-moderate core must now devote themselves to bloody internal struggle for years on end.GUY RUNDLE
APR 03, 2023
LIBERAL CANDIDATE FOR ASTON ROSHENA CAMPBELL (IMAGE: AAP/JULIAN SMITH)
Susan Sontag once wrote a serious and moving essay, Regarding the Pain of Others. Were the title to be used for a study of Saturday’s Aston byelection, it would consist entirely of “hahahah-ahahahahaha”. For anyone whose leftish heart is still beating even faintly, this was a good one. Folks in bars across Melbourne were watching the coverage on their phones.
The result turned early and turned strong, so the rest was pure sadism, full of hilarious moments. “I really, I don’t, I’m lost for words,” said Keith Wolahan, the boy-faced ex-soldier member for Menzies, on the ABC panel when they threw to him. When they came back from a cross to Antony Green, Wolahan was gone. On Sky News, Credlin was holding forth about the Abbott government to a court of tame men, the madwoman let down from the attic to talk about the rotten boroughs. “When Tony became opposition leader, we…”
Still televised, from the Rowville, uh, what was that — it looked the Liberal do was being held in a breeze-block changing room — Peter Dutton, down from Queensland, gave a terrible speech, his point being that the Liberal Party had at least held together, a modest aim indeed.
Losing candidate Roshena Campbell then gave a speech, and showed why she was. Cliched, stagey and self-regarding, she never connected during the campaign. People sussed her: Melbourne city councillor, Brunswick resident, barrister. Dropped in so the local party wouldn’t select yet another man (Emanuele Cicchiello; a local professional woman applicant, Ranjana Srivastava, was seen as too much of an unknown quantity), she comes off as an inner-city hip professional with a few centre-right economic opinions.
Did the Liberal centre have an inkling it might lose this? Apparently the very core did, but the wider penumbra did not, with passes to the Saturday night shindig being given out willy-nilly (when a loss is likely, the location becomes secret, like a speakeasy). And a possibility is that they consciously took the risk of dropping in a candidate like Campbell as a way of reconnecting to the teal seats.
Twenty-four hours later, some were trying to spin it. John Ferguson, the world’s oldest copy-boy, filed a rat-a-tat piece in The Australian that read as if he had dictated it from his phone at a pub bar to the world’s last copy-taker, noting, “This was an earthquake for the Liberal Party, but not as surprising as the political establishment is suggesting.”
Also in the Oz, the ever reliably wrong Tom Tomasevitch Switzerov reassured the faithful that things are not as bad as they look. The Liberal Party becomes a ruthless, focused organisation when it needs to be, Switzer noted. People were writing it off in 1993. What does it need to do? “Call out the corporates who act like social activists. Condemn the ‘sensitivity readers’ who censor children’s books.” Yep, that was all they were talking about at the Boronia Mall*.
OK, let’s stipulate that that’s a bit right. The Australian political system reproduces itself in a stable fashion because it’s designed to. Compulsory voting, exhaustive preferencing and public funding pegged to the primary vote ensure that a major party can keep going with almost no real membership at all, and that there is insufficient incentive for a real, right-down-the-middle split.
But that’s also a problem. It means that political decline never comes to the point of complete crisis, requiring resolution. The Aston result is truly dire. The vote was in part a rejection of Dutton as a leader, of the party’s reactionary position on climate change, of the candidate drop-in, and of some Anglo/European-descended preference for a non-Chinese candidate (like it or not).
But the Liberals could have kept Aston. If they’d run with a local candidate — doing retail politics, campaigning for the neglected middle-outer east, and making some dissenting noises on climate change, and also on the rush to war with China — they might have reversed the 8% swing against them in the 2022 election and made it the starting point of a fightback.
The trouble would have been finding a local candidate like that, given the state of the party branches and those willing to run. For the Liberal Party, holding an open preselection is now like tapping a ship’s biscuit: all that will come out are the weevils — the reactionary, conspiratorial, fundamentalist and resentful types now crowding out the party’s membership lists.
Losing Aston means the keystone has fallen out of the party’s outer-eastern realm. This was a contiguous five-seat bloc, stretching from Menzies and Deakin, starting around Doncaster and Ringwood, passing through Aston, and going to Latrobe and Casey, based around Melbourne’s very-outer suburbs and exurbs. In fact, it’s worse. Both Menzies and Deakin are on 1%, Casey on 3%, and only Latrobe, centred on Pakenham, is safe on a 60-40% margin.
This is all the Liberals have in Melbourne. All of it. The demographics are shifting too, with Menzies and Deakin becoming younger, less Anglo, less European, and the latter’s party apparatus centred around Michael Sukkar and the clownish sinister happy-clappy right. They are now open to challenge not only from Labor but from a suburban-styled community independent, less socially progressive than the teals but still in the sensible centre on climate change and the rest.
The Liberal Party of Australia, the actual Liberal Party, is now down to 25 seats in the 151-seat Parliament. The Liberal National Party, most of whose grunt and energy comes from its National core, has 21 seats. Yes, Australian lower house politics, post World War II, has become one of the most stable systems in the world. But there is surely a point, where smooth reproduction is interrupted to some degree that the force turns from centripetal to centrifugal, driving candidates away from the Liberal core, to run as “cerulean” independents — bluer than teal but more centrist than the party. Were that to occur, the right really could come apart, 1944 in reverse.
For those on the left, the loss in Aston holds out a glittering possibility. The Tasmanian Rockcliff government (it may change in the three hours before this is published) is on a 13-12 margin, and one of several members could always go independent. In the next election, the election there will be contested with 35 seats on five multi-member electorates of seven members each. The quota will be about 10,000. You could get a quoll elected.
Could we have the grand slam? Labor wins 2025, Tasmania falls, Queensland holds, and then, mirabile dictu, Labor takes the mayoralty of Brisbane, currently held by the right. That would leave the Liberal Party without branded government of any description in Australia, above some stray local councils. Once you’ve thought of this possibility, it is impossible to stop.
For the Liberals who aren’t crazies, this vote should affirm one thing. They should regard the 2025 election as lost, and most likely a reversal, and simply devote themselves to five years of the bloodiest, most relentless internal struggles to remove or limit the religious groups that have taken over core positions in the party. They should go full Trot, and regard actual national politics as a mere distraction from the real fight within.
They have no alternative. But they also have the luxury. Because let’s face it, while they may have lost the battle for the baubles, they’ve won the politics. The Albanese is a left-Howardist government, integrating a centre-right social order with a higher integration of the nation into a racially-based international alliance of AUKUS.
We won’t be reviving local industry, reversing iniquitous schools funding, or attacking the corrosive inequality of housing and superannuation that builds inequality day by day, putting anything resembling a social democratic country further out of reach. We lost the politics to get the power. Regarding the pain of others.
*Switzer hilariously repeats a common error, suggesting: “Meanwhile, the cultural left has made a ‘long march through the institutions’, unconsciously following the model laid out by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci nearly a century ago.”
Two things. Firstly, Gramsci never said that. There is no record of it. A moment’s thought would tell you why. The phrase is a repurposing of Mao’s famous 1930s “long march”, and was used by German left leader Rudi Dutschke in 1967 to suggest an alternative strategy for the left, with no prospect of revolution. Secondly, what do you mean “unconsciously”? From the late 1970s onwards, the left and progressives have been very consciously pursuing this strategy. That’s where your Gramsci comes in. Progressives didn’t acquire this empire in a fit of absent-mindedness. Why does Switzer get this quote wrong and misunderstand what has occurred? Because he’s a little complacent and a little intellectually mediocre, and that is one of the right’s problems at the moment.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Guy Rundle
CORRESPONDENT-AT-LARGE
Guy Rundle is correspondent-at-large for Crikey. He is also an associate editor at Arena Quarterly and contributes to a variety of publications in Australia and the United Kingdom.
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schneebly111
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What I sense, from comments after the by election loss and general vibes, is that the Liberals are prepared to write off Victoria and run a “red state/blue state” contest like the US is now.
So they’ll write off Victoria as the home of “leftist commie woke scum” in the hope it guarantees them votes elsewhere. It’ll become the right’s whipping boy like California is to the GOP. Every campaign in all other states will be “hey vote for us unless you want to turn into Woke Victoria!”, and their media allies will run stories about how bad Victoria is, not to influence the politics there but in other states.
It would be a travesty if Australia descended into a “red state/blue state” mentality but I think that’s what the Libs will try
- Banned
- #737
I doubt that is about to happen any time soon.
wah wah wah wah. Just accept that Dutton and his 15 questions are bullshit.
By the way, why don't you tell all of us what Dutton's 15 questions are so we can all have a look at these profound questions that need answering.
When you dont answer every question raised its an own goal for the yes vote. Playing to the undecided, not the committed.
Or an analysis by a card carrying cheer squad member of the other side.
Show us the 15 questions!
Albo's got them, not me.
I'll try again: appeal to the uncommitted, even those who arent as smart as you think you are.
That you consider a question unworthy is irrelevant.
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Crankyhawk
Hall of Famer
It really does depend on the question. Some questions are designed as traps, impossible to answer in a way that a sound bite can't be misused to make you look silly, and aren't genuine in nature.
Whilst I am hesitant to quote the AFR, here are the 15 questions and potential answers based on publically available info and statements. Except for q3 and q6, most seem to have answers.
Q3 opens the door to a very tough discussion and is the "trap" but eventually we are going to have to discuss it if compensation etc is talked about.
Answers to Dutton’s 15 questions on the Voice
The Coalition says the points Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has asked about the Voice ‘won’t go away’. Here are some answers using input from all sides.
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That’s a really informative article. Thanks for linking.Whilst I am hesitant to quote the AFR, here are the 15 questions and potential answers based on publically available info and statements. Except for q3 and q6, most seem to have answers.
Q3 opens the door to a very tough discussion and is the "trap" but eventually we are going to have to discuss it if compensation etc is talked about.
Answers to Dutton’s 15 questions on the Voice
The Coalition says the points Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has asked about the Voice ‘won’t go away’. Here are some answers using input from all sides.www.afr.com
Sent from my SM-A125F using BigFooty.com mobile app
- Banned
- #748
No it isn't. You would immediately lose any and all efficiencies that come with being a MNE. Functions that were centralised would now be required to be set up in each jurisdiction, e.g., finance, marketing, IT. So you immediately increase costs for all MNEs that gets passed on through increased final price to the consumer.
Then you start to see increase in finance costs. Is a stand alone local entity going to be able to source finance cheaper than an MNE? No. More cost passed on to the consumer.
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NO, that's not what's simplistic.
What's simplistic was you, in a discussion of the massive problem of companies using their multinational state to avoid paying any tax anywhere, suggesting that nothing could be done because it would result in increased prices.
- Banned
- #750
Who said nothing could be done?
OECD Pillar 1 and Pillar 2.
This is in addition to the base erosion and profit shifting 15 point action plan.
I'm just pointing out that breaking up MNEs would result in creating inefficiencies which would translate to price increases.
