Australian Federal Election

It's a [bold]GREAT[/bold] night OP!

*For Americans who are confused about the word Liberal - we don't use the word liberal in the same way as you do in the US - the Liberal Party is the conservative party in Australia. The conservatives took on the name in 1945 when it meant something different. The conservative Liberal Party are in a coalition with the National Party who are hard right like the MAGA nuts. The leader of the conservative party, Peter Dutton, is set to lose his seat just like Poilievre in the Canadian election. Dutton has held this federal electoral seat since 2001.

Dutton tried to emulate Trump and his policies such as DOGE, return to office, cutting federal government staff and getting "woke" out of schools and universities to name a few. It all went down like a lead fucking balloon with Australians.

The Trump effect.

Funniest part of the ABC coverage was when their Amazon Web Services servers crashed right at a crucial point of the night and the political pundit got into a queeny snit and blamed Jeff Bezos but then snapped back and working off a notepad and pen called the result.

Fair point R1.

Feels good to be an elector in a country which rejected Dutton’s pathetic Trumpism and didn’t swing to the right as predicted.

Yo Canada! We’re a week behind you!

OMG. I just watched Jacinta Price have a nasty cunt off with Sarah Ferguson (who wasn't having it and never backs down). Price is a very unpleasant bitch. She was complaining that the media was responsible for the election loss and saying that because of Labor, Aboriginal people don't have a voice to be able to tell the federal government where to allocate funding. UNFUCKINGBELIEVABLE when she was one of the most instrumental people in sinking the Voice Referendum. Absolutely unbelievable. Most of her own people hate her.

Dutton has definitely lost his seat. He's getting exactly what he deserves. I'm fucking THRILLED.

This is also an emphatic message to the US from Australians. Get your shit together - we don't want it in our lives and we wont tolerate it.

*Remember Liberal Party = conservative party (i.e. Republican Party).

[quote]Feels good to be an elector in a country which rejected Dutton’s pathetic Trumpism.

It SURE does R3! I'm going to have a celebratory joint.

So that's Canada and Australia done and dusted. Who's next?

The Prime Minister is making his victory speech now. It's all about emphasising our similarities instead of our differences, leaving no-one behind and having respect for those who don't agree with us. He stopped the crowd, who are pretty partisan because they worked on his campaign, from booing his mention of the Opposition leader (who tried to use the Trump playbook) and wished him and his family well for their future.

They needed 76 seats for a majority government. It's currently up to 85. The conservatives have only got 33, with 13 in the hands of Greens and Independents. That's a rout.

[quote]The conservative Liberal Party are in a coalition with the National Party who are hard right like the MAGA nuts.

This is confusingly worded for outsiders like me, I thought you were trying to Mandela Effect me. Just to clarify, Australia has had a Labour (leftie) government under Albanese since 2022 when conservatives lost after nine years in power. This is incidentally also when Australia started getting its shit together. So by coalition you don't mean a government coalition, but their willingness to come together at elections and then form a government.

Anyway, I'm SO happy about this! Rooting for Australia at Eurovision later this month as well, they sent an absolute fucking stud to represent them. A hick from some hippie commune in Manjimup, but he's grown up into a truly beautiful soul.

Just been to the Australia subreddit and I read that Musk has been campaigning for the losing parties. Of fucking course. 🙄

Congratulations, Australia! Will some kind soul be able to give up his or her seat so that poor Dutton can stay in parliament, or is that a strictly Canadian phenomenon?

[quote]or is that a strictly Canadian phenomenon?

No we do it here too R9 - we call it "parachuting" into an electoral seat. One of the conservatives will have to give up their electoral seat for Dutton if so. But Dutton is not well liked by the Australian public so it's 50/50 whether they even keep him on. I wouldn't be surprised either way. He will most likely quit politics. He should. He's been humiliated like Poilievre. He he.

I'm in Australia and I never spotted Musk, but he could have sent them some funding I suppose, though we have tight limits on donations compared to the US. At any rate, the Opposition leader lost his own seat (to a young woman, 59% to 41%), so no, not a successful campaign. R9, if someone wanted to give their seat to Dutton they'd have to resign, he would have to be parachuted into the seat (Australians don't like it when you don't live in the seat you represent and they don't like people being parachuted in from outside either) and there would have to be a by-election which he'd have to win, so the chances are slim.

R7, the Liberals are in a constant coalition with the National Party, whether they are in government or not. There is always a Liberal leader and a National deputy leader, whether they are in power or in opposition, and both parties are represented in their Cabinet, or their Shadow Cabinet when in opposition. (In Australia the Cabinet can only come from elected representatives.) The Nationals represent rural Australia, so they run on the redneck model. They represent the only places in Australia that think guns are a good thing, for example. By no means all rural seats belong to them, though.

[quote]59% to 41%

That is delicious! It was a total landslide. He was BOOTED like Abbott! So humiliating. The LNP will dump him if he doesn't retire immediately.

It looks like Tim Smith will lose again after trying to win back the seat he lost in the previous election.

Fun fact: I was on holidays in Hawaii about 10 years ago and ran into Tim at Hula’s in Waikiki. A mutual friend introduced us as we were both Aussies there on holidays. Tim was super drunk and tried to suck my friends dick in the toilet. Just like the last two elections, he bombed out and was rejected.

Shit. I mean Tim Wilson, not Smith. The (once) member for Goldstein.

Australians, tell us about your mandatory voting law and what the consequence/fine is for not participating in an election? How do they confirm that?

Also, I love that your candidates have to submit their proposed budgets to an independent body for assessment which is reported prior to Election Day. Do those results still have a lot of sway with the electorate?

As R11 noted, they have tight restrictions on campaign donations too. I still can’t believe in the States we have our Citizens United/“Money Talks” SCOTUS decision. That really needs to be overturned.

R13, pleased to see the Anzac wreath stealer on his arse again. Zali got back in for us again in Warringah. Hated the ABC panel tonight. Go back to baking Annabel, Patricia is nasty, lets not talk about David Speers, poor Laura was out to pasture in the corner. Jacinta made a fool of herself again..it's never ending.

OP, will you marry me? When can I move down under and in? Do we have a nice house?

R15 once you’re enrolled to vote at age 18 your name appears on the electoral rolls for each electorate. On election day or in the weeks leading up for pre-polling, you front up at the polling place, they draw a line through your name and then after the election chase down the recalcitrants. It’s completely manual but seems to work.

Unless you have a good reason for not voting you get fined. I’ve been fined once - from memory it wasn’t a huge amount, maybe $20.

I postal voted to avoid hoi polloi.

Thank you, Antipodean at R19, for your avoidance of redundancy!

R15 The law requires you to register to vote when you turn 18, but it's not policed at all. In 2017 we had a postal vote on same-sex marriage, when the deadlines were announced around 20,000 new electors signed up... why hadn't they done so beforehand? Oh, now, NOW they feel motivated to vote!! And for the record, that postal vote wasn't even mandatory.

That cynical exercise aside, on normal election days you are required by law to go to a polling booth and get your name crossed off (yes, it's still manual). You're then given the ballot papers and go to a booth to mark it off. There is no law over what you write on the ballot and even if there was, how could that be policed?

The fine for not getting your name crossed off is $55. But if you don't pay (as a friend did once) there was no follow up for debt collection. In those cases it's too expensive to pursue.

Nothing to fear about mandatory voting. So easy to dodge and too hard to police.

Will the King of Australia make a long-haul flight to open the Australian parliamentary session?

My brother is against compulsory voting so he registers then writes "voting sucks" on the form.

I was molested by a guy named Sidney.

I was just watching all these TikToks about the Aussie election and I was losing my mind because I didn't know that liberal is conservative in Australian politics! (Yes, I am a stupid American.)

But this is fantastic news!

So by coalition you mean a government coalition, by their willingness to come together at elections and then form a government coalition. FIFY.

Nice of you to explain the Australian political system to us R26 (how very American of you) but you’re mistaken.

Back in the 1920s there were two conservative Australian political parties - the Liberal Party and the National (then “Country”) Party. They formed a coalition in that election, won power and then merged to form the Liberal National Party or LNP. The Liberals’ power base is largely urban, the Nationals’ is largely rural - the LNP leader is always the head of the Liberals, the LNP Deputy Leader is always the Head of the Nationals. By agreement they don’t stand candidates in the same electorate. They have a similar conservative ethos although the Nats tend to be more conservative than the Libs.

They have been operating as a single party for over 100 years. They don’t form and reform at every election - this would be an administrative nightmare as Australia has three levels of government in six states and two territories with elections every 3 or 4 years. They sit as a single party in the House of Representatives and the Senate at Federal level and at their equivalent state and territory level.

Hope that helps.

A permanent collation that sometimes governs. FIFY

So happy for Australia and Australians. You Australian DLers were so supportive of us Canadians during our recent elections, I am elated yours had a similar outcome. Let's hope our nations become closer.

Run along and try to annoy someone else, R28.

A “permanent collation”, R28? Well, Australian politics is no picnic at times.

There’s nothing more satisfying than watching a clueless American smartarse make a fool of themselves.

Absolutely, R29. That is certainly the sentiment here.

Feels great to have a government who we can be proud of, especially when returned with an expected majority by the majority of our countrymen. And to see the leader of the opposition, who we nicknamed Temu Trump, lose his own seat.

Trump will single-handedly make the rest of the world tilt left

You have the majority government I wanted fot us in Canada r32.

I must admit I wasn't as worried for you Australians as I was for us. My own country scares me sometimes. Yours seems so stable. Feel free to correct me.

Morning Aussies! I've just watched ABC Insiders and watching the host David Speers (who is an ex-Murdoch Sky News media conservative) have to suck it all up was delicious!

This morning, it turns out that not only was it an electoral landslide to the left but the LNP conservatives have lost most of their electoral seats in the big cities to either Labor or independents and as Speers put it; "the LNP have become the right-wing fringe populist party". They aren't going to be back in power for decades. The conservative leader has emphatically lost his seat and his political career after being in federal government since 2001. The conservatives have confirmed don't want him back in politics. Dutton is a nasty, mean, racist, homophobic piece of shit so no-one is shedding any tears.

ALL the political analysts I've seen on TV and in the media agree that a large chunk of the lurch to the left is because of Trump. Australians saw the LNP conservatives as Trump-lite and determined to do the same things as Trump to Australia because they campaigned on various watered down Trump policies and then tried to pull back on it mid-campaign when their poll numbers dropped significantly. It was an unmitigated disaster for the conservatives because Australians are kinder, smarter and better educated that Americans. Sorry Yanks but it's true. Australians don't want to be anything like what the US has become.

Also very important - in Australia, people who believe in a god and practice any kind of religion are in the minority of our population and that makes a big difference. Every census the numbers of people who are religious drop and are on the way to them being a small powerless minority of the population. There is a direct correlation between how zealously religious a country is and how much of a corrupt shithole it is as evidenced by any fundamental-religious nation like Iran, Afghanistan, and unfortunately - the zealously religious US. Religion has always proven to be a cancer on society and something which grown up, well-educated and forward moving countries who care about the lives of ALL of their people (not just some) do away with.

Well done Australians! Fuck you Trump and MAGA. Now it's time to cancel AUKUS, look for new defence alliances and new trade relationships and strengthen our trade and defence ties with Europe, other Commonwealth countries and Asia.

Although the Trump administration lie about it - Australia has no tariff on any American goods imported into our country because we had a free-trade agreement with the US. In fact, Australia has a trade deficit with the US. Even so, the US slapped tariffs on Australian goods which is very offensive and unfair to us. The outcome is that we will find new markets for our exports and the friendship which we thought we had will the US will die.

Trumpy won another election for the left. This and Canada are by far his greatest achievements

[quote]Every census the numbers of people who are religious drop and are on the way to them being a small powerless minority of the population.

Yes, I made a thread about it in 2022 when the results came out – according to the latest census in 2021 (next one is next year), the non-religious in Australia went from 30% in 2016 to 39% in just five years. Christians dropped from 52% to 44% over the same time period. This is insanely fast by European standards, let alone American ones.

Extremely encouraging stuff. Also, how cute is this cockatoo shot?

[quote] Also, how cute is this cockatoo shot?

Dollface post.

And then there are the Election Day rituals - speedos and democracy sausages.

Those sausages look so good, holy shit. I remember our news reporting on Australians at the polls in swimsuits when I was a kid and I also remember thinking how charming that was.

R30, they did the same thing on the Canadian elections thread earlier in the week. Just ignore them.

Yeah, I would be fine with not hearing the C-word for a couple of years, after that debacle in the Canada thread. To which admittedly I also contributed. And I started the coalition clarification nonsense in this one as well, so maybe I'm the problem? 🙊

One C-word I can't get enough of, though, is the cockatoo! Such precious little citizens.

We do blame you, in the first instance.

R8

Ahhhhhahahaha! That’s makes this even sweeter!

Thanks R41 - I figured that it was someone bitter to see positive election news in another country. Or a troll.

Or both.

A great night. Very happy with the election result.

Don’t be so proud of yourselves. Without Trump, Australia would have gone over to the dark side and you would all be here bitching and complaining. You people owe the USA a huge debt of gratitude—we are fucked in the States, but in the meantime we helped you to save Australia’s ass.

Says R47 who knows fuck all about Australian politics.

We owe you nothing - sort your own country out first before you come for anyone else.

I always knew that the Ugly Americans would emerge at this point.

Go pick on Canada, R47 - you guys seem to be good at that.

Good luck with the tariffs!

The Canadian thread had a chuckle on this same thought. What’s up with the sour Aussies—no humour at all.

The LNP victory on the weekend had this to do with Trump: the opposition leader tried on some Trump lite policies for size (as he came up with then discarded policy after policy on a weekly basis), completely misreading the Australian people.

He then discarded those in another backflip a couple of weeks ago when the polls showed that they weren’t resonating. He ran a shambolic campaign, no costings for his policies and with an undisciplined and unfocused team. He had been on a knife edge margin in his own electorate for two electoral cycles and was personally voted out of his own seat which is largely far right wing and red neck - they should have been prime Trump territory - except that they weren’t.

Oh, and he’s an unempathetic dickhead with a huge property portfolio who suggested in the middle of a cost of living and housing crisis that people just needed to work harder and save harder to buy their own home.

So it’s rather more nuanced than “Trump saved your asses!” but I can appreciate that nuance isn’t your core competency, R47.

BTW is “Trump saved your asses!” going to be the new “We saved your asses in WW2!”?

Because you didn’t do that either.

Link please R50.

We’re not sour, we’re celebrating!

But we don’t take kindly to being lectured to by Americans who don’t know what they’re talking about. Who does?

[Quote] Dutton tried to emulate Trump and his policies such as DOGE, return to office, cutting federal government staff and getting "woke" out of schools and universities to name a few. It all went down like a lead fucking balloon with Australians.

Very glad to read that — congrats to the Aussies. I wish we had the ability to get results like that here in the USA.

Sadly, our vaunted Constitution is going to prove the death of representative government in America. It’s on the brink of already having done so.

The First Amendment’s freedom of speech has been interpreted to mean that baldly propagandistic bullhorns like Fox News can colonize the brains of right-leaning voters, turning them into extreme little hatebots. It’s created a chasm in our culture that I don’t see healing anytime soon. The democrats here don’t have anything approaching the Fox News propaganda network to level the playing field.

Scoundrels like the shitstains responsible for QAnon also piously invoked the First Amendment when accused of being what they were — lying propagandists.

That same amendment has been interpreted to permit dark money to flow into political campaigns. This permits billionaires to funnel endless amounts of money into pols who they know will keep them rich, dismantle consumer protections, destroy the environment, etc.

I being this all up because we COULD have elections that result in life getting better for most people, better international relations, etc, if only those manipulations did not occur, thanks to our vaunted “freedom of expression.” Don’t ever allow that kind of stuff to take hold in Australia. It will be the death of your culture.

(I mean, I know you guys have freedom of expression too of course, but when it’s a fundamental law central to your foundational statute, it’s extremely hard to put laws in place that restrict speech.)

The least fun Aussies are on political threads.

Aussies can sing about politics.

R53, the problems you're describing aren't with the Constitution or Bill of Rights per se, they're with the way the far-right Roberts Court has been interpreting it.

I don’t completely agree r56, although I see where you’re coming from. The fact that we see the bill of rights as “sacred” permits the court to say “this isn’t compelling enough of a reason to restrict this right coming from the bill of rights.

It’s why countries like Germany have a right of free speech, but then they have banned display of the swastika. They can just say, “nope, fuck that, no swastika whether we have freedom of expression or not.”

R54 you say “least fun”, I say “know what we are talking about and have fun pointing out when Americans get it wrong”.

But you always know best, even when you don’t, right?

And so it goes at R58

Totally agree, R59!

The Liberals are saying they need to move more to the center and they're correct. But Labor has to be careful that this win doesn't go to their head and they get seduced by the loony left.

There was a minor stink last year when the Prime Minister vetoed a question about gender identity in the upcoming census. He then faced an internal backlash and now some version of the question is back in. Albanese needs to stand his ground on these matters, he has the numbers and has made political history. The blue-haired identity bigots need to be told to fuck off.

We could in 1972, R55. Not sure we're as chirpy these days, but thank you so much for the clip. I pride myself on having remembered the lyrics ever since, but I've never seen it in full and in colour before.

Can you name those stars?

R60 didn’t quite get it

Most of them, R63. Wikipedia does, if you want to know. The lead singer is Alison McCallum. Our USian readers will recognise Jacki Weaver and Jack Thompson.