With fixed four-year terms, I doubt reporters were exactly staking out Government House waiting for John Brumby’s visit to request that writs be issued for the state election on November 27th.
Much of the early attention has focused on the inner-city battle between the Greens and Labor. as Antony Green points out, the Greens have a decent chance of winning at least three, and an outside chance of winning five lower house seats.
Both the ALP and the local Murdoch tabloid are apoplectic about this possibility, and it seems that their first target is Greens candidate for Melbourne, Brian Walters SC.
The Herald-Sun has started with a piece which makes two claims – the first that he invested in an “industrial estate, linked to the mining industry, in resource-rich Queensland.” That’s fair enough criticism in principle, though the link seems to me to be so tenuous as to be a nonissue. Just about everyone in Australia with a superannuation fund is invested in the coal industry. But the second criticism is just nonsensical
Mr Walters is representing Downer EDI, which owns 44 per cent of RTL, a non-incorporated joint venture that operates the Yallourn open cut brown coalmine, the biggest open cut coalmine in Australia.
RTL is being prosecuted by WorkSafe over the death of union delegate Rick Gauci who was killed in 2006 while conducting maintenance on a conveyor belt at the mine.
In case the story wasn’t enough, the Hun repeated the dose in its editorial for the day.
Clearly, nobody on the Herald-Sun’s editorial staff has heard of the cab-rank rule.
Neither has state Labor, if you believe this story in The Age:
Senior Labor figures including former Victorian secretary Stephen Newnham have contacted influential members of the Jewish community seeking to generate a political backlash against the Greens, and Mr Walters in particular.
The Age has obtained a dossier of documents used as part of the dirt campaign that focus on Mr Walters’s representation of alleged Nazi war criminal Konrads Kalejs in the early 2000s.
It’s going to be a long, long four weeks if there’s more of this on the way. And, more to the point, I can’t see such frankly amateurish smears doing Labor a lot of good.
Elsewhere: Jeremy Sear makes similar points. Legal Eagle thinks more of Walters after becoming aware of this story, and also discusses the cab-rank rule in more detail.
“That’s fair enough criticism in principle, though the link seems to me to be so tenuous as to be a nonissue. Just about everyone in Australia with a superannuation fund is invested in the coal industry.”
Hardly, even, “fair enough criticism in principle”, Robert. He did not go anywhere near investing in the coal industry. Just because you buy real estate in Rockhampton does not mean you are compromised. They do other things there too, you know.
On the basis of that argument, if there was a brothel in Rockhampton he could be said to have in invested in the sex industry because he owned a factory in the same complex.
This is going to be an ugly, boring campaign. And yes, the press seems to be deliberately ignorant of the realities of the barristers’ trade.
It promises to be another engrossing election because of the Greens. My take: Greens Plot Pragmatic Political Path
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cab-rank_rule
The Age reports that lawyers and prominent Jewish citizens have condemned the smear.
In the case of the anti-semitism smear there is the additional problem that this is the sort of thing which is likely to exacerbate anti-semitism. The controversy over The Hand That Signed the Paper in 1995-96 revealed that knowledgable sympathy for Jews is less widespread in Australia than might once have been supposed, and that controbersy, along with disclosures in Mark Aarons’ The Family File and some of the uglier aspects of recent debates over Middle East politics, suggest a wider persistence in Australia of anti-semitic tropes than might once have been supposed. In this context frivolous, false, malicious and politically motivated accusations of anti-semitism run the risk of causing people to cease to take real anti-semitism seriously or to be able to recognise it when it is expressed.
“Never let the truth interfere with a good story”.
The sort of people who will vote Green are not as likely to be taken in by Murdoch/ corporatist Labor bullshit as the less sophisticated elsewhere, there.
It’s an obnoxious neolib government, only there because the opposition are so values/ ideas free and dysfunctional themselves.
And even putting aside the “cab-rank” rule, it seems that he was representing the company’s interest against a non-compliant sub-contractor who had admitted the breach that led to the unionist’s death.
In a modest way, this would be analogous to a lawyer representing the Commonwealth in a case where a non-compliant person in the insulation business caused a death while installing home insulation.
Apparently the matter in QLD was even more tenuous than you suggest above as he simply lent money to his brother to invest in warehouses.
If I were Jewish I would probably take the implied assumption that I was uneducated and unethical as a bit of a slight. And the attempt to hive votes off the holocaust a bit cheap. Given the preponderance of bright barristers drawn from the Jewish community I suspect this will be a hideous misfire for the imbeciles who thought it up.
This is a great argument for teaching “civics” at schools as they do in the US. The whole beatup is predicated on Australians not understanding the requirement for lawyers to provide representation and the fact that that doesn’t constitute an endorsement. As Jeremy Sear has pointed out.
I’ve blogged angrily before about Steven Newnham and his nasty anti-Greens propaganda campaigns in previous Victorian elections. Like, the Greens want to close (the selective government school) MacRobertson Girls school down. What the Greens policy actually was was that they wanted to render such schools redundant by raising the standard of all public education. I hardly think, barring some catastrophic population crash, they would actually want to close a highly functioning and popular high school down.
The other beauty was the “Greens Liberal Deal” website which was all about beating up an alleged preference deal, and alleging other.. er.. inaccuracies, and which was all funky black-and-green to try and look like some activist’s website when in fact it was just Newnham and maybe some backroom boys running the site.
oh look, it’s still here.
http://greens-liberal-deal.com.au/wordpress/
(Sorry hit Submit too soon): Yes, so S Newnham went and was replaced by somebody whose name escapes me, and I wondered whether State Labor would see the light and stop indulging in these pathetic tactics. Apparently not, plus the grubby fingerprints of Newnham still appear all over them.
Graaagh. Well, more votes to the Greens, hopefully!
We saw the same tactic from the other side recently in the USA, where lawyers who had represented Guantanamo Bay prisoners were publicly denounced as unfit for public office by the likes of the repellent Andy McCarthy at ‘Nation Review’. Sad to see it being used by Labor, but nothing they do surprises me any more.
The ALP and News Ltd – locked in a macabre death embrace, pretending they hate each other when in truth they are part of the same decaying political infrastructure.
Stephen Newnham and dirt files. What a great way for Labor to go about losing an election with idiots like that still in their team.
If it doesn’t go that far this kind of thing will mean only that they will be forced to crawl up to the Green’s after the election because they will most certainly need them to form government.
Anti-Semitism doesn’t go away overnight. Regardless of the horror of the Holocaust, it has continued on in Australia and elsewhere after WW2, and I would venture to suggest, here at least, little of it has to do with Zionism (which I use as a term describing a particular political philosophy and not as a slight, though it says something about our society that one has to make that clarification.) I have had enough Jewish friends and come across a few anti-Semites to be aware of that. There’s a long line of it from Jack Lang’s viscious protests about Jewish refugees on the Strathmore in, I think, 1946, through to the League of Rights, the now-defunct Australian Nazi Party, to the occasional desecration of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. And sadly, it is not confined to the rat-bag fringe. As the current smear clearly demonstrates.
The headline should be Brumby Godwins election …
Quite right Helen. Lawyers are, inter alia officers of the court. The adversarial system is designed to ensure that important elements of the proceeding (law of evidence, procedure etc) are applied consistently accoriding to practice so that grounds for mistrial or appeal are narrowed/eliminated.
So while they are there to represent their clients’ interests they are there in a broader sense to enure that the public interest we all have in non-arbitrary judicial proceedings is protected.
That’s what people need to be hearing.
This is worse than a sin. It is a mistake.
The ALP has outdone its habitual clumsiness with these smears.
Wave farewell to Inner Melbourne, ALP. You won’t be back for a long time.
I’ll be interested to see whether anyone in the ALP is willing to condemn this behaviour. It’s utterly contemptible. I thought the Victorian ALP couldn’t get any lower than the Newnham era, but it seems I was wrong.
This incident underlines just how low, the standards of ethics and governance have decended to in the Victorian ALP and Murdock press. Corrective action needs to be taken.
joe2, I should have rephrased that.
In principle, if a Greens candidate held a direct investment in, say, Macarthur Coal, I think that would be a legitimate news story.
However, in this particular case investing in a warehouse development in Rockhampton appears to be a complete beatup.
Goeffrey Robertson wrote a good book about John Cooke, the English Solicitor General who prosecuted Charles I, and established the cab rank rule.
Crap politics from the ALP. makes me wish that the Greens would get their proverbial together and start taking a few seats off he Libs so the ALP didn’t have to do Murdoch’s work for him.
Appalling. I didn’t really need another reason to vote Greens over Labor, but there it is.
Robert said:
Even then, while it would be a legitimate story, it wouldn’t necessarily constitute hypocrisy.
Fairly obviously, one approach taken by activists is to buy shares so they can attend shareholder meetings and complain about company policy.
While it is good to be alert to potential conflicts of interest (actual or perceived) when considering someone’s advocacy unless one can show that the advocacy could advance a pecuniary interest, one surely has no basis for objection.
A person who advocates positions or raises claims that would subvert his/her disclosed pecuniary interest if relied upon surely has at least as much credibility as someone making the same claism who has no pecuniary reason not to advance the claims.
“Goeffrey Robertson wrote a good book about John Cooke, the English Solicitor General who prosecuted Charles I, and established the cab rank rule.”
The Tyrannicide Brief.
Indeed, the description of his eventually hanging, drawing and quartering may have been an omen for future political candidates…
The Tyrannicide Brief.
thats it, thanks
Awesome book, BTW.
I think the title of this post should be “Victorian Election called – it wants its grimy 2006 election tactics back!”
(sad cymbal crash, rim shot)
Now that the Greens are the enemy rather than Labor the MSM needed something to replace the hoary old union ambit claim smear (“Union demands 51 weeks a year holiday!”). Expect to see this nonsense again and again and again now matter how many times it is pointed out that it is incorrect. Now amount of complaints ever stopped ambit claim stories even though they were a demonstrably unethical misrepresentation of a legal reality.
But I’d love to be a fly on the wall when Labor has to negotiate with Walters to form government after the election.
“(sad cymbal crash, rim shot)”
Now THAT’s some nuanced drumming Helen!
Wasn’t Newnham the creep responsible for inflicting Senator Steve onto us all?
Let’s not omit to condemn Melbourne Labor member, Lefty Bronwyn Pike, for going along with the smear. So desperate is she to hold her seat she has jumped into bed with the Herald Sun. I hope she at least feels dirty about it.
Since it is Cup week, the old racing cliche is worth repeating. Walters will take the seat with a leg in the air.
“Goeffrey Robertson wrote a good book about John Cooke, the English Solicitor General who prosecuted Charles I, and established the cab rank rule.”
So if, say, John Howard approached GR, GR would be obliged to represent him against (hypothetical) genocide charges? Surely he would find a way to wiggle out of it?
“So if, say, John Howard approached GR, GR would be obliged to represent him against (hypothetical) genocide charges? ”
Yes.
On the other hand, if you think about that for even a moment you might work out why it would be very unwise to be represented under such circumstances by someone whose heart wasn’t in it. Don’t let that reality ruin your posturing, however.
“Much of the early attention has focused on the inner-city battle between the Greens and Labor. as Antony Green points out, the Greens have a decent chance of winning at least three, and an outside chance of winning five lower house seats.”
Actually, it’s seven not five lower house seats.
The first cab is – if you are an ethical barrister – the only argument.
And the ALP wonders why those with principles are voting Green? This will just reinforce the stampede. Brumby didn’t condemn the smear yesterday, calling it a legitimate story from memory. Have they learned nothing these Labor fools?
Of course 11 years of Labor acting like Liberals explains the swing to the Greens too.
I still think the Libs are dumb not to preference Greens, it’s clearly Brumby’s worst nightmare – and Newnham’s, because if Fiona Richardson loses Northcote I so would not want to be in his shoes.
Philomena at 33: which seven seats? There’s four obvious ones, but then it drifts into pipe-dream territory a bit. I imagine the next three would be Prahran, Albert Park and Footscray, but Labor would need some bad trouble to lose them.
Also, Footscray is looking like one of the most interesting contests. The Greens were outpolled by an independent Maribyrnong councillor, Catherine Cumming, at the last two elections; in 2006, both of them and the Liberals all got between 12-17%, with Labor slightly over 50%. Kinda like an Andrew Wilkie situation (close to a three-way tie for second place), only with Labor a lot stronger. The VEC don’t seem to do full preference distributions if a candidate gets over 50%, but it’s likely Cumming would’ve overtaken the Liberal on Green preferences, and pulled Labor down to about a 10-12% margin. Still safe, but nothing like the 25% they currently have over the Liberals. Meanwhile, the Greens are giving it a red hot go by running the former mayor of Maribyrnong, so they’ve got a chance of cracking 20% and challenging for it themselves. I doubt Labor will lose it, but if the Liberals fall back to third it’ll become a lot more marginal.
it would be very unwise to be represented under such circumstances by someone whose heart wasn’t in it
So Downer EDI is unwise, because Walters’ SC heart won’t be in it?
For those interested, LE and I have done some legal history on the cab-rank rule. This smear is part of a broader failure to grasp not only basic rule of law principles but also the doctrine of separation of powers:
http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/11/01/cab-ranks-smears-and-greens/
Speaking as a Melbourne Green: more Newnham slurs please! I’d say the seat’s wrapped up for us now. Bring him and his clown show to the other ALP-GRN marginals!!
Andrew E unpacks an interesting notion doing the rounds.
This the idea that there exists enough synergies between the Greens and ( Deakinite, at least )liberals for a holding operation against a Labor grouping that has lost touch with its own philosophy at the very time when it has acheived political dominance so that its become Howardism with a makeover.
But the same problem that defeats the current rightist mindset within labor, also upsets the dominant functionalist wing of political liberalism.
The consciousness just isn’t there. Arguably it’s the same mindset, anyway and with the major parties now purged of their better spirits over time, the move back from neoliberalism to liberal democracy, let alone social democracy defeats both groupings, because the Greens espouse precisely those elements of social liberalism and social democracy specifically discarded by dominant neoliberals of both hues.
Hence all the scolding and frustration directed at the Greens. Politicans in both parties experience a sense of conflict because the very presence of the Greens reminds them of values they once held and rightly celebrated as well, against the current soul destroying praxis of neoliberalism.
When they blame the Greens for “holding up development” (not true- no one objects to rational progress), they are demonstrating the conflict in impulses within themselves that arise from neoliberalism’s anti social aspect, against a sense of duty toward the best of the old order coupled with a move to rational process in our times. They cant serve man and mammon- developers and the community- as the aims have become too oppositional (currently).
Unless, like most of the labor right and their soul cousins on the right faction of the liberal party, they have never understood anything in the first place: why would you save a catchment, say, when you can collect a bribe from developers to do otherwise than, the interests of your civil society.
38, I noticed further back Armagny, 23, and the revealing historical footnote concerning this John Cooke, and his grisly fate for that espousing of a foundational principle.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, after all?
38, the DownerEDI case is a worksafe case that could theoretically have arisen with any employer and does not involve a defence of coal mining as such.
another reason why Victoria needs a change of government
Let’s not go too far! Labor with Green topping will do.
Paul@41, I’ve gone into greater detail here. The Liberals should do it for sheer bloody advantage. In the 1950s it was not necessary to delve into leftist theory hair-splitting to assert the kind of dominance they did. A similar opportunity is available to them now, but they are probably too stupid to pursue it and Labor is possibly too smart to let it happen.
the ALP have clearly been in power too long.
get rid of them.
About time in Queensland too.
one really doesn’t have to talk about NSW.
While we’re on this topic, as a Green who can see no good in the Brumby government, I have little investment in seeing them scrape into minority government. I was prepared to preference the Libs until their idiotic policy of, IIR, no wind turbines within 2 kms of any dwelling. Is there any evidence base for this policy at all?
Do any ALP supported want to persuade me why they should get my preferences, or will I just have to swallow the bile in my throat on election day?
All I would say is that anyone who votes liberal, anywhere at anytime, has a short memory but I am not trying to convince anyone.
Or is too young to remember Jeff Kennett!
Jeff Kennett did a good job before had to go.
Does anybody remember John Cain and Joan Kirner?
Yaz, the evidence base is that NIMBYs hate wind turbines.
Some of their reasons are arguably legitimate (they’re fugly) others are just the same kind of pseudoscience you get from (say) anti-vaxers.
That said, given that wind turbines don’t, and probably never will, make a significant difference to greenhouse emissions I wouldn’t waste my time fighting community opposition to build them. Save it for technologies that might actually make a real difference.
“Does anybody remember John Cain and Joan Kirner?”
Yes, quite fondly. John Cain was and is a true gentleman who was unfortunately taken for a ride by money men shysters.
Joan Kirner was left with a mess but was vigilant in her attempts to correct matters and has paved the way for women leaders in this country.
Kennett brought the state out of financial difficulties by making life impossible for those who could least afford it and to this day is doing penance for the depression he caused. He can however claim one triumph – Fed Square.
Paul N @5:
> “frivolous, false, malicious and politically motivated accusations of anti-Semitism run the risk of causing people to cease to take real anti-Semitism seriously or to be able to recognise it when it is expressed”
Agreed. Fortunately, however, this only applies to anti-Semitism and doesn’t apply to any other sort of racism, which is quite effectively dealt with by lawsuits against Coon Cheese, tribunal hearings into Andrew Bolt columns, and similar big stick methods.
I agree, nasty AND dumb gambit by Labor. But I’d probably feel more sympathy for Walters if the Greens themselves had shown a better understanding, in the past, of the principle that you might find someone’s views repellent but still support their legal right to be heard. Instead they tend to play the “fly with the crows, get shot at” card. But then most politicians do, so they’re not alone.
Robert said:
My position on wind as an energy source notwithstanding, I find them kind of attractive. If they worked pretty well I’d be keen on a few on my horizon. And as a work of art, I might even contribute to one …
Joe 2 @53.
Re: Kennett: “He can however claim one triumph”
Yellow taxis as well.
Charlie, sure, you can do all right with a Melbourne taxi as long as the driver is in a mood to go in the same direction you want. They need to take a leaf out of Brian Walters book.
Joe2, Kennett: “He can however claim one triumph”
it almost pains me to say it but i have to add the Turning the Tide monies with the first adolescent drug and alcohol detox in the southern hemisphere, and one of the first in the world.
Give him that one, then, dylan. He was talking about marijuana use decriminalisation at one stage. I think it was just another brain fart probably with an eye to the trendy vote.
He was talking about marijuana use decriminalisation at one stage. I think it was just another brain fart probably with an eye to the trendy vote.
I don’t think that he would ever have got that past his own party,
Be interesting tho if the Greens get The Balance and Prop 19 gets over the line in California. I still think that it would be a very low priority.
Yaz , I’m told some models emit a low hum that can be upsetting if exposed to it over time.
Andrew E, thanks for your link.
On another subject, what did folk who watched “Insight”on SBS tonight, make of it?
Very, very, strange stuff, some of this.
Andrew E.
I don’t mean to be glib, but the sound of idling vehicles is very upsetting to me, but this isn’t going to get me a carfree city, or from having them banned near my house.
I wouldn’t want anyone to have to live with constant irritating noises but we seem to be content to live with many of them (freeway hum), electricity substation hum etc.etc.
Maybe some folks hate the roar of the surf, who knows?
It doesn’t seem a reason to base such a widespread policy on. Perhaps we could keep the windfarm and offer people a moving subsidy instead (perhaps waiving stamp-duty on another property)?
Fran, I tend to agree on the aesthetics of wind turbines. I think they are quite stunning as art (the arc of turbines in the sea off Denmark springs to mind). I have read many an argument here at LP about the usefulness of wind power, and am not quite ready to write them off just yet. I feel we just haven’t adjusted ourselves, and our energy usage to a life of intermittency yet. Are we baseload addicts?
I could vote for Ted Baillieu, since he’s just about the most small-l liberal you could find, seems like a perfectly decent bloke, and the party room isn’t overrun with ideologues as far as I can tell. The issue is there’s seriously little known about his shadow ministry, who they are and whether they’re any good at all.
Brumby hasn’t been too bad, he’s done one or two completely dumb things, basically spurred by listening to the developers and the merchant bankers and their allies who seem to infest Treasury. I mean, paying $5bn for a desalination plant (even though we do need one), $1.5bn for a dysfunctional ticketing system that offers worse service than currently.
That aside though, health is in good shape, police and crime are pretty well under control, education is doing really well, there are many under the radar social justice things happening (like I bet none of you have even heard of the Native Title Settlement Framework). Overall I’m going to hope for a minority Labor government reliant on Green support, but hope that the Greens grow up a bit and get real.
Re Insight @63. I don’t usually watch Insight although I always thought Jennie Brockie did a good job. Tonight she consistently cut off those with anything interesting to say and let the bores rave on.
In the end it was a waste of time and shed about as much light on the subject as a torch without batteries.
Plus very few of the participants actually answered the questions they were asked.
Yaz said:
21st Century society is one in which the provenance of the things that come to us is largely hidden. Ask someone how they will be affected if there is a power outage and people will think first perhaps of their lights, and the TV, and possibly the refigerator a second or two later. If they think a little longer they will think of the street lights, and the traffic controls, but it will take a while before most note that petrol can’t be pumped at petrol stations or that water supply would eventually fail or that the trains would stop or that people would get stuck in lifts or that businesses would have to start shutting down, hospitals cllsoe and so forth. Cutting of the electricity is the social equivalent of a person having something like a stroke. Normally these are quite minor, but if the system as a whole were unable to remain stable and we had fluctuating supply and current, we would start to see damage to major equipment and of course the appliances people rely on. Communication systems would be disrupted pretty severely.
There are places in the developing world where having the power on is a random event. In parts of Baghdad, having the power on for four hours per day is considered pretty good. People get by, but life is a lot tougher. People tend to compensate by building in their own redundancy, if they can afford it, using petrol powered gen sets. In many developing world cities one hears these gensets whirring away and spewing out fumes as they go.
So the question is not about whether we are ‘baseload addicts’. Heavily urbanised places are feasible places to live precisely because the services are pushed out at industrial scale which is possible only because the power supply is highly reliable. Anyone who doesn’t need even indirect access to such services can laugh at intermittency. In the middle ages, when humans used their own muscles, those of farm animals and the occasional windmill to irrigate or grind grain, not only did they not think of intermittency, there were no words meaning “power” or “energy” as we use them now. Of course, they lived shorter and less comfortable lives and used a lot more land per person than we do in living that existence. The world population was possibly 1/14th of what it is today and even the wealthy of those days lived in unspeakable squalour.
Had someone offered them a contemporary 7MW wind turbine and some means of manipulating its output for something useful, I daresay they’d have been thrilled to bits. 500 years later, it’s not nearly as practicable.
We absolutely positively must have power on demand which means that short of some extremely cheap storage and transmission options and a willingness to engage in very significant and costly overbuild without even then a firm guarantee of output, intermittents simply can’t do the job we want them to do — i.e replace the fully dispatchable fossil thermal units we have now.
“a willingness to engage in very significant and costly overbuild without even then a firm guarantee of output”
Fran, we’re way off topic now, but a few weeks ago while the wind power data thread was under way, I had a quick go at back of envelope calculating what it’d cost to ‘overbuild’ the network to ensure baseload-level power at all times – given the lowest daily outputs on record, no storage mechanism at all, and ignoring for the moment the issue of enough readily available space to locate the turbines.
I was wondering if you’ve ever attempted something similar, and what conclusions you reached? How many NBNs, for instance, would it equate to?
Nick asked:
According to BZE/ZCA, no friends of mine but earnest renewables advocates, about $370bn or about 9 NBNs. They have to make heroic assumptions to get it down that low.
In all likelihood, it would be several (perhaps 10) times that figure if you really wanted to be confident that unserved demand would never arise.
The more salient consideration would be the deemed price of a tonne of CO2 abatement on that scheme. Even with generous assumptions about the life of the equipment (say 50 years) and its utility and recurrent cost you get figures way above what we are talking about in explicit terms now.
But yes … this is off topic here.
Thanks, Fran. A few more questions to ask, but will save them for another day.
Yaz,
I’m glad you don’t mean to be glib, but it’s a pity you succeeded. The unremitting noise gets to people, apparently, and farmers complain animals are put off too. Now I’m no one to pay much heed to whingeing farmers, but it’s always best to keep your counsel when whingers have a point (plus, it’s wise never to argue with the sleep-deprived).
Fran@67, can I just thank you for a fascinating comment.
Andrew E, obviously, no one should be asked to put up with noise and visual nastiness from wind farms encroaching on their space. These are planning issues. Not something to kill the project.
Not to play thread police, but we do talk a lot about renewable energy round here, and not so much about specific state politics, so I’d probably prefer to hear what others say about the Victorian election if you don’t mind… there will be another renewable energy thread coming up momentarily, I’m sure.
Fair enough wilful.
This is an interesting development in the Vic election. Things have apparently moved on since this report with Tom McFeely mending fences with Liberals.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ipad-application/candidate-quits-over-image-row/story-fn6bfmgc-1225947415445
Meanwhile, the Unions who were casually sleeping with the Greens have gone back to the old abusive relationship.
wilful, indeed there will be…when I get a spare moment!
Ridiculous at work – and I imagine for all the other academically-employed LPers.
“Meanwhile, the Unions who were casually sleeping with the Greens have gone back to the old abusive relationship.”
I actually think this will help the Greens in the lower house seats where they have the best chance – i.e. inner Melbourne. Dunno about further out of town though…
It’s only fair that the Greens are subjected to the same scrutiny as everyone else. Do Greens out there honestly think that every ALP candidate is not subjected to the same kind of attacks? Greens are pretty good at throwing mud themselves.
I remember bemoaning the fact ages ago at LP that the internal politics of the Greens aren’t examined in the same detail as every other party. In reply, one Greens supporter of course denied the possibility that factions could ever form in the Greens (Greens being elevated above the rest of fallen humanity). But it turns out that internal power struggles are taking place in the Greens. Appartently there was a Green version of ultimate fighting over the deputies spot – though it happened months ago and it wasn’t reported at the time.
The Greens escaped – once again – being seen for what they are – a political party like every other.
…deputy’s spot, I should say.
so, after watching the leaders debate, all I can say is that I’m uninspired. But me missus made a good point – if Bailleau doesn’t get in, then he’ll probably be replaced by some right wing ‘tard, which will be a loss for Victoria.
It’s great that Brumby has pointed plainly that the Greens’ chances in inner-city lower house seats rest on Liberal preferences. Greens are causing Labor to divert money and resources from marginal seats to defend otherwise safe seats (in the process knocking off generally the most progressive members of the Labor caucus).
I’m a very tribal supporter of the ALP, but I think even non-sectarian progressives might find this a monumentally dumb strategy.
The Libs are the real beneficiaries of the Greens’ lower house madness.
…I should say hoping to knock off the most progressive members of the ALP caucus – there’s always the hope that inner-city Melburnians may use their education to actually think.
Ginja
Ok you’re on. Explain the reasoning other than in tribal terms.
Not sure what question you’re asking, Fran.
I think it’s dumb that the progressive side of politics wastes resources fighting amongst itself to win seats – especially when the Greens try to knock off Labor MPs that are invariably the most progressive in their party. Dumb – especially when the Greens holding the balance of power in lower houses is only something that is likely come along once in a blue moon. And Paradoxically, I suspect that if the Greens concentrated exclusively on the upper house they might win more upper house spots.
If you’re asking why I’m a tribal ALP supporter the answer is simple: I don’t think the Greens represent my class interests well. There’s a lot of statistical evidence around now showing the Green support is drawn strongly from the professional upper-middle class and many Green supporters are just plain loaded. That’s not me – and it inevitably has an effect on policy.
“There’s a lot of statistical evidence around now showing the Green support is drawn strongly from the professional upper-middle class and many Green supporters are just plain loaded. That’s not me – and it inevitably has an effect on policy.”
What effect?
What policy?
I think that’s shortsighted Ginja. Greens support resourcing public education and public health properly. I can’t think of any better way to help struggling people and decrease the leverage which people with money (and, unfortunately, people with less money and huge debt loads) get.
And (this is a genuine question, not snark) if the Greens don’t support your class interests, who do you go to? Labor? One Nation? DLP? None of the other parties seem to hve much of a useful agenda for workingclass people, except to foster anti-immigration sentiment by presenting the economy as a zero-sum game.
The other thing is, Ginja, just how influential have the progressive ALP members been on policy? My perception is that, for the last 35 years at least, they’ve had virtually no influence.
“Appartently there was a Green version of ultimate fighting over the deputies spot – though it happened months ago and it wasn’t reported at the time.”
What, two people nominated for one position and six people voted on who got the job? *That’s* what you think Australian Greens ‘ultimate fighting’ looks like? You should sit through a policy conference debate on education funding, or a breakout group trying to agree on a national membership form. That’s when we have ambulances standing by.
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This pisses me right off. Thank you ALP, the progressive party.