Please use this thread for any breaking news and general speculation that isn’t quite on topic for any other recent hung-parliament posts.
Update 2010-08-27: the latest Hung Parliament posts
- Tingle on Friday
- The Left, the independents and “new politics”
- Quick link: Antony Green on constitutional realities
- Time is not on their side
- Steve Fielding wants a new election too
- Brisbane may be the last seat in play: 73-72 looking more likely
- The new election no one wants – except the Murdoch press (and maybe Mr Rabbit)
If you think he’s pro-farmer and pro-land, Bob Katter has said the Murray Darling basin can go and f**k itself.
For a man who’s very sharp in some ways, in others he’s a bloody-minded buffoon, isn’t he?
Helen, Katter went on to question why we are farming in areas of limited water. He is not so much stupid as fiercely pushing his develop north Queensland agenda. Clearly history, extremes of flood and drought and bitey insects come into play.
Lets not forget that although the climate science is very clear that south east Australia is drying out there has not been enough research to predict what is happening to the climate in tropical Australia. It may become a less hospitable place for human habitation.
http://doesaustraliahaveagovernmentyet.com/
Hopefully, one of the lessons from all this for progressive voters – paticularly upper-middle-class progressives – is the kind of chaos that reigns when they go off in all sorts of different directions. A Green and a Green independent posing for their electorate on every issue just adds to the hedaches Julia Gillard has in forming – and maintaining – a government.
I wouldn’t hold my breath, though – Green voters seem so smitten by their own moral wonderfulness that they rarely see the big picture. I thought the Chaser had one of their few genuinely funny moments last night with their spoof of the Greens’ ad.
…headaches.
@6
Take a Bex and lie down then
Ginja wrote:
Was this the same Chaser I tried to watch that so so puerile and unfunny I changed the channel? It’s one thing to be juvenile but those guys are old enough that their sub-par University revue humour is an embarrassment.
Comrade Ginja states with admirable clarity the utmost importance of proletarian discipline and unity, and clearly recognises the harm done to the workers’ cause by the petit-bourgeois Greens and their failure to appreciate the one true dialectical materialist truth that there can and must only be one party of progressive politics in any country at any time.
A bit off topic, but the only funny bit on the Chaser was the view from Central Australia – possibly because it didn’t include any of the actual Chaser boys.
Ginja, a growing proportion of the Australian population want a different direction to the current dig it up, chop it down, build more roads, kickback to your mates, kick the powerless / foreigners ethic espoused by both major parties. The major parties’ supporters can wish it away but that is the reality.
As Deborah pointed out, other countries like Germany and NZ have had governments of mixed ideologies and the sky hasn’t fallen in. You’re welcome to spin that as airy-fairy idealism if you want to be on song with Miranda Devine.
Exactly what a couple of UMCPs thought Kim@10. The Chaser ‘boys’ have really reached their use by date, although ther song that only featured one of them was pretty amusing.
Thanks Vlad, it always welcome to be reminded of what is really important in uncertain times such as this. It’s also great when the interests of the proletariate and capital coincide.
Who woulda thought? Murdoch – the workers friend.
Ginja, focusing on the small picture (whwether some self-doubting rightwing rabble does or does not outmanoeuvre an equally egregious band of policy buffoons, asserted as follows:
Of course, when the big picture is ugly and you only have the resources to start emending it, pixel by pixel, focusing on those individual pixels and their orientation is pretty damned important — that, and getting a good refresh rate, better resolution and the ability to see the image with high clarity from anumber of angles.
{/tortured metaphor}
9: I’d have more respect for the Greens if they were petit-bourgeois. Your grasp of Marxist theory leaves much to be desired. Off to the Gulag for you.
Helen: those of us who support the Left of the ALP deeply share all those concerns, but the mistake many Greens make is to assume that a two-party political system can’t accommodate these concerns.
@ 14, the two party system has failed to accomodate those concerns for at least 40 years so I can’t see any mistake there.
Now is a good time to remind the Tories of what their favourite conservative, Edmund Burke, said about the parliamentarian’s duty to his electors:
Somehow I don’t think they will be mentioning it much.
You’re understandably feeling a bit raw Ginja but I am so smitten by my own moral wonderfulness, not to mention a smug elation that your bleating merely brings an indulgent smile to my face.:)
Next Ginja will accuse the Greens of competing for progressive votes against the ALP.
The ALP hasn’t been joining in that competition for some time now.
The Greens have spurted forth from the Toothpaste Tube of History, the Humpty Dumpty of progressive unity has had a Great Fall from the Great Wall of History, and I don’t fancy the Antipodean Mensheviks’ chances of getting the tothpaste back in the tube or of putting Humpty back together again.
Mr. Rabbit’s Tea Party
Mr. Murdoch has encouraged me
To reconstruct a once great party.
I know the one he means, where Alice
With clear instructions from the palace
Helped me put Dormouse in that tea pot.
I could replace him with Rob Oakshott.
Then there’s that relation of our Queen,
Tony Windsor, though he could be Green.
Still, that not’s true of old Bob Katter,
Made for the role of Oz Mad Hatter.
Will they all join? Are we their first choice?
Why don’t they love our Barnaby Joyce?
Meanwhile Rupert’s so keen to kill ‘Time’
He won’t give a dollar, not one dime,
If my tea party turns out a failure
And that bolshie Red Queen gets to rule in Australia.
PS from Mr. Rabbit to the ‘pome’ @ 20.
Don’t try to say that was the March Hare.
You’ve seen the pictures. That was me there!
Salient Green: I disagree. To take just one example: logging in old-growth forests has, for all practical purposes, come to an end in this country (as has large-scale land-clearing). This happened under Labor state governments. Beginning with the Wran Government in NSW, Labor governments have come to the conclusion that conservation is more important than forestry jobs and the forestry union.
I could point to many, many other examples.
Mr Katter, how could you like a control freak, no friends nerd so much:
Where’s that quote from Adrian? Quite telling isnt it….
It’s from the Daily Terrorgraph web site, Lefty E.
Yes, very interesting.
Random prediction: ABC to benefit from hung parliament. Until the next election.
Well, that solves the problem of which senior portfolio to give Kev. He can be the Minister for Looking After Bob Katter.
You know the Liberals are in trouble when they have to drag Andrew Robb on ABC news 24 to defend their costings refusal. He added nothing substantive, just repeating the dot points, and avoiding the point of questions. Seems they’ve just switched the ‘illegitimate’ mantra for the ‘not gunna’ mantra.
Lefty E and adrian, your bromance with Rudd is so full on, you’re sounding like characters out of a Judd Apatow movie.
There are pics of Abbott & Bishop meeting the 3 amigos, but where is the National Party? Are they meeting seperately? Or is the Coalition just Liberals now?
Last night got to see a replay of Nat Press Club with the independents, wasn’t it great to hear unequivocated comments without the dross of a party line.
The mention of conscious votes made me wonder what would happen if there were a free and open debate in the House about our involvement in Afghanistan. Be an interesting debate, and vote.
I had a boss once who was a total psychopath – nice as pie in front of people, total screaming psycho behind closed doors. She was universally liked by people who *didn’t* work for her, and loathed by those of us who did.
That’s generally how workplace psychopaths operate. Of course adrian et al are so enamoured of Kevin that apparently this escapes them, and if Kevin was nice to one bloke, that means he must have been nice to everyone, hey.
I notice that Tony Windsor at the National Press club slipped in the word paradigm, much loved and used by the guy with the big cowboy hat. It means an example or pattern (Concise OD)
Katter talks of the hung election as representing a ‘paradigm shift’. Is it?
Ginga,
I invite you to come to Tasmania where, on any day of the week, you can see old growth forests coming down so fast it will make your head spin. All signed off by a Labor government and cheered by a union.
Legislation slowing, not halting, the destruction of the last of our old growth forests may well have been introduced by Labor governments, but it wasn’t done willingly. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming every time.
Face it, your lot had a go, they failed, and now it’s time for you get out of the way.
What I find quite telling in adrian’s quote is that Bob Katter was apparently unaware of how many portfolios Julia Gillard held under the Rudd Government. It was three, not one.
ewe2 @28, not only was/is Robb dot pointing and dodging, he is also sounding very down.
Ginja @22: not only has logging in old growth forests not come to an en under labor in NSW but there are two actions proceeding at the moment against Forests NSW – one on the North Coast for illegal logging practices including logging too close to watercourses and logging in the habitat of endangered species and another on the Sth Coast that i attempting to prevent the Forests NSW sanctioned logging of what appears to be the last viable colony of koalas on the Sth Coast.
Not only is logging proceeding apace but in NSW at least it is a hotbed of rorts, nepotism, state sanctioned criminal activites and violence against anyone, local residents included, who gets in the way.
So whats the view of the other independents? If Kevin being PM is a condition of their support would the Labor party be willing to dump Gillard?
You better be careful Chris, if you bring such an issue up you could be accused of having a romance with Mr Rudd, or not realising that he was a ‘workplace psycopath’ or something.
Incidentally, Rebekka, I’ve known a few workplace psycopaths in my time and I think your characterisation is a bit simplistic. None of them managed to hide it from those not directly in their workplace, but really this is a pointless argument. My bromance with Kevin makes it impossible for me to see the reality of his bastardry.
Yes tigtog @ 34, that was one of the reasons I found it interesting.
OMG the breathless and uncritical approach of the PM reporter on the “results” of an online newspaper poll in Mt Isa and the sentiment of phone calls to Windsor’s and Oakeshott’s electorate offices.
What do they teach in journalism courses?
If body language counts for anything in telling us how negotiations might progress I thought the images of a smiling Julia putting three amigos at ease in comfy chairs around a coffee table in her office augured well. Plenty of laid back laughter even as she handed out those business like policy packs for them to read. Tony on the other hand was facing the trio looking very earnest (menacing?) as he addressed them across a table behind which they all sat close together in straight backed chairs. His opening comment about how much he loved the bush whenever he went there surely raised in their minds the question “Oh yeah, and how often is that?”
Having napped a little, am back, to read about the labor party and forestry and the proposition that labor is thus proven as actually more rather than less, informed and progressive than the Greens. We learn also and that other progressives more closely aligned, on a basis of accurate critiquing, should back off in favour of labor.
Whatever it once was, it not a progressive party, it’s the less obnoxious face of neoliberalism, to the outright authoritarianism proffered by Murdoch, Abbott and so forth; now operating against a genuinely progressive agenda, as a defacto liberal party.
The comments attempting to position labor as the friend of science and reason as to ecology induces the angriest laugh to scorn.
It turned against science back in 1994-5 when Beddall and co rejected Faulkner’s forest coupes proposals, hopped into bed with the libs on regional forestry agreements and did their level best to shut down an inquiry into the rotten Gunns Tamar pulp mill.
The anti old growth, pro woodchipping/pulping clique with labor is actually centred about Brumby, hence Gillard, who have strong ties with the brownshirt element of the CFMEU, who act as bovver boys for the timber industry whilst being bought off by politicians like Howard in 2004-5, after their sabotaging of the Latham push. Tasmania is merely a satrapy or colony of this influence.
Good to se that the Coalition has got the brains trust together overnight and decided that the excuse for not sending in the costings was the Treasury leak.
But who was the bright spark who sent Tony to the press conference without checking what he was going to say?
Or maybe the Liberal staffer who was meant to be standing down the back with the cue cards got lost and Tony had to wing it.
I actually liked Ambigulous’ take on it, in another thread, re “dog ate my homework”.
Patricia @40, a friend noted that Tony was also drumming the table in a ‘not really paying attention to you’ kind of way; the difference couldn’t be greater.
Fiona @39 Yes, his body language was incredibly stiff and avoiding, in direct contrast to Ali’s attempts to make it a dialogue. Their media minders must be yelling ‘nooooo!’ at the screen by now.
But taken in conjunction with a furious MSN, it does appear that the intention is to sabotage any rapprochement and petulantly stamp their foot until they have their way. We can only hope they also go blue in the face and turn screaming circles on the floor as we walk away laughing.
Patricia WA, I actually felt a little sorry for Abbott when he said that about enjoying the country whenever he was there, it’s the sort of meaningless thing you say to break the ice but it sounded so very insincere. But last night he was the rabbit in the headlights, now he’s back to being the rabbit of caerbannog, I’m back to schadenfreude.
Michael@42 – No, the cue cards were away being touched up to include another tag line – “We will stop the costings”.
Andrew Robb in his interview on SkyNews Agenda this afternoon was seemingly adding this point, among another jumbled reiteration of campaign slogans. Doesn’t he know the election is over and he needs to change his message/massage a little?
In a welcome change Sky reporter, Ashleigh Gillon, pressed him over the refusal to provide costings to a Treasury who, to paraphrase Robb, might fiddle the costings to favour the Labor Party.
He was very thirsty today – I think he had about four swigs of water during the interview. For a little bit of evening entertainment SkyNews Agenda is usually repeated around 8.00 or 8.15.
akn: I knew someone would nitpick. Yes, some logging in old-growth forests is still taking place. My point is it’s tiny compared to 30 or 40 years ago and diminishing all the time.
I have many friends who are Greens and once every year or so I get a breathless email warning me about how the horrible NSW government is about to open up the National Parks in this state to commercial activity. Well, 8 or 9 warnings later there’s still no McDonalds in my local National Park.
Conspiracy theories and dark plots involving the ALP abound among the Greens.
Thanks paul walter
may the Dog never eat yours!
cheers
Chad C Mulligan: the experience in NSW (and most other mainland states) is different. Even parts of the union movement understood that old-growth forestry was on the way out and accepted that fact with equanimity. The culture at Gunns seems to be changing rapidly and Tasmania will likely fall into line with the rest of the country.
I suspect the ALP will still be around when the Greens – like the DLP and Democrats – are a mere footnote.
AKN: Vic government is busily trying to log old-growth which it promised to save in 2006. An environmental lobby group has gone to court and won a stay of a few months. One of the many reasons why I’m not voting for the Victorian ALP in November.
‘One of the many reasons why I’m not voting for the Victorian ALP in November.’
You and thousands of others Helen.
Brumby’s a very good chance of being our next minority Premier.
One of the striking things about this election result is the way that its given us the chance to question all kinds of underlying assumptions about how our politics works, how we define it and what we want from it. I’ve come to realise over the last few days that I’ve grown up with a number of assumptions ticking away in the back of my mind that are not necessarily based on the system as defined in the constitution but rather the system as it is practiced by the major parties. The major assumption for me, and this seems to hold generally in our society, it that you elect a party who will then make laws and govern according to what was presented at the election. Elections (seen this way) are like shopping exercises, do I want the best broadband system or the less expensive one? Do I want Work Choices or something else? This is how the media present it and where that ill-defined concept of a mandate comes from. Its corporate culture, McDonalds politics. You pay for your item (by voting) and you expect that you will have a good chance of getting it (except that when you don’t you revert to the “all politicians are liars” position).
Oakshott’s suggestions for a consensus government however go against this model in a fundamental way. If we vote for a politician who may or may not be part of a government and if this government must accommodate a range of views on policy, what are we voting for? It doesn’t compute if you think that voting is like buying a house or a car. What Oakshott is saying I think, is that we elect People and we then trust those People to contribute their talents and ideas to the political process. Windsor said something similar to this in response to the question about what he thought of the polls showing (if you interpret them one way), that the majority of his electorate want him to back a Coalition government. Something along the lines of “the people didn’t elect a Labor or Liberal candidate they elected me, an Independent”. As I write this I’m worried that you’ll think I’m just learning basic politics here but if this is so then I suspect many people need to do it as well. Whatever the case, I hope that we are able to think about politics more as a process of exchange between people that results in decisions being made rather than selecting from an assortment of policy dispensing machines.
I can say no more than, that’s highly unlikely, Ambi.
zzzzzzz…
Richard Ackland has a nice history lesson that puts hung parliaments in historical perspective: Cut the big parties down to size and reform can blossom
Ginja #49:
Exactly right, just as the recapture of the mainland is only a matter of time.
Antony Green: Hung Parliament – Where to From Here?
Tim Dunlop: Quick thoughts on the interregnum
tig tog
thanks for the links Anthony Green’s summary is particularly helpful.
The Green piece is a very useful summary; the shame is that so many people need to have it explained. Maybe the new government should spend less money on school chaplains and more on basic civics classes.
“I suspect the ALP will still be around when the Greens – like the DLP and Democrats – are a mere footnote.”
I seem to recall the Protectionists saying that about the upstart and so-called ‘labor parties’.
PM Gillard announces that Mr Abbott has (probably) changed his mind about Treasury scrutiny of his costings.
Just updated the body of the post with this list of the latest Hung Parliament posts, so that people can find the most recent topical posts:
• Tingle on Friday
• The Left, the independents and “new politics”
• Quick link: Antony Green on constitutional realities
• Time is not on their side
• Steve Fielding wants a new election too
• Brisbane may be the last seat in play: 73-72 looking more likely
• The new election no one wants – except the Murdoch press (and maybe Mr Rabbit)
By happy coincidence, earlier this year the NSW Parliamentary Library published a research paper examining hung parliaments in Australia from 1989-2009. You can read it here.
The paper looks at different models/arrangements that have ensued, and profiles each one, including the “reform agenda” extracted from the major parties in each case.
It appears we’ve had 10 in the last 20 years. Only one (Qld 1998) seems not to have lasted the distance, judging from the dates each ran for.
The Queensland one didn’t last the distance because a Labor candidate won a by-election, giving the ALP a majority in its own right.
This should not have happened in an Australian elecrion.
http://www.news.com.au/features/federal-election/labor-makes-claims-of-vote-tampering-in-boothby/story-fn5a6dkp-1225910966295
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia has received a complaint re the constant promotion by Hockey et al of their costings report as an AUDIT when it clearly is not. They are launching an investigation.
Having looked at the covering letter from the firm concerned I would have to say it doesn’t even measure up to the disclaimers I put on tax return financials every day of the damn week.
There could be trouble.