I love the way you can determine the agenda of so many “think-tanks” by just inverting their name.
Centre for Independent Studies = Centre for Partisan Preaching
Institute of Public Affairs = Institute of Privatisation and Austerity
Jesus I hate the term “think tank”. Thinking is the one thing these mobs don’t want people doing…
I prefer ‘propaganda swamp’
That’s certainly a more accurate name for them
That’s exactly why they take it upon themselves to do the thinking for us, so that we don’t have to!
Never mind their general lack of qualifications or any relevant lived experience, they’re rich and otherwise privileged, so they must know best!(/s to be clear)
Yea, I do wonder how much this referendum and its significance is going to be the opportunity and demand it provides to examine our (ie white non-indegenous) politics. The effect it has on indigenous people and issues is obviously significant and central, but I keep getting the feeling that this referendum’s result and the way the campaigns were run was not really about the indigenous issues but the way Australian (and maybe western) politics processes issues at the moment.
Not to say that there isn’t racism in the result, not at all. But if one wanted to get the YES vote over the line and make progress for indigenous people, they had to understand and have a strategy for Australia as it is now. Wealthy and manipulative actors operating in the shadows. City v Rural divide. “Elites” v “everyday battlers”. Wealthy v not-so-wealthy latte line. “Don’t fix it if ain’t broke” conservatism. Traditional (labor v liberal) voting patterns. An inability to get down into and honest about real issues. Racist dog whistling deployed with any of the prior.
This seems to me the Australian landscape and I’m not sure any movement or political actor is able to navigate it in pursuit of any kind of progress. Labor in particular, as a federal political force, IMO, has been struggling with this landscape since, at least, Keating. For me the main result of the referendum was the that results of the electorates lined up very well with those of the 1999 republic referendum.1 Moreover, the 1999 results were a better predictor than any other typical metric (eg education) it seems. This indicates to me that Australia, perhaps like much of the west, is locked in some baked in class opposition without the substance of issues meaning too much. Kind of like an NPC political system.
All the people who brought pens with them to vote because they thought AEC workers were going to change their vote are absolutely something we need to be concerned about moving forward.
I … did not know this was a thing. I heard someone in the line mention they had brought their own and thought it quirky. JFC, what a cheap and meaningless way to feel like you’re in control of your world.
Oh it’s a thing. My mum worked for AEC on the day and said lots of people in her area brought pens with them. I handed out HTV cards on the day and saw a few people come up to the no campaign people to ask them if their votes were legal because they did it in pencil.
Right-wing reactionaries followed the right-wing reactionary playbook word for word.
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Find a few people happy to sell out their gender/race/sexuality/class/children and build them a pedestal. Don’t worry, you can kick it out from under them when they’re no longer useful.
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Pump money into sleazy businesses who don’t have offices at their listed address and use them to seed information into social media. Once it takes root, signal boost it.
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Muddy the waters. Redefine words, rewrite history, whatever you can do to leave people confused and burned out. Murdoch will help in return for a warm mouth.
Every election for the rest of time will follow this pattern. Even after climate change has killed us all, artificial intelligence will spin itself up every 4 years to post comments on Reddit saying “I’m just not sure we can trust the Green’s fiscal policy”.
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This indicates to me that Australia, perhaps like much of the west, is locked in some baked in class opposition without the substance of issues meaning too much. Kind of like an NPC political system.
I agree on this. Some of the language is centuries old and doesn’t really fit with the divisions we have now, and some of the new ones we have are largely manufactured for political purposes E.g. “inner city elites” and the wide variety of insults that go with that, along with “Howard’s battlers/working families” as a way to make relatively well-off people feel like victims.
“Howard’s battlers/working families” as a way to make relatively well-off people feel like victims.
Yea, my general take on Aus politics since the 90s is that Liberals have done their own version of the Republican Southern strategy thing with the battlers, knowing that they can drag the wealthy business focused conservatives along with them. Meanwhile, Labor struggles to think of itself as anything other than a party the straddles the progressive / “battler” latte-line, and so, as that gap has widened, grown taller and more instilled, the party hasn’t been able to form a base at the federal level and has been losing primary votes since the 80s. They’ve not been able to drag either branch along with them the same way the liberals have.
The teals have disrupted this pattern though, perhaps (finally) creating a 2x2 political compass in Aus and it remains the biggest X factor for general federal politics out of this referendum … is this a strategic win or loss for the liberals given how much “elites” voted yes and Dutton maybe looks the most “Dutton” he has this term.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…
Derton is not a smart man.
But that doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous.
Gee I wonder why influential business figures wouldn’t want this change to the constitution?
