One final Australian politics link for now

[dolorosa_12]

You may recall that in my previous post about Saturday's Australian federal election, I said that after the 2022 election, our right wing parties, upon losing, refused to accept that they had done anything wrong, and responded essentially with 'are we out of touch? No, it's the voters who are wrong.'

They now appear to be doubling and tripling down on this after losing the following election.

The Guardian decided to engage in a bit of pointing and laughing at the spectacle of a bunch of ghastly Sky News talking heads blaming the voters for failing to embrace their toxic offerings. Andrew Bolt literally came right out and said it:

By 9.46pm the rightwing commentator had penned a piece on the Herald Sun blaming the Australian electorate for the Coalition loss.

“No, the voters aren’t always right. This time they were wrong,” Bolt wrote.

The reason for the loss? It was because the Liberal party “refused to fight the ‘culture wars’”.

And I'll just bask in the schadenfreude of the article's closing lines:

Former Labor minister Graham Richardson, who hasn’t lost his talent for the one-liner, said the Liberals have got to ask themselves where do we go now?

“We’ve tried Dutton - what else have we got? Well not much because if Angus Taylor is the answer, it’s a stupid question.”

The comments section is full of people boggling at the inability of Sky's brains trust to read the room.

Comments

[lyr]

I do have one question: what's up with naming the conservative party Liberals? That has always confused me.

[lokifan]

I might be wrong (not Australian) but I assume they were originally classical liberals, aka socially liberal (do what you want) and fiscally liberal (capitalist, with generally low taxes and low levels of government regulation).

[dolorosa_12]

lokifan has it right in the previous comment. The name originates in their economic liberalism — an emphasis on low taxes, free trade, and minimal government intervention in economic issues. (This is generally the ideology behind the names of most 'liberal' parties in Europe as well.) Obviously economic liberalism doesn't have to go together with social conservatism, but in practice this is how it's worked in Australia when it comes to our largest centre-right party.

This is in contrast to our other major party, the centre-left Labor Party, which started out with a social democratic approach when it came to economics (higher taxes, more state support for social services such as health and education), and ultimately found that this went together more naturally with a more progressive approach to social issues. (Although many progressive Australians would quibble with my characterisation of Labor and say that they've drifted too far to the centre.)

[corvidology]

...They're obviously studying the Cheeto bobblehead's modus operandi.

[dolorosa_12]

Well, yes, but I kind of don't want to correct them when their delusions have led to such catastrophic consequences for the kind of politics they want to see!

[laurenthemself]

Andrew Bolt is exhausting.

[dolorosa_12]

He is indeed, but right now he's also doubling down on being delusionally, catastrophically, hilariously wrong, so long may this continue.

(I feel as if I might have met him once, more than twenty years ago, due to who my dad is — he was one of Australia's most senior political journalists for close to thirty years, and as a child and teenager I was frequently at things like barbecues and dinner parties where most of the adult attendees were political journalists from a variety of different newspapers and TV stations — at a point when he seemed right wing, but still normal, and not completely poisoned by extremist culture war views. But then again, my memory could be faulty.)

[trepkos]

Bloody media!

[dolorosa_12]

I'm quite happy to let them all stew in their own toxic swamp of delusion, since it's led their preferred form of politics into the abyss in Australia — long may this continue, and may it take years for them to regain legitimacy!

[lokifan]

ahahaha!

[dolorosa_12]

I reread the article over and over again because it was so satisfying to my sense of schadenfreude.