Beyond Selidor

This is quite possibly the longest I've gone after the result of an election in one of my countries is known before writing up a post in response. This time, it was for good reasons: I was away visiting friends over the weekend (about which more in a later post), and, after a fretfully sleepless night of anxiety about the result, I woke up on Saturday morning UK time to find that my fellow Australian citizens had done me proud.

This is the first election since I turned eighteen in which I was not eligible to vote; I lost the right due to living overseas for too long, so I contributed literally nothing to the outcome.

Non-Australians wanting further context about our electoral system can read my post from the last election in 2022, which goes into more detail about all these things, but the crucial and decisive factors to my mind are: a) mandatory voting and b) preferential (ranked choice) voting, which lead to more moderate politics, and make it impossible for a party to win by appealling to a narrow base and assuming low turnout will do the rest for them. (I can only remember a single election in my lifetime that was won on what I'd term culture war issues.) I'm happy to answer further questions about Australian democracy, political parties, etc in the comments if you're interested.

In 2022, we voted in a Labor government on a razor thin majority after a decade of centre-right conservative government. I commented at the time that our centre-right parties (they always campaign and govern as a two-party coalition, and do not field candidates in 'each other's' electorates) had a choice: do some soul-searching, work out what went wrong, and try to course-correct in three years' time, or the opposite, which I termed as follows:

'Are we out of touch? No, it's the voters who are wrong'

I'm pleased to report that they did the latter, and, after a few tense months where it appeared this might have paid off, it became apparant that Australians do not currently want culture warring right-wing populism, and responded by reelecting Labor in an absolutely massive landslide. Peter Dutton, the creepy, far-right culture-warring opposition leader made history, but not in the way he wanted: he became the first opposition leader in Australia to lose his seat in an election. (The schadenfreude on Australian politics social media was absolutely off the charts.)

The two of my sisters who are adults are what we'd term in Australia 'true believers': die-hard Labor supporters, party members who spent this election as volunteers for their local Labor candidates' campaigns. Sister #1 was even briefly asked to stand as the candidate, but ultimately ruled it out, instead throwing her efforts behind the woman who did stand, in an unwinnable electorate where it was important to have someone from Labor on the ballot to make it harder for the conservative candidate to win against the 'teal' independent who was standing. Sister #2 appears to have run the social media accounts for her own Labor MP who was facing a very tough uphill battle for reelection which was ultimately successful. Both sisters are, as you can imagine, absolutely ecstatic.

The very first piece of legislation the reelected Labor government is going to pass will reduce student debts by 20 per cent.

I can't claim to have contributed anything to this result, but I've been floating on air for the past four days as a consequence.

I'll close this post with a few commentary pieces whose analysis teases out some of the issues that were in play this election.

Annabel Crabb on Dutton's toxicity with female voters

Crabb again, on the failure of culture wars to affect the result

The Murdoch press no longer has the power to sway voters

Edited to add two articles about the lengths to which the Australian electoral commission will go to ensure all voters have their ballots, and have no difficulties voting: one and two.

And, finally, one link and another, which provide context for the title of this post, and my 2022 election post as well.

A massive round of applause for all Australian voters.

The 'Voice' referendum, which is happening in Australia in just over a month, is a yes-no vote to change the Australian constitution in order to mandate an Indigenous 'Voice to Parliament,' meaning a consultative body whose views would need to be sought (although not necessarily taken into account) in any circumstances where an Australian government wanted to legislate on any issue likely to affect Indigenous people. There have been attempts at this kind of thing before, but they were subject to political interference, and generally ended up abolished every time there was a change of government; changing the constitution in this way would mean that the Voice would remain even if the government changed, unless a fresh referendum were called and voted to abolish it.

As you might suspect, the debate about this has been dreadful. There is a small segment of the Indigenous community (plus non-Indigenous allies) criticising the Voice for not going far enough — they want a treaty rather than a consultative body. But the majority of opposition is coming from the (far) right, including the usual handful of right-wing grifters who never shy away from an opportunity to stoke a culture war and spread disinformation. There's a lot of fear-mongering ('the Voice would mean Indigenous people could veto any laws passed by any Australian government!') and a lot of racism ('the Voice means some Australians would have more rights than others, why should Indigenous people get something the rest of the country doesn't get?'), and a general inability to see that having this kind of consultative body is no different from e.g. consulting with economists when governments make laws that might affect the economy, or consulting with senior military people if making laws that might affect defence; people are generally bad at understanding that people or communities can be experts in their own lives and experiences, and consulting them as such means better outcomes. Most insultingly, in my opinion, is the approach that the No campaign has taken: to insinuate that understanding what the Voice would do is so difficult and complicated that ordinary voters shouldn't make any effort to do so, and 'if you don't know, vote No.' (I don't think it's that complicated; I explained it in a single sentence in the first paragraph.)

I didn't have any serious doubts that Australia's postal survey on marriage equality would result in legalising same-sex marriage (and indeed the country voted overwhelmingly in favour), in part because the Yes campaign there was able to tell a simple, emotional, and uplifting human story: some Australians lacked rights that other Australians already had, that was unfair, vote to change that and you'll make everyone happy, and there'll be lots of weddings, and everyone loves a wedding, don't they? (Obviously that's massively simplifying things, but that was the general tone, and it was exactly what was needed in a referendum where you're asking the majority to vote for rights to be granted to a minority.)

I feel much more uncertain about the Voice referendum, in part because of the kind of defensive racism that a lot of even progressively-minded Australians tend to profess when prompted to think about injustices and inequalities experienced by Indigenous people ('My ancestors were convicts/only came in the 1950s, they were just as disadvantaged themselves, why are they always wanting us to feel guilty about things that happened in the past, and in any case things in Australia aren't as bad as they are in America' tends to be the standard response), but in part because the Yes campaign has struggled (as far as I can tell from overseas) to land on a single compelling, simple, positive human story to link to the Yes position. It's a pity this is necessary, but unfortunately in referendums in which the majority (and the non-Indigenous population really is the overwhelming majority in Australia) is being asked to grant rights to a minority, said majority needs to be given a reason to feel warm and fuzzy and virtuous for doing so.

That changed with the Yes campaign's main ad, which I've embedded below.



It's hard to explain how brilliant this is if you're not Australian, but it's just the most incredible piece of visual communication (and the choice of music is spot-on — it's the kind of daggy nostalgic song that makes one feel incredibly, incredibly Australian; kudos to John Farnham for consenting to the Yes campaign for its use). It says three things, without any words:

Look at all these pivotal moments in recent Australian history! Don't they make you feel emotional?

Look at how these pivotal moments in recent Indigenous history are interwoven with moments from broader Australian history. You can see from this that Indigenous history and broader Australian history are inextricably linked.

Don't you want to do your part to write the next pages of that interwoven history, and make it the best it can be for everyone? Don't you want to feel as vicariously proud as you did when Cathy Freeman won the 400m final at the Olympics, when the Howard government did its one good thing and drastically reduced Australians' access to firearms, when Kevin Rudd said sorry on our behalf to the Stolen Generations? Vote Yes, and you will do your part, and feel those selfsame feelings, swelling, nostalgic, daggy Farnham soundtrack and all.

In other words, it does exactly what it needs to do: it tries to make the non-Indigenous majority of voters feel good and uplifted about voting Yes. I can see it manipulating me (I simultaneously feel teary, motivated, and patriotic whenever I watch it) and honestly I don't even care.

I worry that I live in too much of a bubble to really evaluate its effect accurately (I have at least three immediate family members working in an official volunteer capacity for the Yes campaign, so I'm kind of primed to feel the things they want me to feel with this ad), but it's certainly the correct approach, and I can only hope that it will be enough.

(Standard disclaimer when I write about Australian politics: I've lived overseas for a long time now, and it's hard for me to get a sense of the mood on the ground, beyond my own social circle and what I see more broadly on social media.)

I was going to wait until the dust had settled slightly — at least until we knew the full shape of the results, but counting continues. As of this evening (26th May), we still don't know if we're going to have a Labor government with a slim majority, or a minority Labor-led government with some form of coalition or confidence-and-supply agreement with independents and minor parties. The former is more likely, but any result is honestly fine by me.

( Long, long post-election musings )

I think I have a new fandom, and that fandom is the Australian Electoral Commission, or, more specifically, its Twitter account.

I loathe a lot of Australian politicians, my contempt for the country's current government knows no bounds, and I deplore the generally mercenary attitudes of Australian voters (elections tend to be lost due to fear of supposed tax increases, and won by the party which suburban voters believe will save them money in some way), but wow do I love our electoral system.

A rigorously, zealously independent electoral commission at local, state and federal level, preferential voting (if you're not going to do proportional representation, this is a good alternative), and above all, compulsory voting which means that not only is voting easy, quick, and straightforward, the AEC goes out of its way to get ballots to Australians in the most remote and inaccessible of locations: basically if your 'democracy' doesn't have these things, it feels like a very watered-down example of democracy to me. (This should not be interpreted as me smugly placing blame for said watered-down democracies at the feet of their citizens and voters, obviously.)

My love for all these things is directly proportional to how much the right-wingers in Australia detest them, and how obvious it is that they are unable to get rid of them precisely because these things exist and hinder them in doing so. (That said, we should never get too complacent; the fact that the right-wing government keeps making noises about getting rid of compulsory voting should be a massive wake up call to everyone. As an Australian immigrant in the UK, my current home country is an object lesson in the terrible consequences of voter complacency.)

Well, 2021 certainly was a year.

( Questions and answers behind the cut )

I ... kind of disappeared again. I spent the previous two weeks in the kind of miserable fog that I always fall into when I make the mistake of reading news websites or going on Twitter. I always think I can handle it in small doses, and I'm always wrong, and fall into terrible patterns that end up basically being like deliberate self-harm.

In any case, I am now at the point where I recognise these patterns, and eventually drag myself out of them using the usual tricks:

Making daily to-do lists and crossing them off

Walking outside every day, even on days working from home

Yoga every day

Cleaning every day

Regular exercise

Avoiding Twitter and news websites like the plague, and instead reading soft and comforting books

The vaguely irritating thing is that all this stuff actually works. Who would have thought that moving one's body, cleaning one's living space, and nourishing one's mind would lead to better mental health than spending the whole day scrolling Twitter and feeling furiously enraged about Brexit and Sarah Everard? (Sarcasm, obviously.)

Two other things that have done a huge amount in improving my mood are my resumption of regular swimming, and my visit to a physiotherapist to finally deal with the intense pain that I've been feeling since January whenever any pressure is put on my wrists and ankles. I have a high tolerance for pain and a rather stupid relationship with aches and pains in my body due to my history as a gymnast — my assumption is always to ignore the pain and assume it will eventually go away or I'll stop noticing it. Obviously, this is a bad attitude, and in this case was profoundly unhelpful.

The physio's diagnosis was pretty much Peak Ronni. There is, apparently, nothing actually wrong with my wrists and ankles. Rather, I am so utterly incapable of relaxing any muscle in my body that the tension in my arms and legs has caused this knock-on effect on my wrists and ankles. (This led to an amusing moment where the physio was trying to move my wrists to check they weren't injured, and kept telling me to relax my arms ... no, really relax he said, but I was incapable.) I'd kind of always known I did this, but it was good to have it confirmed by a medical professional.

And that's basically been my week. I'm sorry not to have responded to comments, or commented on people's posts, but I just haven't felt up to it.

In other news, the new premier of New South Wales is a) someone I went to university with (he was a perpetually failing student politician who — if memory serves — kept trying to get elected as the leader of the student union) and b) a raging homophobe and conservative Catholic. (It feels to me that we've sleep-walked into a situation where Australia's politicians are disproportionately conservative, fundamentalist Christians of various denominations, despite the fact that the country is extremely irreligious; the prime minister is a Pentecostal Christian who belongs to a church that believes in the prosperity gospel, and many of his cabinet are evangelicals as well.) So, we finally get someone of my generation into a position of political leadership ... and we end up with this guy? (I told my mother he went to uni with me, and she was like, how can he be your age? He has six children? Well, he's older than me, but younger than Matthias. The six kids are, of course, the consequence of conservative Catholicism.)

This feels like a negative note on which to end this post, so I'll leave you instead with a photo of the cathedral hidden in the mist.

Yesterday I tried and failed to write a post about how angry and heartbroken I was about the Australian federal government's handling of the pandemic. Today I woke up and found someone else had done it for me.

On a slight tangent, for at least six months, I've been saying that Australians have been getting disproportionately outraged about breaches in hotel quarantine, compared to how upset they should have been at the botched vaccine rollout. (Australian friends here on Dreamwidth, as always, if you don't recognise yourself/your attitudes, assume that I am not complaining about you.) I literally had an argument about this with my mother yesterday. I have also long maintained that the botched rollout has led to unacceptably high levels of vaccine refusal and complacency. Every time I've said this, various Australian friends and family members have shouted me down and said that of course everyone wants to be vaccinated, they just can't get the appointments. Now the Australian Bureau of Statistics has released findings that one in four unvaccinated Australians aged over 70 say they haven't been vaccinated because they are 'waiting for a different vaccine' (i.e. they want Pfizer even though AstraZeneca is available). I feel vindicated, and I feel no joy from it.

My mood, at this point, is basically this women heckling at a Dan Andrews presser:



As to the UK, I'm trying to bring the same energy as this carriage full of Spanish people shouting an unmasked fellow passener off the train to my fraught commute on Monday.

Before I sink my teeth into the next few fandom meme questions, I'll throw a couple of links in your general direction.

The first is a recording of the book launch for Ava Reid's debut novel, The Wolf and the Woodsman. This book is a secondary-world fantasy that draws on Jewish mythology (most obviously the story of Esther, but there are other strands as well) and Hungarian folklore and history, very much in the vein of Novik's Spinning Silver, and the novels of Rena Rossner, and I love it intensely. The book launch is a panel discussion between RF Kuang, Alix E. Harrow, and Ava Reid, and ranges in topics from nationalism and twentieth-century history to revolution, empire, and academia. Harrow's fiction has never worked for me, and I admire, rather than love, Kuang's books, but all three panellists are excellent as conversationalists, and the whole thing is well worth watching.

The second link is wildly different in tone: a humorous article in The Guardian about a bizarre photo of the NSW premier supposedly watching TV. What I didn't realise until reading this article was that apparently enough photos of 'Australian politicians awkwardly watching TV in strange ways' exist that it's become a mockable — and meme-able — genre. (Enough so that jrhennessy has compiled a Twitter thread of greatest hits of such photos, although some are UK politicians rather than Australians.)

( Days 7-8 )

( The other days )

I'm having a hard time taking my mind off the truly dreadful, horrific violence that men have done to women and that is currently making headlines in my two home countries. (For those who haven't been following me long on Dreamwidth, I'm an Australian immigrant living in the UK, so the two home countries are the UK and Australia.)

( Cut for discussion of misogyny and violence against women )

And yes, I have been planning to link this song, on this specific moment, for the past twelve years. When I decide to do something, I commit, and I do not forget.

Looking back, 2020
Mistakes — I've got many
But the truth is
That I'd probably do it again