Politics
This won’t be breaking news to some, but I just don’t get politics… it so hard to keep up with and I don’t know who is charge of what and all the different levels, and distinctions between governments, councils, local members, state, federal blah blah blah…
I’m not sure exactly how it all came about but there’s a new leader of the Liberal party I believe, and that had something to doing with our climate change. A bunch of people voted, although I’m not sure who, and some guy won by 1 vote.
Now, unfortunately I’m not playing dumb… I just don’t retain this stuff too easily and have never been able to…
I can’t remember who used to be the leader of that party, and I can’t even remember now who the new leader is.
Now I hear other things like that because of what happened there may be an election… but what’s the point, they just voted for a new guy, shouldn’t we give him a chance before voting him out.
I also hear the phrase double disillusion, it all a bloody illusion to me, let alone a double one!!
Maybe I’m again showing my stupidity here but up until recently I could never remember if ALP stands for Australian Labour Party or Australian Liberal Party. But then someone pointed out that one of the parties just shortens their name, so now I think is it The Libs or The Labs, and surely it’s not The Labs, therefore ALP must stand for Australian Labour Party.
You should know that I’m also not writing Politics off, I understand how important the whole thing is to running a country, but for the average (or below average) person it just seems to be a little overwhelming…
Chris Waghorn
Political Correspondent
Dubbo
December 2nd, 2009 at 10:14 am
i’m forming a detailed response…….pending
December 2nd, 2009 at 11:51 am
Tony Abbott is the new Lib leader and he’s often touted as the far right Christian conservative (because he once trained as a Catholic priest but dropped out).
Can someone tell why it is that Climate Change denial is often made synonymous with Christian conservatives? I just can’t see the connection at all…
December 2nd, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Thanks Howie……awaiting
I guess you can now add far right, and therefore left, and middle if there’s a middle, to the list of things I can never remember the definition of. Conservative I kinda get, but I couldn’t cite examples of conservative vs. the opposite of conservative.`
December 2nd, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Right = conservative (find most of your “shoot refugee and stuff the poor” rednecks here.
Left = liberal (find most of your “hug a tree and rights of the marginalised” hippies here
Just to add to the confusion, the Liberal Party is actually conservative, and Labor is more liberal.
Yes, you can have a middle. In fact, both the main stream parties in Australia are really more middle when it comes to their policies…
So you have the Liberal Party = right of middle, and Labor = left of middle (at least traditionally speaking…), and the Greens are far left, and one nation is far right.
Clear as mud.
December 2nd, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Wow, how educational is our blog at times!!
As you say clear as mud… Why is the phrase conservative linked with things like shooting the refugees and stuff the poor??
If I had to have a crack at what conservative was I would have just thought it was in regards to policies that would seem to win votes as they are stuff everyone would like… like cut taxes, build better stuff, give people more of everything…
I feel I should be apologising to Pete right about now, I think at some stage he explained a lot of it to me, but because it’s not stuff I talk about outside of election time it’s really hard to retain. But now there’s a blog I can refer back to.
I also remember trying to find out about the different parties and make an informed vote last time they had a major election, but that’s quite a lot harder than you would think.
I remember that their websites were too complex and you needed to read for days to work out what they are on about, and their pamphlets are too short as they only advertise whatever the big push is at the time. I think I eventually got somewhere, but then policies and all that change at the next election.
My life is such a task sometimes…
December 2nd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
It’s conservative because they’re not very progressive, ie. they don’t much like change… So the redneck is conservative (usually) because they don’t want these refugees coming in and changes the white australia they love so much…
Mind you, not all conservatism is bad… change for the sake of change, and some progressive policies are not in the public interest. And like I said before, this is how they’re usually characterised, but not necessarily the way it is…
You’re right, this is educational!
December 2nd, 2009 at 5:11 pm
In Australia we have 2 major parties as dicket stated.
The Libral party who are the old school conservative folk who basically represent the middle class,
And labour who are a bit more libral in their views and historically represent the working class.
Both parties on the whole aren’t all that different from each other.
Climate Change is at the heart of all the recent chaos as Rudd is tring to pass a bill that means business pays for the amount of carbon they produce, and if you produce a lot of carbon you can buy ‘credits’ kind of like a pre paid mobile phone. You know you are going to make calls so you buy so much credit.
There are a couple of issues that the libral party and the greens have raised.
The proposed bill gives discounts to big mining companies which doesn’t seem fair, the other thing is that it may increase the cost of products and services for the general public.
The liberal party became divided as half of them thought it was a good idea but needed some tweaking and the other half thought it was all rubbish and we shouldn’t do anything about climate change until countries like China do something first.
So this is why the libral party went a little crazy because they are supposed to be united but there was obvious tension so those who oppsed rose up and challned the leadership of their party.
The greens (who are the hippies in suits) feel it’s dodgy because it’s not really going to decrease our emissions by suitable amount if we are going to take climate change seriously.
The bill was going to be voted on today in Parliament, and it was and because the Greens, Most of the Librals and a bunch of others opposed it, it didn’t pass.
This is the second time the bill has been shut down so it probably means we will have an early election.
Personally I think the carbon trading scheme as it’s called is a bit dumb. It’s just a tax really which isn’t going to be enough incentive for big business to stop polluting soo damn much.
December 2nd, 2009 at 5:13 pm
there is also the national party which is joined to the libral party and they are a bunch of old alcoholic bogans
December 2nd, 2009 at 8:56 pm
I’m laughing at you now Howie…don’t get me wrong, I’m more Learn-ed since reading your posts, but I also know for a fact that John Anderson is a wonderful Christ focussed God fearing man… definitely not an old alcoholic bogan, rather, a great man of God!
It’s so hard for me, this politics thing, because I grew up on a farm…this meant that my views of labour aren’t so great as they seemed to forget about anyone west of the mountains. I also have spent a lot of time with social workers (hi Fi!) and people that do a lot of work with people and the community they live in and therefore see some good points of labour.
The thing that I hate so much about politics, is, that if they happened to work together, maybe just maybe there would be a happy medium on all counts…you know, a world where one society isn’t neglecting for the sake of a different society! The other thing is the school yard way of dealing with things where you bag people out because you think differently!
I think that the last election (can’t even remember what it was) was the first time that I haven’t done a donkey vote in my voting lifetime (which didn’t start till I was 21 cause I didn’t vote…is big brother going to get me know that I posted that on teh web?) and I think that it was a local thing and I voted because I knew DEFINITELY which people I DIDN’T want to run our town!
December 2nd, 2009 at 9:11 pm
there are plenty of Christians in parliament but that doesn’t mean we should vote for them.
Also John Anderson hasn’t been in politics for 2 years now.
I’m in the slow process of writing a blog post about Christians and politics, and what i think our role is.
December 2nd, 2009 at 9:32 pm
One view on why Christians tend to be associated with non-environmental policies (especially in America), is that some particularly vocal and media savvy Christians tend to have a view along the lines of “sooner or later, probably sooner, we’re all going to disappear in a rapture anyway, so why bother about this evil world?”. Not the sort of theology I hold with, but I suppose it’s their right to have their opinion, however little evidence I can see in Scripture to support it.
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This view is also a bit easier to back up with inaction, than the alternative view which tends to focus on our role as tending God’s creation, and being his representatives on an abused planet.
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The current state of Australian politics is quite centre-ist, with both major parties having to look fairly hard for ‘wedge issues’ to argue about, as most of their policies are actually fairly similar… although they hate it when people point that out. The Greens are way off to the left in ‘save the gay whales’ territory, while the Shooters Party etc are over on the right, just slightly left of the ‘Australia First’ and ‘One Nation’ mob who are busy looking out for foreign terrorist Communists who might be sneaking in on refugee boats.
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The election that will probably be held in early/mid 2010 will be for who gets to be Prime Minister (KRudd’s current job). Tony Abbott just got himself elected as leader of the Liberals (the Opposition party, who lost the last election – remember John Howard?). He’ll be going up against KRudd, unless the ALP have a similar implosion and elect a new leader before then… although that’s fairly unlikely at this stage.
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Parties like Family First have prominent Christians involved, and so quite a lot of Christian people feel that they have to vote for them. I can see why people want faithful types to make important decisions, but realistically once politicians are in power they tend to follow the agendas that their advisors present to them in any case, so perhaps Christian public servants are more important than Christian politicians?
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In any case, that’s all my opinion, and as open to criticism as the next person’s. I just happen to think that I’m fairly well spot on… funny that.
December 2nd, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Defending myself…knew he was no longer in politics but he WAS the leader of the Nats so thereforeshould have fit under your description of old alcoholic whatevers…
But he wasn’t….
Politics discussions…we are getting old!
December 3rd, 2009 at 8:11 am
haha yeah it is all grown up to talk about politics, at least we aren’t talking about hip replacements yet.
December 3rd, 2009 at 12:37 pm
or walkers and adult nappies!
December 3rd, 2009 at 3:06 pm
i like walkers shotbread
December 9th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
I really like Walker’s shortbread also.
December 13th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Yeah, true…Walkers shortbread is pretty good…I especially like the ones with macadamias in them!
December 13th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Hey, Howie, do you reckon that there are bamboo adult nappies out there?
December 17th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Oh, and to add the the confustion, the Australia Labor Party has no U in Labor. Labor not Labour.
December 17th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
OK, I’ve been meaning to get back to this.
I love Christmas and the way that shortbread makes more of an appearance then any other time in the year but also thanks for the info everyone, I reckon I’ll be referring back to this stuff later on to get a grip on things again.
Why doesn’t Labor have the U? Is there some old time story to go with this or is just like they did some printing once and it would be too expensive to throw out all the old stationery and have it reprinted with the U in it?