I’m sorry, this could have convinced me in the early oughties but I’m worn out now. There’s a song and dance about how powerful the Murdoch media is but firstly that’s no longer as true as it was, and most importantly, any time Labor has had the chance to shut them down, they haven’t taken it. Literally the laws which got Labor offices raided were supported by Labor. At some point I’m going to stop believing the “small target” strategy is a real strategy and start to believe that this is what Labor actually is deep down. The toothless NACC, the active protection of the perpetrators of Robodebt, making a rod for their own backs, this is just who Labor is.

There are other unions, and if I can take a minor detour, some of them, eg teachers and nurses unions are majority women, and Labor walk over them, time and time again, whereas unions like CFMEU and TWU will strike. Health and Education are being gutted from a skills perspective, and the lesson they’re being taught is that if you stand up like the other unions, you’ll get your necks cut off. COVID came and “went”, and Labor were in power for a good chunk of it, and they’ve not had the Unions or the workers backs. The majority of deaths happened / are happening during Labor in government. How many of those were Teachers? Nurses? With friends like these…

What even is the point any more? What is there to lose when unions are basically unable to stand up to their own? When Labor must shunt to the right of the coalition. Some people blame the right for the “right wing ratchet”, but to some extent this has been engineered by the left to make the right look less favourable to their voters. I don’t give a shit about Labor, I want some fucking solidarity.

There’s also the possibility of a split. If enough of the unions want to split, and it does look like it, it’s possible that “left Labor” and “right Labor” split into two parties.

Frankly Labor has been taking advantage of the unions for a very long time, consistently kneecapping them, and has been doing so back to the Hawke / Keating years. This isn’t a “compromise” anymore, because the right just keeps on taking and taking.

Not a premium user but Youtube has poisoned its own waters with its algorithm. You can see the “top” content basically gaming that algorithm as well as it can. Literally every part of it from the title to the thumbnail to the content itself is hollow except for the skinner box.

Yeah agree with what you’ve said. I think your example of Tactical voting lines up with Zagorath’s detailed explanation. Makes perfect sense.

Overall, my main point was that there were a cohort of “small l” liberal voters who accept the science on climate change, and basically cannot vote for the LNP any longer, but for aesthetic reasons really would prefer to stay away from the Greens or Labor.

Thank you for the awesome analysis. To try and put what you said intuitively, I guess the “strategic” voting is to compromise as early as possible with a group whose “second choice” would be your last choice (and that is also a very popular first choice but only just popular enough to win). Does that sound correct?

So in your political compass, instead of picking the closest option to you on the compass with a Greens/Labor vote, you would pick a spot closer to the overall vibes of the electorate with a Teal vote to solidify that choice against an even further to the right choice which would win by a narrow margin?

Sure, what I have is anecdata, but I will say the study is focused on the teal voters, whereas the people I’m talking about were members or organisers. They did door-knocking or sausage sizzles or similar.

For this comment, I’ve decided to go to the actual study rather than use the ABC’s interpretation of it.

Firstly, the analysis is that there are fewer “rusted on” voters, which is consistent with what I’m trying to say. A bunch of rusted on LNP voters have become less rusted on, so to speak. The first half of the analysis broadly agrees with what I’ve been saying.

I don’t know if ranked choice voting really works with “tactical voting”. Someone would need to draw me a diagram, but overall the way most people vote is to put the candidate they like the most at the top, and the candidates they like the least at the bottom. If they distrust the majors, they put the majors “later”. Basically, if you think the Teals are going to get up, but you want the Greens, you’re still better off putting the Greens on top. There’s a very small corner case where the a bunch of small parties can trade places based on a handful of votes but it’s not common, and if you want the Greens but are happy with Teal, you’d still put them in the order you want. The study does say in the first half that people are way less likely to use HTV cards, which is consistent with what I’m trying to say.

I think what’s happened is that they’re looking at 2019, the Scomo era. By that era, the voters I’ve been talking about would already have shifted to Labor or the Greens as Option 1, something they would not actually want, they just wanted a Scomo Coalition even less. I think the Teals actually are the first preference here, and a lot of these guys used to vote LNP in maybe 2015.

I don’t think that’s a good read of what’s happened given the “teal” voters I know about. Almost to a person, Teal voters are ex-Liberal voters. Pro Hewson, pro Howard, pro Turnbull. A lot of them probably excused Howard’s “Stop the Boats” as the realpolitik of keeping the ONP vote down (something which didn’t really pan out long term).

However, even at Abbott many were noping out. First because they could see how much trouble Turnbull was having, but also because Abbott really was the jerk they saw Howard pretending to be. The “minister for women” probably also hemorrhaged a bunch of women voters too. That I think would have meant the success of the Teals, but not a landslide, until Morrison.

The fact that he could just operate a kleptocrat government, no real skill, no real goals, just ill tempered and mean spirited. I think a bunch of Liberals were looking for a new home, and that was in the Teals. Those liberals aren’t coming back because the LNP isn’t going back to being the LNP. The nationals have taken over enough of the agenda that reactionaries are the only ones left in the Liberal party.

The reactionaries have thoroughly “won” the LNP, all the way over to being the alt-right. Brain-dead “young liberals” will keep the ball rolling over but no serious person is going to care about their stupid ideas. Over time the Liberal part of the coalition will lose votes as the coalition increasingly embodies the National Party agenda. At that point the Nationals might wonder why they are in a coalition with a party which has fewer members than them. What happens to the Nationals at that point is unclear, because Climate Change doesn’t fuck around in 2040.

Err that name sounds a bit unfortunate.

He was fired

He owns the business. His ownership was liquidated by the other owner without paperwork, and most of the other owners dispute that the ownership was ever diluted. The decision over whether he should have been “fired” are really upto him and the other business owners.

It’s also unclear why the other employees, who may or may not have been coerced, were not siding with Kurvitz. I agree it’s a mess, but there’s a big gap between “feelings” and “actually grossly illegal stuff”.

There are other videos on the internet about this, but basically PMG have done a terrible job here. One person is accused of serious corporate misconduct, and the others have allegations of being hard to work with, and PMG effectively treats them as equal, not even realising that the reason maybe some people were hard to work with was because of forced labour from the guy also doing the corporate misconduct.

They’ve just not done a great job overall here.

Just going to echo this. It’s a tough balancing act to allow a bit of fun and shit posting while also preventing abuse and the mods are doing amazing, and the instance is in great technical health too. Thanks all. Really love being in this online space which is actually pretty tough to achieve.

It’s honestly silly. I have a minor interest in Olympics coverage but it’s so often difficult to be able to watch a sport or see more context from a meme that I just stop caring. Like imagine if you saw that shooting meme and thought “yeah I’ll watch the whole thing” but you can’t. The wheeling and dealing makes the whole thing harder to get excited about.

Barnaby Joyce??!?!?!?!??!??

Writers give publishers legitimacy. Publishers will regularly pull the writers out to trot out some “copyright is important” line.

Modern day book burning. Done by the writers this time.

Yeah I can’t remember where I read that but it’s definitely a possibility IIRC.

Pumped hydro is not exactly a dam. There’s a hole and 2 water reservoirs. Yes there’s a cost but so does anything.

You also can’t just turn nuclear on or off. You’d need to also get rid of existing solar. Ie: get people to disconnect rooftop solar to make nuclear work.

sad facts :(