Hi OP, when quoting the article in your post, it’s helpful to use the quote formatting to show us you’re giving quotes and not just supplying additional commentary.

Writing: > You need to only look at the modern crossbench

becomes:

You need to only look at the modern crossbench

This article is very clear and to-the-point. Thanks for sharing.

In order to ensure the administrator doesn’t run wild, the administrator has to be satisfied that the administrator is acting in the interests of members.

Great system.

When we’re talking about ads and media, I highly recommend reading the relevant chapter in Manufacturing Consent (PDF version can easily be found for free online).

But really, intuition will get you the raw basics: using the ad revenue model gives the advertiser control over a media outlet. If media truly ‘need gambling ads’, then this implies they cannot afford to lose them. So, they therefore cannot offend the gambling industry or especially the companies advertising with them. And therefore, they are pressured into media bias, into failing to be critical of an obviously harmful, corrupt industry dealing in addiction manufacture AND laundering at the same time!

Didn’t know there was such thing as too much. For me it’s a nice warm soup.

Haven’t checked the official .gov What’s On site in a while, but it’s always good for a quick look if nothing else is on.

Randwick Mayor Philipa Veitch has addressed protests at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and outside the offices of US arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin in Matraville.

A few councils and senators have been standing up on this issue and it’s great to see elected officials getting involved and not afraid to take stances. Veitch is a Greens member, so they have party support there, but it’s still nice and encouraging to see some support within certain governments (despite my reservations with current electoral politics).

Greens and Labor councillors combined to vote against the motion, which was defeated by 10 votes to five.

The motion was amended to remove the vote of no confidence and became a motion condemning anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and acknowledging the council’s role in promoting community cohesion.

I wonder what that means in practice, will supporting human rights protests like this violate “the council’s role in promoting community cohesion”?

[Liberal councillor who launched the motion] Cr Rosenfeld told ABC Radio Sydney local politicians should leave international affairs to the federal member. “We’re in the local sector of government, not the federal sphere,” he said.

hahaha this is just silly. Of course a local politician should be allowed to care and engage with international politics. Particularly in Randwick, one of the areas with a major university involved in the war effort (e.g. weapons manufacturers connections to campus), their local area is relevant to international affairs so they shouldn’t just block their ears and offload responsibility because it’s over 10 kilometres away.

The video does touch on this wrt. the South Australian proposal, they give a few explanations and critiques of how well it does this.

I’m glad the video covered some good points, I recommend viewing or at least skimming, instead of knee-jerking at the title.

One of the big issues with political donations, being a form of capital influencing politics, is that people with more available capital can have more influence. On an idealist level, this contradicts some expectations we might have of a democracy with fair representation, like the ideal of one-person-one-vote. But looking at present conditions rather than ideals, we have to consider wealth inequality: I’m no expert but I think it says a lot that in 2023, the Australia Institute claimed “Ninety-three per cent of the gains from economic growth have gone to the top 10 per cent of income earners. The rest of us — the bottom 90 per cent — have only got 7 per cent of that economic growth.” (also note, “the top 10 per cent of income earners get a lot of their income from profit”, whereas the bottom 90 per cent mainly get it from wages. The importance being they have very different political values and priorities to most workers.) So, we can see that even though the worker class vastly outnumber the owner class who make money from profit, their capital and therefore ability to influence politics, even as individuals rather than interested corporations, far outbalances the masses even if we were somehow all aligned.

When some parties have enough funding for constant print, internet and television ads while others are basically unknown by most until election day, it’s a shame. Look at Clive Palmer as an example of disproportionate funds, although the same applies to the big parties even if we’re so used to it. I’ve seen some countries give free airtime (maybe 5 or 15 minutes?) for every party or candidate to explain their platform, I think that’s a great idea at the least to reduce unfair advantage.

Another reason for removing lobbying is that I’d rather my union (for example) not waste their money on it. In a recent survey they did, one of the questions was what priorities do we think the most of their money should be spent on, and one of the options is lobbying the Labor Party. It’s just a coping mechanism for putting their preferred party ahead in a broken system.

I think it’s nice to see that that the proposed South Australia laws also acknowledge the status quo and in some cases give some advantage to newer parties which don’t have all the seats and existing exposure of the main parties.

Even wins which are on-the-grand-scale symbolic are important demonstrations of what can be done. Take the port actions against ZIM - economically and logistically, the direct impact was a blip. However, they showed that the community can stand side by side in solidarity with union workers taking industrial action. This has a real effect on workers in the industry (and there are reports workers still insider were taking go-slow actions against ZIM) and can translate across to other industries like weapons manufacture. These actions also highlight that Australia isn’t irrelevant: this country is making critical bomber jet components, trading with the Zionist Regime, diplomatically failing to adequately counter the genocidal invasion. There are actions we can take, and if those small actions can grow and snowball, then we can become a meaningful catalyst for change, like we were during South African apartheid and the Vietnam War.

HMAS SYDNEY CONFIRMED?!

This historical context is important, and something we might take for granted.

On the other hand- in the age of the internet - Why we aren’t voting online over party membership, platform and policy decisions beggars belief.

Direct democracy is a neat area of exploration, and there’s been great theory on how to securely and anonymously implement verifiable voting systems. There are some major implementation problems with online voting whatsoever from a security perspective, but nonetheless I think direct democracy a good system to aim for, especially seeing the gap in (e.g.) the Labor Party policy internally between the members and the leadership.

Nobody is excluded from contributing to legislation. At least we must all chose a party every four years.

In a way, yes, although I also believe that contribution is extremely limited and astronomically overshadowed by capital (see things like lobbying and mass media bias) making direct action and indirect pressure necessary to represent the worker class.

There’s also a idealistic argument that making voting compulsory forces people to care. Ask anyone who counts votes whether everyone cares or not. Drawings of penises, scrawled messages, blank ballots and donkey votes aren’t rare. In local elections, my friend processed a blank ballot with “STOP OVERDEVELOPMENT!” written on it, instead of voting for either of the independents whose entire platform was “Let’s stop over development!”.

One of the upsides of compulsory voting is that it forces people to be able to vote. Look at horror stories in the US to see what I mean, where some people can’t leave work to vote, are omitted from the voting roll for garbage reasons, that kind of broken system. But obviously compulsory voting isn’t necessary to make voting availability a priority! So it’s hardly an argument for preserving it.

My attitude (and this stems from having managed and been involved in democratic organizations myself) is that the ideal democratic decision-making process is to get as many informed voters as possible. Consider Condorcet’s jury theorem - having 100 decently-informed voters is better than 5 experts voting, but 100 or even 1000 un-informed voters is worse than both! Participation alone is not valuable. Forcing people to vote is useless from a decision-making perspective, nor is it enough to encourage people to become informed and involved. I’d rather only 1 million people vote with actual reasons than 25 million just pick the team they’ve always voted for, or based on media misconceptions, or just tick a box and not mean it. I think it’s not hard to become decently informed either, but nonetheless, there should be serious effort to create an informed population if we’re going to use a democratic system of governance.

Does anyone think its “Democratic” for Tasmania to have the same number of senators as NSW ?

Are you therefore suggesting a [federal] democracy should have all votes be equal? Or, to phrase that another way, “Would you think it’s “Democratic” for the entire Northern Territory to be have the same number of ministers as the ACT, or as two-and-a-half inner-Sydney electorates?” The issue there being, major issues affecting a huge part of the country would get dismal representation, and urban issues would get all the expertise. Neither popular representation or regional representation alone is considered adequate representation, so we have a Senate focused on regional representation and the HoR for popular representation. It’s a compromise, because both extremes have serious flaws ruining representative democracy’s aim.