Zagorath
@Zagorath@aussie.zone
- Comment on Anon accidentally makes a camgirl rethink her life 10 hours ago:
What do you mean other extinct groups? That implies dinosaurs are extinct.
- Comment on Young woman's strip search at festival akin to 'sexual assault', court told 12 hours ago:
Is this a problem in Australia too?
Yup. Not to quite the same extent as America…you’re much less likely to get shot by an Australian cop, and cops who do provably wrong as an individual (as opposed to institutional problems like the one in this story) are much more likely to get charged here. But by and large it’s exactly the same problem.
- Comment on Australia 2025 – Wrap-up of the night 1 day ago:
There’s no conspiracy. It’s just…politicians playing politics. It’s spin, the same thing politicians do all the time, to varying levels of success. In this case, to enormous success, because people are constantly accusing the Greens of being obstructionist despite the complete reverse being true. The Greens have always been open to negotiations, and on both the HAFF and HtB Labor played the obstructionist by refusing to negotiate, relenting after months on the former, and threatening the nuclear option if the Greens didn’t capitulate in the latter.
The concessions I was referring to were in the Housing Australia Future Fund bill, passed with amendments negotiated by the Greens in September 2023. It sounds like you’re talking about the Help to Buy bill, which was introduced in 2023 but after passing the House of Reps in February 2024, Labor waited until September to even begin debating in the Senate, and eventually passed with Greens support in November 2024.
It doesn’t help that despite both of these bills being ostensibly based around affordable housing, Labor has explicitly gone on the record saying they do not want house prices to fall. The Greens do want that. So of course they push Labor to do better. Frankly, I would have preferred them not to pass HtB because it’s inflationary tinkering-around-the-edges rubbish. But they passed it anyway because it might help some small number of people (even if it does create more problems for everyone else), and they don’t want to be obstructionist. Unlike Labor.
i’d still call it a pyrrhic victory due to the amount of time wasted on a key issue the electorate wants action on.
Much more time was wasted by Labor for the timing of the bill in the Senate than by the time from when it began debate to finally being passed. And even that time could have been more than made up for by enacting its 40,000 places over 3 years instead of 4, as the Greens suggested. Or it could have been reduced by Labor doing their job properly and negotiating to improve policy so that it gets popular support.
Labor did none of this. Because they’d rather play politics and be seen to get a “win” in the press than to actually do the right thing. And it worked for them. The media eats up their nonsense. The public eats up their nonsense. And the country suffers for it.
- Comment on ABC 2025 Election Watch Party 1 day ago:
Hmm, I can definitely see how you’d interpret it as accusing the AEC, but I don’t think that’s it. At worst, it’s accusing the AEC of failing to adequately kerb bad behaviour from Labor. But it was mostly accusing Labor and the media of being abusive. Unhinged, but not, I think, in the way you took it.
- Comment on Australia 2025 – Wrap-up of the night 1 day ago:
???
But the Greens did pass Labor’s housing policy. After forcing Labor to improve it, and refusing to back down after Labor tried to play games by agreeing to improve it but then reintroducing the unimproved version in Parliament.
The Greens’ only failure is one of PR. That Labor supporters have been so successful in their lies that even people on left-leaning Lemmy believe them. I’m not sure what actions the Greens need to take to counter this very effective PR, because it almost feels like people want to believe it.
- Comment on Australia 2025 – Wrap-up of the night 1 day ago:
Moving the lower house to a federal type pool would remove any chance of area localised representation
Not if it was a federal pool using the MMP system that they have in Germany and NZ. You get a local member and there’s a pool of proportional party members on top of that.
- Comment on Australia 2025 – Wrap-up of the night 1 day ago:
Unless Australians are comfortable with sending a much larger number of lower house members, that would make the electorates get much bigger than they currently are
Your idea would result in a 225 seat house. Mine would be 250. Not a significant difference IMO.
I actually most of all would like to see a move to MMP, the system used (with some minor differences) in NZ and Germany. Where you elect 1 per division locally, and also vote for a party, with the party vote being roughly 50% of the total seats in Parliament, and used to make the total Parliament proportional to the will of the people. The biggest differences I would like compared to the Kiwi & German system is to let you give a second preference for the party vote, used only if your first choice doesn’t reach the 5% minimum threshold to get any seats, and to choose MPs in the proportional system based on nearest loser, rather than by a party-provided list, so if a party deserves 1 extra seat based on its party vote, the candidate from that party that gets the seat is the one that got 49% of the seat vote, rather than being the person who was pre-selected by the party to get the highest priority.
- Comment on Australia 2025 – Wrap-up of the night 1 day ago:
3 is such an awkward number though. It would basically lock in 1 Labor 1 LNP all over the country, with the third being the only variable one. I’m not a huge fan of STV with 3. 5 is really where I’d like to see it start. Merging 3s to return 5 would work, and because of how STV works, you could still adapt for regions where that’s not viable, like the NT and rural WA.
- Comment on ABC 2025 Election Watch Party 2 days ago:
Smaller parties have to have a path to success
Under FPTP? No, they don’t. Not a realistic one, anyway.
- Comment on ABC 2025 Election Watch Party 2 days ago:
Oh shit wtf did she say?
- Comment on ABC 2025 Election Watch Party 2 days ago:
I only heard a small snippet of Dutton’s concession that the ABC played while I was driving home near midnight. It was focused on Dickson rather than the prime ministership. But that part of it, at least, was really good IMO. Explicitly saying your opponent will be good, the really heartfelt personal touch about her son. I was impressed. Honestly if the person who delivered that speech was the same person who ran the campaign (and has been a powerful player in politics for more than the last decade), he may have won.
But of course, that man would have had an entirely different political trajectory, so who’s to say. Considerate people don’t exactly excel in the LNP.
- Comment on ABC 2025 Election Watch Party 2 days ago:
Top of the list, ‘soft mandatory’ voting
Absolutely not. Mandatory voting is great, but the number one two and three thing is voting system reform. They had an IRV referendum a few years back and it failed. Maybe they could take MMP to the people in the future and get more support, and leapfrog is into having an even better system.
But with the rise of Reform over there, I’m not sure they’d want to risk giving smaller parties a path to electoral success.
- Comment on All the political mail I got this election 2 days ago:
Yeah I had heard that. But I live in Ryan, one of the most hotly contested urban electorates in the country. I expect they’ve already received copies.
- Comment on All the political mail I got this election 2 days ago:
They’re aware, and it’s apparently completely legal.
- Submitted 3 days ago to australianpolitics@aussie.zone | 2 comments
- Submitted 3 days ago to australianpolitics@aussie.zone | 34 comments
- Dark Money: Labor and Liberal join forces in attacks on Teals and Greens - Michael Westmichaelwest.com.au ↗Submitted 3 days ago to australianpolitics@aussie.zone | 0 comments
- Comment on Found paper 3 days ago:
Transcription:
– Leg muscles tight a lot of the time
— Getting better at work not able to be in office for full days yet
— Mostly positive but still some very down and dark moments
I hope the author is doing ok.
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 3 days ago:
Transylvania at the time of Dracula? It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so it would be Franz Joseph I (yes, that Emperor Franz Joseph). Romania has a very tumultuous history, having been stuck on the frontier between Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans for most of the modern era. In Vlad III “Dracula” 's life alone it switched sides multiple times, and he was made Voivode of Wallachia and deposed at least 3 times. Voivode being roughly equivalent to Prince.
- Comment on Me when I zoom past traffic on my e-scooter 3 days ago:
I’d regularly see near-militant comments to anything even remotely suggesting cars had a place
That tends to be pushback against anyone saying their specific use case requires a car, rather than saying nobody should be allowed to like cars as a hobby.
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 3 days ago:
Who are which King/Queen? Dracula is set mostly in England in 1897, so it would be Queen Victoria. But I’m guessing that might not be what you meant?
- Comment on Me when I zoom past traffic on my e-scooter 4 days ago:
Does !dragonsfuckingcars exist here?
- Comment on Me when I zoom past traffic on my e-scooter 4 days ago:
the r*ddit fuckcars certainly took the name literally
But it didn’t? It would regularly get people who are into their project cars or whatever come in and people would be quite friendly. Because the vast majority of that subreddit understood that the point of the movement is about systemic change and car culture, not about individual cars.
- Comment on Me when I zoom past traffic on my e-scooter 4 days ago:
Well, it’s a little more than just “bike or scooter is way better downtown”. It’s that car-centric infrastructure as a whole makes biking or walking dangerous and inconvenient, and public transport expensive and inconvenient. It’s that the sharp divide between “downtown” and “the suburbs” which means that a statement like @Godric@lemmy.world’s, which sort of implies “bikes are great downtown, but cars are better elsewhere” (even if godric didn’t intend that, it’s certainly a valid way to interpret their comment) is making an allowance for cars that things should be designed for them elsewhere, when actually trams and bikes worked great in small towns before we started designing everything for cars.
- Comment on Me when I zoom past traffic on my e-scooter 4 days ago:
it’s just that they’ve taken over
Like a lot of movements, fuck cars is named partly to grab attention. If you take the name literally, you get a misleading impression. A more accurate name would be “fuck car culture” or “fuck car-centric design” or “fuck motornormativity”. But those aren’t nearly as catchy.
- Comment on Me when I zoom past traffic on my e-scooter 4 days ago:
!fuckcars@lemmy.world
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 4 days ago:
Yeh that’s right. But if we go off the idea that Dracula is meant to be Vlad III (which, I’ll admit, is actually something Stoker tacked on right before publication), well…he was royal.
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 4 days ago:
That’s what inspired me!
I decided to do that, and then when someone started the vampires community I thought…why not see if anyone wants to chat about it with me.
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 4 days ago:
Before John Polidori—Lord Byron’s doctor—wrote The Vampyre (incidentally, it began at the same retreat where Mary Shelly conceived of Frankenstein), the idea of vampires as nobles who can pass among humans basically didn’t exist. They were more akin to zombies or werewolves, prior to that. Polidori’s Lord Ruthven was a British nobleman based in no small part on Lord Byron. Then a few decades later you get Carmilla, another upper class vampire, this time female. And then just a couple of decades after that, on the cusp of the 20th century, Bram Stoker writes Dracula, the first time we get a vampire who is not just noble but royal, and we get the full furnishings we associate with vampires today. The foreign accent, the castle, the wine (though interestingly, the wine Dracula serves is actually a white wine, not the blood-red we usually think of).
Also fun note: this Saturday marks the start date of Dracula. Over in !vampires@lemmy.zip I’m planning a read-through in real-time, if anyone wants to join me.
- Comment on Labour [sic] to win with an increased majority in YouGov's final MRP of the election | YouGov 4 days ago:
Labor to gain Brisbane off the Greens (prior to Greens it was LNP), but Greens to retain Griffith (Labor prior to 2022) and Ryan (LNP prior to '22), according to this.
Based on this, Dutton likely to retain Dickson, unlike some had hoped.
Note that MRP polls capture broad trends much better than traditional polling, but still fail to capture strong individual ground games. That’s particularly important for independents, and still quite important for minor parties like the Greens.
