The problem is that so many Australians don’t even believe in climate change…
Yes it would make a lot of sense to mandate it, but I can’t see that happening with the stupidity of our politics.
There was a great piece on the ABC tonight covering politics in Oz… Sammy J’s Playground Politics…
Who should you vote for? I really don’t want to answer that (directly at least), but would like to say this much… Even if it’s unlikely that an independent/minor party will get in in your electorate, I say vote them No1, if for no other reason than to deprive both Labor & Liberal parties from receiving election funding. (Anyone who receives at least 4% of the primary vote will receive $$$.)
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Yeah I’ve enjoyed the Sammy J playground politics!
Sorry hobo, I didnt mean to imply that I wanted someone to tell me… I’ve been around way too long to take advice from anyone 
. I was simply indicating my current level of indecisiveness.
I’m in the seat of Newcastle. The entire electorate are rusted on Labor voters, as is most of the HUnter Valley. Mines, you see. Working men. I’ve looked at the list of pretenders and I’ve never heard of any except the sitting Member. Labor. I’ll make my decision when faced with the papers in the morning, and with a pencil in my hand.
I’m prepared for the disappointment for Turnbull getting back in. Mark my words, watch out for big cuts once he gets back in.
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I’d much rather that than my electorate of hard core coalition voters 
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I’d suggest looking at the work Giles Parkinson does with http://reneweconomy.com.au - great articles, mandating solar panels may not be the best way of getting a renewed outcome, mandating that existing power companies have to connect solar powered house holds to the grid at a set rate might achieve the outcome. Essentially the electricity grid is a huge network and solar power is like the having lots of servers in homes, one home won’t replace a datacenter, but enough houses with their own servers and a datacenter or 3 won’t be needed and ideally in the case of the grid local power (i.e. from your roof) the transmission costs are negligible in comparison
Indeed. There wasnt much choice here, in the end. Weirdos last, AFTER the Libs. But Labor and Greens before them
Oh yes. I wasnt suggesting everyone should go off-grid, by any means. I’ll go read at the link you supplied, thanks.
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Yeah me as well - I meant a certain number of solar panels on every roof, for partial supply not full supply
LOL at the Health Party Australia (or whatever their name was on the ballot paper) They are the ones pushing for no vaccinations…ha! They even lie through the name of their party!
But to the point. I come from Europe where politicians and political parties are one of the most corrupt and evil, one of the most low life’s you could imagine are party members and representatives and leaders. All of them, from Germany through France ending on Greece and my home country Poland.
I came to Australia and made my life here in the last 20 years, one of the aspects I really liked was the fact that political MumboJumbo didn’t have to affect me if I chose not to…or do I thought. More now than ever I watch what is going on in the recent years and more I see a carbon copy of the lies and deceit I had to live with and be affected by back in Europe 
I think that they should have to have proper descriptions of what they are. Its just wrong :’(
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The carbon tax in the form it was implemented was stupid and not well thought through. You’re penalising local manufacturers and making them uncompetitive against foreign manufacturers so all you do is making Australian companies uncompetitive. You’re taxing people more so they’ll look for cheaper and non-green ways of doing things to cover the costs.
They should have put billions into renewable energy research. That way you create additional industries for manufacturing products or technology you can sell as well as making things more environmentally friendly.
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I saw an ad for the Marriage Equity party late one night… and my immediate thought - they must in fact be against gay marriage - just cos that’s the way things seem to go these days… So I checked out their website, watched the ad again/a longer version of the ad, noted several gay couples kissing, and confirmed - no, they are in fact PRO gay marriage.
In the case of the Health Party, I was unaware before ticking boxes, but did assume they were not as clear-cut as they appeared, so ranked them down… If I had actually known, I’d have put them below Libs…
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Unfortunately Labor will now be going to the bottom of my preference list. I think their Medicare SMS thing was a whole new political low. The thing that bugs me about this is they came back and said it was a mistake but they still haven’t apologised and everytime a politician from labor gets asked about it, the refuse to answer it, refuse to say it was bad, refuse to apologise and deflect the issue to something else. If even one voter was mislead, it’s still electoral fraud, and lets be honest here, there are some dumb voters who can be easily mislead. If there weren’t. Even Waleed Aly took Shorten to task on it saying that if Labor win they might have won off the back of fraud and Shorten refused to answer it.
The Libs are no better so this isn’t a dig specifically at Labor, I just think the Medicare issue was a new low for Australian politics.
I think the current hung parliament is a good reflection of how disillusioned voters are about ALL the parties at the moment. There are no winners, no nice guys. They all lie and come across as the kind of people that would sell their own mother for an election win. The days of actually caring about the population are gone. They promise the world and deliver nothing. When they leave power they deliberately sabotage the next party coming in by stopping any legislation (good or bad) if they can, sabotage costs and spend their lives travelling business class at the expense of the tax payers before they take their golden handshake and disappear into their cushy pension while they write a book about how evil politics is and how they were the only nice person there. Which private sector organisation would continue to allow their staff to fly business class while they are making a loss? None that I know of. Even the most profitable mining companies I worked with cut international business class during the recession, but not our esteeming politicians, they’re too good to fly economy.
They’re all funded and manipulated by the unions, companies or someone who has interests that are not aligned to the population.
While they do this, they deliver about 20% of what the private sector can do for the same cost because they spend more time bickering with each other like school kids instead of actually doing the job they were put there to do.
I’m not surprised so many people wrote penises on their papers. Choosing between the different parties is like choosing between root canal and castration. Neither is an appealing prospect.
Rant over.
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I agree with everything you’ve mentioned above and with all the rumours of a second election flying around today, I’m not inclined to vote for anyone again. They had their chances and they blew it.
Personally, I think that the hung parliament might be a nice way for the major parties to wake up and realise that they can’t continue to feed the Australian public shit, we’re not mushrooms - we don’t like being kept in the dark and fed crap.
Hopefully, the politicians will wake up and smell the roses. Although, they’re all as bad as each other in my book - be it the major or minor parties or independents.
Also, Waleed Aly is a douche.
I’m intrigued by the way the count is conducted, It’s very interesting to see the progressive count, for example here is Victorian results from 2013:
(YES they are old results, just being used to show how the count progresses)
If the top candidate has enough votes to get a seat, they do, then they re-count.
If the top candidate doesn’t have enough votes, drop off the lowest scored candidate and re-distribute preferences.
*repeat until done.
If you read the distributions as the count progresses you get into the 30th even 40th preference before it’s all over.
Which adds some extra complexity to your voting decision… if you don’t think your chosen party will win, does that mean you should be carefully looking at their preferences and working out at which point it might count? And given it’s at 30 or 40th place, is that even possible?
Senate preferencing is eye wateringly complex, but they changed the rules after 2013. Rightly so I think, after Glenn Druery, aka “The Preference Whisper”, came up with his system for gaming it in favour of people who garnered hardly any votes. Minimum number is now 12, for which you need to go below the line. 6 above could go anywhere depending on which 6.
House of Reps preferencing goes all the way still - I scrutineered in Indi where there were 10 candidates and watched votes of 9 be counted toward one of the 2CP candidates. So you really do have to be careful in the HoR if you don’t want a major candidate to get your vote.