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Can someone explain Australian parties to me?

Y'all have first past the post / winner takes all, don't you? There was a vote recently and "labor" won from what I'm reading?

Labor, coalition, independents, etc. what kinds of parties are these? I thought Albanese was a "cunt" yet his party seems to have won again? What's going on?

33 comments

  • Y’all have first past the post / winner takes all, don’t you?

    Nope. Instant-Runoff Vote, where we rank preferences. It's much better.

    Labor, coalition, independents, etc. what kinds of parties are these?

    The Coalition is a coalition of allied parties, not just one party. Generally speaking, it's the Liberal Party and the National Party. Now, if you're used to American political media, you've probably learned an incorrect definition of 'liberal' - it doesn't actually just mean 'progressive', liberalism is an ideology focusing on the ideal of liberty, and most parties in modern liberal-democratic countries are liberals, whether they're classic liberals (think US Libertarians), progressive liberals (think a Green party) or conservative liberals. The Liberal Party of Australia are conservative liberals, and they've been mirroring some of Trump's rhetoric and US Republican Party ideas like the DOGE, and rationalising new coal power plants. Australia apparently didn't like that.

    Labor were historically a social democrat party representing the labour movement and unions, but has drifted further away from that and is now considered either the centre or centre-left party.

    The Greens are the third biggest, a populist progressive party, focusing on issues like environment and climate, social justice and housing.

    Independent candidates are independent, they aren't in a party. Some have left their old parties, some were never in one.

    I thought Albanese was a “cunt” yet his party seems to have won again?

    Since when has that stopped politicians from winning?

    What’s going on?

    The Liberal Party faceplanted, many of their voters swung to Labor. Others will have chosen smaller parties, but Labor and Coalition each had about 33% of the primary vote in the past few years with Greens and One Nation down somewhere around 10% so Labor was clearly the most likely to win this year.

    Interestingly, unlike the House of Representatives which election coverage has focused on, there is still a crossbench in the Senate, it looks like Greens will still have around 11 members there, forcing Labor to appeal to them in order to pass bills in the Senate.

    These are generalisations, there are some technicalities I've avoided.

  • We don’t have much of a left in Australia, Greens are the closest, Labor embraced NeoLiberalism and sold the country out in the 70s and has only moved further from its union/worker roots.

  • Y'all have first past the post / winner takes all, don't you? There was a vote recently and "labor" won from what I'm reading?

    Others have answered you that we have preferential voting, but I'm still really confused about why you're asking in this way? It makes if sound like FPTP would have stopped them from getting elected, and preferential would have prevented it.

    As for what's going on, Dutton, the leader of the Coalition, and members of that group of parties associated themselves with Trump, who's really unpopular here. They also provided literally no policies to genuinely help with the cost of living issues people are facing, instead engaging in culture wars stuff. We have mandatory voting here as well, you can't just sit it out, so it makes the sort of apathy+populism that has gotten Trump elected not possible. The silent majority of voters rejected Dutton and the only other major choice was Labor.

    • The silent majority of voters rejected Dutton

      This time, not for the last two decades though.

  • I'll preface this by saying I'm not as informed as some so if I get something wrong, apologies.

    We don't have first past the post.

    Australia has federal, state and local government elections. This election was federal. Each state is subdivided into large federal regions, and we vote on representatives for our area (green ballot and lowe house). We also vote on which party we want to see in control (white ballot and upper house).

    The green ballot is just counted up, and the person with the most votes wins. The white ballot is harder to explain, but basically you need a majority of seats to take government and have to win 76 seats. There's a transfer system you can read about on wikipedia.

    Idk about Albonese being a cunt but every politician in Australia is considered a bit of a dickhead. We don't worship them here. So we vote out the biggest dickhead (Peter Dutton) most of the time (some could be lovely but most people are aware how many do very little and earn $400k salaries).

    Dutton ran a campaign on nuclear power and other things I won't go into. Nuclear power has 0 infrastructure in Australia so we'd be starting from scratch. It would take 15 years to begin powering Australia. We will have a crisis in 5 years due to population growth. This is extremely easy to point out as stupid, and hard to argue against, especially when half the country already has solar power on their roofs. They also told everyone they'd make fuel cheaper and buy more military equipment even though we have a deal to get military equipment from the US and UK. It'd be nice to have but stupid to run on it.

    They didn't have many other policies that made it to me, but I largely block ads so you could go read more about it online.

    Conversely, Albonese ran on things like healthcare, the housing crisis and affordable living. Things people actually care about given the times.

    Parties:

    • Labor is pro union, and commonly quite centred with a slight lean left. They won the election in a landslide.
    • the coalition is two parties, they're supposed to be centred-right and conservative but they were going off the deep end and going with America/trump style politics. They ran a bad campaign is what I can say with stat's to back me up.
    • greens party is very progressive, sometimes a little to aggressive with that stance.
    • there's the trumpet of patriots who were meant to be Aus MAGA and are just annoying.
    • there's one nation who are basically racists who want white Australia to be strongly enforced again.
    • independents will vote with whatever they think is right, but will often align with one party more than the others. They can win seats in government and work with all parties as they want.

    TL;DR Most people would probably say the liberals ran a bad campaign, hence they lost badly. Albo is likely a cunt but he's better than the guy we voted out who wanted to force the country to go with nuclear power, which would start producing energy 10 years after we had a shortage. At least Albo is going to do things with healthcare and affordable living. And if he fails, we'll vote him out and get someone who will because we aren't a cult.

    • @joshcodes
      "The green ballot is just counted up, and the person with the most votes wins." Nope. That's the Seppo system, thank fuck we don't do that shit here.
      The green ballot is a single winner instant runoff vote (to give it it's "well akshully" name).
      So they count the first preferences, then the candidate with the least first preferences has their ballot papers distributed to the number 2 choice on each one (at full value). Then the next least has theirs redistributed, and so on, until there is a candidate with 50%. This means I can vote 1 for my local gay-furry-legalise-ecstasy independent, and if they don't get in my preference will flow to the least fascist big boring centrist party that I put first in my preferences.
      Here's the Australien Honest explainer video, it should be required viewing:
      https://youtu.be/zXHq04W0kBs
      @atrocity

  • Y'all have first past the post / winner takes all, don't you?

    No, preferntial i.e ranked choice

    There was a vote recently and "labor" won from what I'm reading?

    Indeed

    Labor, coalition, independents, etc. what kinds of parties are these?

    Independents aren't a party per se, the hint is in the name

    We have the Green parry as our centre party and everyone ekse is to the right of them. There is nothing i'd classify as left.

    Labor is anti refugee, pro fossil fuel mining, anti enviorment etc i.e part of neo liberal orthodoxy, centre right, Liberal Party (not liberal in the US sense) is climate change denying, anti refugees, pro private health care, TERFs, etc two sides of the one coin. Bit of difference over Gaza, like minded on Ukraine.

    • Labour are pushing future made in Australia the initiative to create renewables in Australia and export to the world.

      That's not exactly pro fossil fuels

33 comments