Aussie Election Results

[Aractus]

The pessimistic way would be to say that rather than do what is needed for "democracy" they will spend their time trying to figure out how to make the other side look bad for the next round.

Actually the biggest problem that the Coalition had in their campaign was in not attacking Labor effectively. It's really quite interesting, they ran on their policies, and didn't really make any big promises that they couldn't keep. But people are cynical and expect political lies at election time, which is why Labor was able to get away with a huge lie that appeared to have influenced people - Medicare will be gone, gone forever if the Coalition is returned. Where will it go? - It'll be gone!

The Senate changes were a huge missed opportunity for the Coalition. As I've mentioned, they are so much better for democracy, yet Labor ran the lie that they were bad and opposed them. That should have made them an easy target for the Coalition who never once even mentioned "Hare-Clark". It is more democratic and makes voting easier - that should have been an easy argument for the Coalition to execute, and leave the ALP open to attack on their back-room preference deals. And again, Labor did a complete back-flip on their promise not to preference Greens on how-to-vote cards, that should have been easy for the Coalition to attack - and they didn't.

The other thing that went against them was proposed superannuation changes. That saw Tassie fall to Labor - which (ironically) has essentially the same policy. Tassie used to be one of the most anti-Labor places in Australia, because of the ALP shutting down the logging industry and driving high unemployment. Again, I'm not in Tassie, but that should have been an easy local argument for them. Instead of just saying "unemployment is half what it was when we took office in Tassie, blah blah blah" drive the point as to why it was so high under Labor. Both of the Super policies are quite mild in terms of what needs to be done to make Super fairer for "middle Australia" - I would like to see them go a lot further. Not as far as the Greens, but certainly indexing and taxing super on a modest level post-retirement.

Anyway, we can wait and see what comes out of this - but I do hold out hope for a re-election later this year for the House if there's a hung Parliament.