#auspol

[shystymcshysterson]

I don't understand why anyone is bothering to run smear campaigns against this guy, he's doing fine on his own

[phlebasphoenician]

It actually makes perfect sense if you understand the history of Australian politics.

In Australia, the Liberal Party came out of a fusion between the Protectionist Liberal Party (which believed strongly in tariffs) and the Free Trade Party (which hated tariffs) in 1909. Now you'd think that these two would be strange bedfellows and wonder how on earth they could merge to form a new political party, until you realise that they only came together under the pressure of wealthy people who wanted to preserve their privileges and fight back against the other major and growing political party of the time - the Labor Party, founded in 1901 by a bunch of trade unions.

Even now, today, the Liberal party is still often considered to represent the big end of town while the Labor party is strongly associated with the unions, with the Liberals constantly accusing the Labor party of privileging their union supporters while Labor shouts back that the Liberal party wants wages for the average Australian to stagnate in the name of hoarding economic wealth for their billionaire buddies.

Also, you have to take into account what liberalism actually is - a political and moral philosophy which espouses support for the inherent rights of the individual (including liberty from oppressive authority and political equality) as well as free market capitalism.

In America, 'liberal' is a label that tends to be applied to political views espousing personal rights and freedoms. In Australia, the Liberal party pays more attention to the free market end of things by constantly trying to fire chunks of the public service while simultaneously blowing the government budget on pricey corporate consultants, and luring billionaires to 'invest in Australia' by letting them mine national resources without paying full price for it (something Labor is ironically also willing to support, if only though inaction or very mild reform).

Though, I gotta point out, the Liberal party isn't above imitating the USA Republicans and dogwhistling about 'woke curriculums in schools', and proposing their own version of DOGE.

tl;dr - Liberalism means many things at the same time (some of them contradictory) and the Australian Liberal Party focuses on small government and free market economics rather than progressive personal freedoms.

Unless, of course, it's the right of Cis White Men to shout down everyone else.

They're totally behind that one.

So today in "Batshit things happening during the Australian election" - the Liberal Party has dropped a rap diss track about the Prime Minister and shopping prices on Soundcloud, and for those wondering, yes it is the worst thing you will ever hear.

As if that wasn't weird enough on its own, there's plenty of accusations circulating that they made the song using AI, given the bizarre choice of using an American accent in the song, and it's been pointed out that the cover art is parodying a Drake album cover which isn't exactly someone you want to be aligning yourself with in a rap battle right now.

Shoutout to this quote from Channel 7's story when the song dropped:

[eggthew]

shirt design idea: on the front it says "thank god I dont live in America!" and on the back it says "MY COUNTRY'S GOVERNMENT IS JUST AS BAD AND MY COUNTRY'S HISTORY IS JUST AS BLOODY"

[drferox]

You see, well, the USA situation is looking increasingly like that and I think there’s enough going on there to say LGBTQIA+ Americans should be able to qualify as refugees and seek Asylum.

And this is the petition to ask Australia to do that.

We also have a federal election coming up (start of May) and our conservative party (the Liberals) are not doing that well in the polls, so making this a strongly supported issue could push the federal government just a little more left.

The energy on the ground in Australia at the moment is ‘we hate Trump’ so I’d like to think this has a decent chance of happening. But there are other bloggers who are a bit more political than me @theauspolchronicles @batshit-auspol

[pigeonsplease]

[hydr0phius]

@negative-speedforce yep!

Fellow Aussies, as of Sunday 20th April 2025 (20/04/2025) there are 4 days left to sign this.

Can I have everyone’s attention please? Especially Australians

Sign Petition EN7163 - Asylum for Gender and Sexual Minorities from the United States

There is a petition imploring the Australian government to take in LGBTQIA+ refugees from the USA. Given the rapidly worsening political situation over there, I want to at least give this a go. I don’t have any illusions that it will get through to the people that need to see it but I want to try anyway.

The petition closes in 8 days; if you aren’t Australian, please do me a solid and pass this around. Reblog this if you can. Thank you.

[scp-230]

Auspol is a senator getting the Miku skin and hitting the griddy

[pansoph]

today my dad (60+ asian man) shocked me when i asked how he was voting in the federal elections this year and he said “labour (centre) in house of reps and … greens (left!!!) in the senate” and i said WHAT so loudly because i could not believe a man who voted liberal (right) in the earliest years of my political consciousness was voting greens for the first time ever in this political climate

[identitty-dickruption]

I went to an exhibition on the history of migration and colonial rhetoric in Australia and it really helped me to pinpoint my exact issue with the way non-Australians (and. tbh. some aussies) talk about this country

this map is a piece of propaganda from 1921. honestly what shocked me about it was how little of Australia is marked out as “uninhabited���. I have seen maps shared around on this website that basically mark out the entirety of non-coastal Australia as “empty”. fucking colonialists from 1921 were more generous than some of you

the history of colonial Australia is a history of “taming the untameable land”. this has been reinforced through narratives that this country is:

inherently dangerous

uninhabitable

empty

this rhetoric survives in both the way Australia is imagined by non-Australians and in the self-image of Australia. the (white) aussie battler conquers the unconquerable. the outback is imagined as a post-apocalyptic hellscape. our fauna is categorised as uniquely hellish and unwieldy. so when non-Australians make joke after joke about how scared they are of this place. well you can imagine why it fills me with the kind of rage that can only be generated by the understanding that You Are Reinforcing Colonialism

[bluedragonbooks]

F*ng ‘Australian “Christian” Lobby’ … and their ilk

Green (House of Reps) ballot paper - vote them last or close to it.

White (Senate) ballot paper - you don’t even need to give them a preference at all.

Someone left garbage in our mail box today.

[batshit-auspol]

So the Premier of Victoria (an Australian state) posted this on twitter yesterday

Someone shared it on Reddit asking if that was appropriate language for an Australian politician to be using and the entire thread is just Australians saying "only a dickhead would think this is a problem".

[jenovacomplete]

couldn't fit it into the main post but shoutout to channel 10's response to the whole crowdstrike debacle, lmao

[axvoter]

Blatantly Partisan Party Review X (federal 2025): FUSION | Planet Rescue | Whistleblower Protection | Innovation

Running where: five states for the Senate (not TAS), plus a smattering of House seats across four states (not TAS or WA)

Prior reviews: federal 2022 (which links to my past reviews of most constituent parties), VIC 2022

For newly allied party Australian Progressives, see: federal 2016, federal 2019, federal 2022

What I said before: “It’s not as left-wing as some, it emphasises pragmatic reaction rather than ideological ambition, and some of the policies are clearly a little underdone in trying to reconcile five platforms, but most of their positions contain worthwhile goals.”

What I think this year: This is the longest review I’ve ever written, so if nobody sticks with me to the end then I understand. It’s also a much more negative review than in previous editions. This might surprise some readers, including a couple that I know have volunteered for Fusion before. But the more I worked my way through Fusion's materials, the more I came to dislike this party. The heavy use of images that are quite clearly from generative Artificial Intelligence made matters worse: superficial soulless visuals for a superficial soulless party.

Fusion coalesced in 2022 after Australia’s lax party registration laws were tightened. Its original name was FUSION: Science, Pirate, Secular, Climate Emergency, which embodied the names or main focus of the broadly centrist and left-wing parties that had joined forces. These parties retain an independent existence with individual websites, though these also direct the reader to the main Fusion site. The name has been updated to articulate some core principles of this union, or fusion if you will. As I have said before, putting party positions or slogans in the registered name looks ridiculous.

Earlier this year, Fusion formed an alliance with two extra parties. One, the Australian Progressives, is not too objectionable, although I hadn’t realised they still existed. They have gone from being broadly centre-left in their presentation to pitching themselves as not “‘left’ or ‘right’—we’re about moving forward, ie. PROGRESS”. They describe themselves as motivated by ��evidence, not ideology”, which makes them a good fit with Fusion (I’ll discuss that claim more below), and state that they sit in the “sensible centre”, a phrase almost invariably used by people who are neither sensible nor in the centre (usually well to the right).

The other partnership that Fusion established is incredibly, unbelievably stupid. They have welcomed into their camp Democracy First, a decidedly right-wing anti-migrant vehicle of serial candidate Vern Hughes. Yes, the Vern Hughes. This is shockingly bad and raises serious questions about the judgement of Fusion's leadership. Hughes has belonged to more parties than you’ve had hot dinners in the last week: by my count, he has stood as a candidate for at least eight groupings, promoted numerous extra parties that never attained registration, and his most recent outing was in 2022 for the lunar-right Australian Federation Party (now the Trumpet of Patriots). Democracy First is openly Trumpian—they have a 12-point platform (more a rant) to “drain the swamp in Canberra”—and it is an unwelcome inclusion in the Fusion fold.

Democracy First worked through a bunch of monikers before settling on the current name, including Sensible Centre (that phrase again!). Their Twitter handle is still @sensiblecentre_ and I had to make a thread in September 2021 warning people to pre-emptively block them because they were searching keywords and aggressively trolling people and peddling anti-vax “plandemic” nonsense. Whether it was Hughes or not (and I won’t be surprised if it was him), it was and is discrediting to the group. Hughes is a self-interested crank whose ideology and principles are flexible, but flexibly right-wing. If he is presenting himself to Fusion as having had some revelation to disown far-right positions, more fool them; the bloke has long since proven himself disreputable.

What all this means is that if you have a Fusion candidate in your House division or Fusion is running a Senate ticket in your state, the people involved could believe in anything from techbro futurism, urgent climate action, or “sensible centre” right-wing aggression. This significant variation in approach and priorities means that you should look up the people standing for Fusion on your ballot because you might find yourself more or less favourably disposed towards them than the party as a whole.

I’m now going to turn to the policies and principles that the party has posted on the main Fusion website. Before I launch into my criticisms, let me note key things that I like: the emphasis on whistleblower protections, the promotion of university teaching and research, the strong emphasis on combatting climate change and restoring damaged environments, and many of the digital privacy policies inherited from the Pirate Party. I do, though, wonder if the Pirate movement’s time has passed: I agree that copyright and intellectual property laws need reform, but perhaps in different ways now that we need to protect authors and artists from AI companies who unethically use and even steal material to train their lake-draining hallucination machines (which, as I noted above, this party seems quite happy to use for illustrations rather than photos and art by real people).

Fusion articulate both a set of values and separate principles. They spent a shocking amount of words, including some diagrams, to say not much at all. Both pages are laden with buzzwords that can basically mean whatever you want them to mean, although some of the discussion of values is useful, e.g. that their approach to personal liberty is one of “maximum net freedom”, where one individual’s freedom to act can be restricted justifiably if it limits the freedom of others. The principles page is tedious jargon that reads like the sort of emails many of us would have received from senior managers who use fancy language to express banalities.

Two major conceits animate Fusion. First, they have a frankly naïve fantasy that they can bring together divergent political interests (e.g. greener-than-Green environmentalists and Democracy First right-wingers) to achieve something despite their disagreements. Second, they believe they can do this because they are uniquely focused on evidence, not ideology. These are the sort of people who think “ideological” and “evidence-based” politics are polar opposites.

In reality, all political actors are ideological, and to deny this is either ignorant or dishonest. It is akin to people who claim they do not speak with an accent, only people from other places have accents. Leo Puglisi interviewed Miles Whiticker (NSW lead Senate candidate) and raised this topic. Whiticker defended the party as not taking a “zealous theory-driven position” that is pursued whatever the evidence might be. He defines being centrist as having the attitude that “if the theory clashes with the evidence, we are more likely to support the evidence than the theory”, which is absolutely not what centrism is and basically everyone at every position on the political spectrum believes they follow the evidence.

(also, yes, I keep using interviews from 6 News because Leo is doing the lord’s work for political nerds everywhere, conducting detailed interviews with politicians beyond the major parties)

Let’s turn now to a specific policy: Fusion’s housing policy is a mess. It is a total mess. You are not prepared for how much of a mess this is. Most of Fusion’s policy pages are brief, with bullet points and short paragraphs. The housing policy reads as someone’s passion project and it runs to 10,700 words. The average person is not reading nearly 11,000 words from a party they’ve never heard of, even if they’re good words. And these are not good words. The main proposals revolve around tinkering with taxes. There are a bunch of proposals for much greater government intervention in the rental sector through apps and transparency websites that veer into micromanagement, running counter to Fusion’s own “our party” page that suggests if you support mandated regulatory approaches you’d prefer the Greens. Fusion’s rental proposals would be much more invasive and meddlesome than anything the Greens propose to reform the sector.

The policy jumps all over the show. For instance, it favourably cites NIMBY economist and former Sustainable Australia candidate Cameron Murray. For the purposes of this review, I asked a well-read YIMBY friend for his reaction if told a party was citing Murray favourably and he replied that it’s “almost certainly bad”. At the same time, however, the housing policy favourably refers to Auckland’s zoning reforms, which Murray has downplayed (to such an extent Stuart Donovan and Matthew Maltman absolutely savaged him in a piece reviewing the effects of Auckland’s zoning reforms last December). It’s a muddled assortment of ideas.

But the funniest part is the favourable inclusion of Saudi Arabia’s linear-city megaproject The Line, part of its larger Neom development. You’ve got to be huffing farts to think The Line is a good idea, but the best bit is the bumbling invocation of David Ricardo’s idea of comparative advantage. This concept, central to classical economics, states that countries should focus economic activity on specialisation in industries where they have the greatest efficiencies and lowest opportunity costs. Apparently, the comparative advantage of The Line is that it “will have the economic advantages of being in the desert, and having an uncharacteristic layout”. Is that the best you can do? The comparative advantage of being in the desert.

Another questionable policy is that Fusion wants to declare that ageing is a disease. They pitch this as promoting quality-of-life measures, not as a life-extension policy: if ageing is declared a disease, rather than a natural part of existence, they think this is the magic trick that will enable doctors to prescribe medications that have secondary anti-ageing effects to people who do not have the condition or problem the medication is primarily meant to treat. This has a host of questionable implications and potential for misuse. It’s all a bit silly: there are much better ways to promote quality-of-life measures and healthy ageing than to say the process itself is a disease. The strong whiff of techbro futurism that permeates the party makes me think this is really a policy for anti-ageing fans who think Bryan Johnson is something other than a muddle-headed weirdo.

I could pick on other aspects of their policies and principles but this is quite long enough and I don’t want to repeat the length of their housing policy. Although Fusion contains multitudes, much of it feels driven by the old Future/Science Party, which was very blinkered—the classic science bros who badly need at least a basic education in the humanities. If this is a party made for and by STEM bros, then you can consider me a HASS fellow.

Are there worse parties on the ballot? Yes, many. But they are straightforwardly terrible. Fusion had potential, and I was a fan of some of the parties that came together to form it. I’ve spent so much time on this review because Fusion sit much closer to the positions that I support than, say, Family First, and I think it’s worth articulating why—in 2025 at least—they do not represent a good option, especially not for left-wing voters.

(also, sorry Fusion bros, please don’t @ me: I’ve argued with some of you in DMs before about my reviews and it was very boring)

Recommendation: Give FUSION | Planet Rescue | Whistleblower Protection | Innovation a weak to middling preference. Some individuals might warrant a slightly better preference; any that are aligned with Democracy First should be ranked lowly indeed.

Website: https://www.fusionparty.org.au/

[nando161mando]

[you-need-not-apply]

I’m pretty sure that Australians don’t have more then maybe 30-50k MAX people on tumblr. Like American had some 30 million users in 2020 (aka basically probably peak over the last 7 2018-2025) while Australia only has 26-28million people depending on who you ask (27 to be safe) so I’m just genuinely curious how many of us there must be on here.

If you Currently live in OR were born / raised in Australia and ID as (born/raised + ID, as I know a lot of born/raised here don’t ID as Aussie) you are Australian in this poll!

Please reblog for bigger sample size