I intended to give you the results of the Australian elections today. I kept putting it off to see if we would know more but we don\u2019t, so this the wider picture. These are the results, then\u2026 sort-of.<\/p>\n
Labor had a small victory, that looked on paper like a landslide. They have the Lower House but not the Upper. They\u2019ve gained quite a few more seats in the House of Representatives, but many of them were gained by slender margins and some of them (my own, for instance) are still borderline and the votes are still being counted. It\u2019s as if most Australians looked at the candidates and looked at elections outside Australia and said \u201cWe\u2019re going to make our preferences matter.\u201d When a single electorate goes to layers of preferences, counting is slow and it has to be revisited when the seat is a close call. This is happening all over the place.<\/p>\n
In the Lower House, we voted out the leader of the Opposition and quite possibly the leader of the Greens in his\/their own seats, plus gave their parties fewer seat. Dutton (Opposition) gave a graceful speech to cede everything. Bandt (Greens) is still claiming a Greens victory. He has between 0 and 2 seats in the House of Representatives That Lower House), dropping from four, but he\u2019s focused on the number of primary votes his party received over the whole country, I suspect. They\u2019re down, but not by much. My assessment of this is that a large number of voters do not see the hate that I see. Enough do, and so the Greens are diminished, but, unlike the elves, they\u2019re not so diminished they will not go into the west. The far right Trumpet of Patriots, on the other hand, got so few votes that I look at the data and think \u201cAre there any far right politicians in this parliament at all.\u201d Our far right is the right end of the US Republican or the UK Tories, if that helps.<\/p>\n
As I read things, most of the controversial far right and left didn\u2019t get enough votes to get lower house seats. This includes a handful of virulent antisemites. Those candidates trying to push extreme views (not just hate of people who happen to be Jewish) also didn\u2019t fair as well as the pre-election polls said. Our House of Representatives contains far less hate than I had expected. This is a good thing.<\/p>\n
While the same pattern applies to the Senate, the nature of the Senate vote (namely the quota system) mean that the changes are less. The far right is diminished, but not nearly as much as in the Lower House. Greens will still have a lot of power, and may be led by someone who really, really hates Jews. In some ways the Greens holding balance of power is good: if they vote wisely, they can be a curb on extreme policies by the government, and, if they go back to the roots they\u2019ve been avoiding recently, will also push for environmental care and social justice. This is not, however, what they did in some significant votes in the past, so the Senate may become just a mess. Everything depends on the Greens paying attention to Australia and not their inner voices.<\/p>\n
An update on antisemitism: it\u2019s worse this week both on the right and on the left. Voters are not the loud voices in Australia, because of our system and because we\u2019re part of the western world\u2019s set of shouting matches between so many people who refuse to think for themselves. This hate is largely the usual mob trying to share their bigotry. The big thing is that Australia as a whole has voted against hate and also against a Trump model of government. We remain our ratbag and mostly centre-left self. We no longer, however, have a functional left wing party (Greens are now far further left than they used to be) and we don\u2019t have any functional right wing party (the Coalition is very close to Labor in many ways and we did not put the far right in their place). The outcome of our next election may well rest on whether anyone\u2019s clever enough to change this.<\/p>\n
The path our voting took supports that sense reported on in newspapers of most parties sucking right now. It also supports my view of Australia, which is that the quiet majority do their own thinking and we will not know what that thinking is until election day. This time they\u2019ve voted for social cohesion and stability. We often do that. What looks to the world like the left, is actually the most stable option for us.<\/p>\n
If any of this appears self-contradictory, it\u2019s because the big thing Australia has done is quite extraordinary. It has said \u201cAll the elections outside Australia are not our story.\u201d Australians write our own story, it appears.<\/p>\n
For me, this means, despite the massive increase in antisemitism, we\u2019re not following the 1930s German route. We have a lively and dangerous far right and far left, and an enormous amount of antisemitism, but the voters have said, \u201cNot in my parliament.\u201d We\u2019re not doing what we did in the Morrison days, and following the US path, either.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know where we are going, but that\u2019s a big improvement on last week. Better not to know than to know that Jewish Australia is walking into hell. We are not. Not safe. Not comfortable. Not loved by extremists on either side. But we are part of Australia and Australia itself says so. Every single Jewish candidate received a normal level of votes. None in office was thrown out of office. The question now is will the far right and the Greens accept this and reduce their polemic. If they do, then the hate will reduce and Australia will be a lot safer and I can return to my own life. I have books to write…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I intended to give you the results of the Australian elections today. I kept putting it off to see if we would know more but we don\u2019t, so this the wider picture. These are the results, then\u2026 sort-of. Labor had a small victory, that looked on paper like a landslide. They have the Lower House […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,56],"tags":[656,112,27,475,1046,88,39],"class_list":["post-4009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-life-experiences","tag-antisemitism","tag-australia","tag-canberra","tag-elections","tag-greens","tag-politics","tag-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4009"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4010,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4009\/revisions\/4010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}