The Labour party won the general election in Australia, roundly defeating the conservative coalition led by the Liberal party. While needing 76 seats to have a majority, Labour already has 85, with the coalition only 41. Various independent candidates have nine seats, with 16 yet undecided.
As in Canada, the conservatives hoped to win but Trump’s baleful influence effect seems to have sunk them in Australia too. Like in Canada, the Liberal party leader Peter Dutton lost his own long-held seat.
Dutton’s brand of hard-line conservatism, his support for controversial immigration policies – like sending asylum seekers to offshore detention centres – and his fierce criticism of China, all led to comparisons with US President Donald Trump.
It’s a likeness he has rejected but then the Coalition pursued policies that seemed to have been borrowed from the Trump administration.
Dutton said that if elected he would cut public sector jobs – more than 40,000 by some estimates. This reminded voters of billionaire Elon Musk’s Doge, or Department of Government Efficiency, which has slashed US bureaucracy. Dutton later walked back the plan.
The Coalition even appointed Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as shadow minister for government efficiency. And images of her wearing a cap with the words Maga – short for the popular Trump slogan, Make America Great Again – have became a key talking point.
None of this served Dutton well and he knew it. Towards the end of the campaign, he tried to shake off Trump’s shadow, and in the final leaders’ debate he repeatedly told the audience that he didn’t know Trump before attempting to answer questions on him.
“The Coalition will probably regret issuing messages that came across as supporting Trump and opposing the US Democrats,” said Frank Mols, a political science lecturer at the University of Queensland.
Trump is proving to be a millstone around the neck of any politician who embraces him.
In the US, these results and Trump’s own historically low approval ratings must be sending jitters through members of his party who have been unswervingly supportive of him. But we will not know until the mid term elections in November 2026 what the effect will be and a lot can happen in that time.
They spell it ‘Labor’ in Oz.
Finally some unambigously good news.
-Also, the success of the Brit Trump wannabee party in recent British local elections should be a greater concern for the tory party than for Labour. And Nigel Farage’s party is unlikely to provide impressive results now that they face *real* responsibilities.
Furthermote, Germany is tagging AfD as an extreme-right party, naturally triggering an outburst from their American allies.
I wonder whether non-Labor left-of-centre voters decided to vote strategically, as many in Canada did.
People all over the world are coming to recognize the fact that tRump is the anti-Midas: Everything he touches turns to sh*t.
It’s terrible that he and his minions have control over the US at present, but if that reality makes people in other countries recognize the BS associated with this “movement” and avoid it, then some good has already come of it.
Rob Grigjanis @ 3
Likely, as countries with the antiquated ‘first past the post’ system share similar problems.
The Germans -thorough to the point of stereotype- have a hybrid system that includes the possibility of voting for individuals as well as proportional representation for political parties.
Rob Grigjanis @ 1
Well, you say tomato, I say potato.
Good for Australia!
Meanwhile, here in Canada I’ve had two robocalls doing a telephone poll for the “Republican Party of Alberta” because this province loses its shit when the Liberals win an election so the separatists start flaring up again. I did the poll the first time then shockingly they let you record a voice message at the end (mine included a profanity and what I thought of their mental state), but didn’t have time for that nonsense again on the second call though I regret it now because I wouldn’t mind to have left a second message.
Third (and last) comment.
Jimf @ 4
“People all over the world are coming to recognize the fact that tRump is the anti-Midas: Everything he touches turns to sh*t.”
Foreign people need to know this about MAGA and their secondary tumors: They are CRAZY. Shout this news from the rooftops!
“Minnesota GOP Elects Flat-Earther as Party Leader: Trend of Fringe Politics Rising ?”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=sNfmGaHxvhI
-Satanic chemtrails as distinct from filthy secular chemtrails? Also, I think we can remove the question mark from the headline.
Except where it matters of course.
Lets say there is a landslide in the house and Democrats control senate but not filibuster proof. What materially will change ? The fact is that unlike parliamentary democracies where the dear leader can be removed like Lettuce Liz the US is messed up for the next 3 years and 9 months (atleast) -- and thats even assuming that the Democrats come to their senses instead of doing their usual we must appeal to Trump voters and we must court billionaires and big businesses
People keep speculating on what will happen in the midterm elections or the next presidential election. But that seems delusional because there will not be any free and fair federal election in the foreseeable future unless something major changes (and I don’t really know what that could be). The current administration is already planning to rig the process before, during and after the elections so that the “wrong” people either cannot be eligible to vote, cannot actually vote or won’t have their vote counted.
And even if that wasn’t enough, who’s going to make them respect the results? They don’t follow the law and no one can enforce it since the enforcer is also in on the fraud.
So any plan that relies on using the normal way of changing the current government is doomed to fail. The US is no longer a democracy; it’s not just a future possibility.
Just to make things complicated, in Australia the word is spelled “labour” but the party name is indeed spelled “Labor”. I think it was a deliberate americanisation that may have made sense at the time the party was named.
@Deepak Shetty, 8:
At this point I wouldn’t put it past them looking at their electoral performances in 2016 and 2024 and thinking “well we tried picking a woman, and that didn’t work… and we tried picking a woman of colour and that didn’t work… we’re going to have try picking a trans woman of colour… who’s gay and an atheist Jew”. South Park’s parody of Kathleen Kennedy springs to mind.
The Democrats remind me of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, a group who enjoyed the warm feeling they got from being a righteous opposition with no responsibility to actually do anything so much that they actively sabotaged any chance they had at gaining any power.
Also: what Jean said @9.
So Australians are a sensible people? Lucky.
Also, this infighting instead of agreeing we have to remove the scourge of MAGA first isn’t helping. Australians and Canadians leftists understood the task and voted to keep their countries functional, even if it meant showing up to actually vote and voting for the “lesser evil” (hate this term, makes people that say that unironically sound like their special angels that are more enlightened than everybody else) Liberals and Labor respectively instead of small leftist parties. Just like what the super purist leftists were doing back in 2024, it’s happening again now: demoralize leftists, give in to fear, and make them resign to defeatism.
Talks of Dems not trying to stand to Trump (even they are if you bother to focus on local news, plus surveys have showed that most voters don’t want Dems to just oppose the feds, they want them to focus on local issues too), talks that elections don’t matter anymore (not yet at least but already saying its over as if fact) and talking about Dems being useless even if elected (let’s not put the carriage before the horse) are all excellent recipes for convince leftists that nothing matters and even trying will be futile so why bother. Whining in blogs or protesting just once sure, but never to get off their butts and do something. The leftists in Canada and Australia showed us how it’s done (they even voted for “bad” center-left parties) but here we are complaining instead of taking notes.
I had a little trouble parsing some of what kitcarm wrote @13 (it’s approaching this old fart’s bedtime); but I think they’re probably right. I remain hopeful, if not all the way to optimistic, that the tyrany of the oligarchs can be avoided.
The first thing to watch for is probably what happens when a bunch of cases finally wend their way to the Supreme Court. There are some signs that at least two of the gang of six will be not entirely shameless.
The next interesting thing to happen will likely be the midterms which are coming up in about a year and a half. I think I can still hope that we won’t be having Russian-style elections that soon.
But even if I’ve lost all hope by then, I’ll definitely be voting, and not for Republicans or third-party candidates. I’ve been wrong about other things before (surprise, surprise); and I could be wrong about the hoplessness, too.
kitcarm @13,
I’m Canadian and I voted for the Liberals. But we do have much more robust institutions than in the US partly because not everything is partisan here especially regarding running the elections (and by the way, so-called bipartisan entities in the US are also partisan). And we don’t have the same toxic culture and this idea of US exceptionalism. That goes a long way towards maintaining some sort of perspective and balance that helps keeping extremism in check (mostly and that may not last).
What I meant @9 is not that elections don’t matter, it’s just that it won’t be enough now that the MAGA mob/christofascists have been allowed to take control of the government. There are a bunch of incompetent buffoons but there are also a lot of behind the scene people who have been planning for this for quite a while with elaborate plans. So thinking that planning on a successful election campaign and getting the vote out will be enough to get back to a normal state is just naive. A lot more will be needed.
That’s my view from outside. There isn’t anything I personally can do but I definitely will be (and already am) in the splash zone. I may be overreacting somewhat and may be seen as a conspiracist but I’d rather that than not saying anything. If this opens a few eyes then that is worth it.
It’s similar in Australia.
While a lot of formerly Liberal (conservative) seats fell to Labor, a good number fell to “teal” (“blue” conservative + “green”), candidates who’d formerly have found a place in the moderate wing of the Liberal party, but are now no longer comfortable with the direction of that party.
That had already happened in the previous election, and the Liberal Party thought the answer was to go further to the right.
As for the counts, they are still media forecasts, even if a very large proportion of them will turn out to be correct. The result only becomes final when the results are declared by the Australian Electoral Commission. That will usually take a week or two, because of the relative complexity of the STV vote system used in Australian Senate elections.
On the comical side, Australian mining magnate (and possibly billionaire) Clive Palmer, spend AUD80 million (about USD52 million) on campaign advertising for his Trumpet of Patriots party (yes, seriously) and will probably fail to win a single seat after running in 100 out of 150 House of Representatives seats and in all states for the Senate.
@Phil Hoenig
That’s pretty much correct, but it’s a bit more complicated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Labor_Party#Name_and_spelling
Also, Australian Dictionaries, like the Macquarie, generally list both American and British spellings of a lot of words (including labour/labor) s spelling variants with equal status, though the British spellings are probably used far more often in most cases.
@ 12 kitcarm
A people with a deeply ingrained anti-authoritarian streak. (I mean what do you expect from a former convict colony.)
By American standards we’re irredeemably socialist. 8-0
Only if they didn’t understand their own electoral system -- which is of course possible -- at least as far as the House of Representatives (the “lower” and more powerful house) is concerned. Australian voters are required to put all candidates for the single-member constituencies of that house in order, and until some candidate gets at least 50% +1 of the vote, the lowest-scoring are successively eliminated and votes for them redistributed. Hence if you put Labor above the Coalition in your ordering, you will be voting for Labor if both are still in the running when all those you placed above Labor have been eliminated.
Hmm… thinking again about #19, I’m wrong, there are cases where it would make a difference. Suppose there are 3 canddiates, Labor, Coalition and Green, and all those who put Green first put Labor second, but some of those who put Labor first, put Coalition second -- and the total of those who put Labor or Green first is more than 50% of the total. Then if Labor have more first votes than Green, Labor will win, but if Green have more first votes, Coalition could win.
The Trump-repulsion effect has not yet damaged the British Union of Faragists (“Reform UK”), if the recent local, mayoral and byelection election results are anything to go by. Of course, these elections were not going to change the government, but Farage has now said that every local council his minions will now be running will have a DOGE. We can confidently expect a good deal of chaos and disrupted services and probably a good bit of corruption, but he’ll find that he can’t simply disregard the law as Mump has been able to do.
@KG
I don’t think that you were. You were talking about what happens to an individual vote in your first post. In your second post you’re talking about the outcome in a whole electorate.
In the second example, if the Greens are eliminated from the count first, the result confirms the choices made -- enough Greens said “Greens first, but if not them, Coalition” than said “Greens first, but if not them, Labor” to tip the vote in favour of the Coalition. That doesn’t seem like a perverse outcome to me, though politically speaking it’s probably unlikely.
Note that that result (Coalition wins if the Greens are eliminated before Labor) isn’t a necessary outcome of that scenario. The result depends on the number of first preferences that Labor and the Coalition get, and on what the split is on the second preferences is from the Greens. I’ve run out of posts in the topic, but constructing reasonable numbers to make the outcome fall either way shouldn’t be hard.
Tp people in the US who are interested in resisting the Mump regime and aren’t sure how to organize, one option is to participate in Representative Pramila Jayapal’s Resistance Lab. Today was the first repetition of the 2nd event in the series. I think recordings of the first event are available on social media. It looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xMpZmLwdHw is the youtube version of the first event.
Australia uses the Single Transferrable Vote, so there is no need to vote tactically. You give your first preference to the party you want to win. You give your second preference to the party you would like to win if and only if your first choice is eliminated, your third preference to the party you would like to win if and only if both your first and second choices are eliminated, and so forth.
The only thing messing with this otherwise-perfect system is compulsory voting; meaning that in every election, there is a pool of people who are pissed off at being required to vote, and who thus might easily be manipulated into voting a certain way by means of a naked appeal to emotion.
We counters knew it would be a bloodbath by how early the result was beyond doubt -- about an hour after polls closed in South Australia. The eastern states alone had already settled the question.
#5 bjerger replying to #3 Grigjanis
This reply seems to indicate you think Australia has a FPTP system, but we don’t. Ours is proportional (the prime minister is simply the leader of whichever party claims the most seats -- in US terms, this would mean whoever wins the congressional elections also decides the presidency) and involves both instant runoff and single transferable vote systems (upper and lower house respectively).
#24 bluerizlagirl
But this is considered more than made up for by the fact that being required to vote induces a large number of people to put at least a modicum of thought into the candidates. Plus, the manipulation by emotion can be equally used by any party, and so favours no one strongly.
Holms @25:
No, I knew it wasn’t FPTP, but I couldn’t be arsed to dig into the details, there being enough Aussies around to educate an ignorant Pom. I just thought that if, in a given constituency, enough people switched from (say) (1) Green (2) Labor, to (1) Labor (2) Green, that that might tilt the odds in Labor’s favour for that constituency.
I find the title of this post misleading: in what sense has Trumpism been tried or even been offered anywhere else?
What are the hallmarks of Trumpism? One can, with a little knowledge of history, sum up things like Reaganomics, Thatcherism, Blairism and similar. How could one sum up what’s going on now? And what possible precedents are there for it elsewhere? I’d posit that Trumpism, by any reasonable definition
(a) has never even been offered to any electorate any time in history before, in any country and
(b) would be unlikely to succeed in any other country.
I can think of a number of pretty specific reasons for this, but few of them are particularly complimentary to the culture of the USA, so I’m going to leave them as an exercise for the reader. Do YOU think Trump, and all he’s done, could be sold to the electorate somewhere else? Maybe where you live?
This is not to say other countries couldn’t elect something bad. I just can’t imagine anywhere electing anything worse. (Bear in mind: Liz Truss -- against stiff competition from her three immediate predecessors by some margin the worst Prime Minister in British history) was NOT elected Prime Minister of the UK, and her own party defenestrated her within 45 days, and her own constituency threw her out at the very next opportunity, leading to one of the best moments of the election last year when she didn’t even have the grace to give a concession speech and appeared too stupid to know which way to walk off the stage).
Other countries have, of course, elected people as bad as Trump by some limited metrics (looking at you, Hungary/Turkey/Israel), but most of those are vaguely competent.
@sonofrojblake @11
Shrug -- both women were qualified -- more so than the dweebs who do get elected so I dont really have a problem with a nerdy trans atheist muslim gay socialist communist woman as long as she can clearly articulate a liberal left position and liberal left policy instead of “look Liz Cheney opposes trump , she is a good one to campaign with or look billionaire Mark Cuban likes us too (Billionaires should be scared to come close to a true liberal left candidate)”
I know you think that if you dont win the election you cant do anything(not true) -- but hell if I wanted to “win” the last election I could have just become a Trump supporter(it would need a lobotomy, but still), no ?
@ sonofroj
Yes, there’s no way anyone other than a white cishet man could possibly a candidate unless they’re a “DEI hire”. Thanks for sharing your usual thoughtful input.
@Deepak Shetty, 28:
No argument there -- they were both more qualified than anyone the Republicans even had as a potential candidate, let alone the dumbass they ended up with.
I wouldn’t have a problem with such a candidate either… if I thought for a second that sufficient other people would vote for them. However, I live in the really real world, where hordes of dolts are allowed to, and do, vote. So, whether your principles like it or not, if you want actual POWER, you have to think about what would appeal to them, as well.
Do, please, regale me with all the significant achievements of the UK Conservative party since last year, or the Democrats since January 20th. Tell you what -- I’ll hold my breath while you type them all out. Won’t take you long…
Well, that’s one approach, certainly.
However, a better approach might have been to nominate someone for the Democrats who had more of a chance of winning. And right now, in the USA, what that means is -- a man. You can rail against that… and lose, or you can acknowledge it and win. The Democrats have gone with option 1 twice now. We’ll see how often they try it in the future. Maybe one day it won’t be true, but for now the data is in. A definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.