Can the Democrats Side-Step Questions They Dislike?

Last night I attended a YACSA Pizza and Politics night in town. About fifteen people showed up to listen to short presentations from:

Senator Simon Birmingham - Federal Liberal Senator and #2 Senate Candidate for SA;
Ruth Russell - Lead Democrats Senate Candidate for SA;
Sarah Hanson-Young - Lead Greens Senate Candidate for SA; and
Tony Bates - Lead Family First Senate Candidate for SA.

Unfortunately, the ALP representative was a last minute apology.

The presentations at the start of the night were fairly routine. They all ran slightly overtime and were full of the standard policy statements.
Simon Birmingham proved himself an articulate and confident voice, with a sound understanding of a wide range of issues. Though I disagreed with a number of his positions, I was impressed with the depth and bredth of his knowledge.
Ruth Russell was her usual self and seemed to love to name-drop. You'd have thought she was stumping for Senator Stott-Despoja between ideological flights of fantasy with, seemingly, minimal groundings in hard facts or data.
Sarah Hanson-Young was a fairly typical young Greenie - fiery, passionate, and angry.
I have to give bonus points to Tony Bates. His speaking style was perhaps a bit reserved and formal for such an event and his spiel was not especially convincing. However, he was willing to come to an event where he was unlikely to have any supporters (and indeed, everyone present was anti-family first). That takes a certain amount of courage and determination. His willingness to engage with us was not unimpressive.

The question period went for over an hour and was by far the highlight of the evening. Numerous questions were answered and several things became apparent.

* The Democrats and the Greens agree on so much they could practically be one party.
* The Democrats like to say "Natasha Stott-Despoja" an awful lot. You could be forgiven for thinking that it was the Stott-Despoja Party and not the Australian Democrats.
* There is a big difference between experienced, competent candidates and fresh faces.
* Family First is not the pure evil it is often made out to be.

I was surprised when Mr Bates explained that Family First had a policy of completely free tertiary education. I was also somewhat appalled. I am, and always have been, fully against free tertiary education. The current pay-when-you-earn-enough system is fairer and more effective in my opinion. One could mount an argument that the current thresholds are too low, or the rates are too high. Overall though, it seems to me that it is unreasonable to ask people who are earning below the median wage to pay for other people to earn above the median wage.

I was less surprised when Mr Bates explained Family First's manufacturing policy. They are protectionists. I have seen this policy from them several times before, it is effectively an infant-industry argument and I am curious as to how well they could implement it. Personally, I think many Australian industries have been coddled for far too long. If they aren't export competitive after sixty-years, they aren't going to be.

Ruth Russell had to before the night finished, as did Sarah Hanson-Young. So, unfortunately I was unable to ask them my question. Fortuitously, Sandy Biar and Aleisha Brown stood in for Ms Russell. Mr Biar is the Democrats candidate for Adelaide and I have met him on several previous occasions through student politics at the University of Adelaide. Ms Brown is their candidate for Makin. I had never met her before, but know her name from around campus where she is the current President of the Democrats Club.

I asked them to explain how they reconciled Compulsory Student Unionism with a belief in Freedom of Association. Ms Brown demonstrated her inexperience in a stammered and broken response in which she outlined the importance of student services and how they have been cut since Voluntary Student Unionism was introduced.
Mr Biar then stepped in and delivered a more articulate response, albeit one that contained no additional content. I was most disappointed. The Democrats were once a bastion of civil-liberties and civil-rights. They now seem to be a collection of angry, bitter radicals.

After the formal proceedings closed, there was some opportunity to mill around and speak to the various candidates. I spoke with Sandy Biar about the VSU question I had raised and he indicated that he actually supported VSU, though that was not Democrats policy.

This came as a shock to me. What happened to the Democrats being a collection of like-minded individuals who were not hampered by a need to toe the party line? Is this indicative of a broader change within the party? Are the Democrats now as restricted as Labor and the Liberals? Does the policy of conscience voting exist in theory alone?


Events such as last night's YACSA Pizza and Politics are phenomenal means for young people to interact with their representatives and candidates. My only regret is that the evening couldn't last longer.

Furthermre, it seems to have had a limited impact on my voting intentions. My current intentions for the House of Reps remains the same (an unfortunate state of affairs induced by my disdain for the Liberal's Tracy Marsh and wariness of Sandy Biar, leaving me little choice but Labor's Kate Ellis). My impresions for the senate race have modified slightly. Family First shall move from their traditional place at the bottom of the ballot, to be replaced by long-time competitor for last place by One Nation. Family First will now sit at second-to-last (unless a particularly nasty one-issue party stumbles along). Simon Birmingham was fairly impressive and I'll probably include him in my top ten.

Yes, I vote below the line. Always have. Always will. This year I aim to meet every Senate candidate for South Australia and every candidate for the seat of Adelaide (along with as many other candidates as I possibly can). I suspect that shall be quite the tall order. This blog will hopefully record how I go and detail a few interesting meetings with politicians of various stripes and sizes.

Edit: I fixed a few spelling-errors and added the hyperlinks. Daniel. (22:30 17-Oct-07)

Could Australian Politics Be A Little Biased?

John over at Australian Politics - a blog, posted about today's announcement of the new Australian Hospital Nursing Schools scheme by Prime Minister John Howard and Health Minister Tony Abbott.

I will avoid discussion of John's take on the nursing schools, though I will say that I am, in theory at least, a supporter of the Government's proposal. I was a partner (admittedly the junior partner) in a community nursing business for two years and involved in the administration for well over a year prior to that. Though not a nurse myself, I was privilege to a lot of conversations over this time about what makes a good nurse and how nurses should be trained.
Every nurse who worked for us bar one was trained before the current university system was in place. And every nurse that I remember speaking to, both within and outside the business, thought that the in-hospital training system was far superior to the current university system. Certainly, my experience was that the hospital-trained nurses were superior in skill. It is important to note that that may be a function of their (often far) greater experience after training (due to an obvious age discrepancy). I must admit to a strong level of bias and little objective consideration of the topic and will thus avoid any formal consideration of the topic.

The focus of this post, however, is not the scheme announced by Mr Howard and Mr Abbott today. It is, what I believe to be, the shocking misrepresentation of Mr Howard.

Read the press release.
Now, does Mr Howard sound like he is taking all the credit for himself, or does he sound like he attributes it to "the Government" which he routinely refers to as "we". Is 'we' a term commonly used to describe a single person? Or, is it a term commonly used to refer to a collection of people, such as, perhaps, a team?

How do your views correlate with John's take?

Traditionally I have enjoyed John's well-reasoned, well-written, and justly balanced posts. Today I was disappointed. I fail to see how Mr Howard "pointedly talks about 'I'". I think that the copious use of 'we' is evidence that he was speaking of a team. Mr Howard does make significant usage of the 'I', when discussing personal anecdotal evidence to support the policy, when discussing his personal opinion of the policy. Does membership of a team preclude a personal opinion? Why would we expect our elected representatives not to hold personal opinions? Indeed, should we not both expect and demand that they not only hold personal opinions, but cleave strongly to their personal principles and beliefs?

It is ludicrous to think that someone who obtained Mr Howard's position would be anything but a team-player. Furthermore, I must ask, why is it that Mr Howard must talk of the 'team'? Why should he be compelled to suddenly, specifically and overtly, discuss the team that has been in existence for, supposedly, his entire prime ministership?

In a second post, John has further attacked Mr Howard along these lines. I have yet to have the chance to read the other sources John has drawn from - partly because he has neglected to provide any link to them and I am thus trawling for them on my lonesome... I will update this post as I gain the opportunity to read through these speeches.

For those who would choose now to label me a Liberal and Howard-supporter: I intend to vote for Kate Ellis in the House of Representatives at the forthcoming election. Ms Ellis is the current Labor Member for Adelaide and a thoroughly decent and capable person (whom I was fortunate enough to meet at the Youth Parliament Mentorship Dinner back in July). Her Liberal opponent is Tracy Marsh, whose basic platform seems to be "I am a good mother and I'll do what Mr Howard tells me to" - not exactly a strong position. At this stage I intend to preference the Liberals over the ALP in the Upper House.

As previous posts demonstrate I have a tendency to support the Liberal's positions more frequently than I support the ALP. Thus, I must wonder if it is merely my personal prejudices and biases that form my opinion that Mr Howard did in fact refer to the team. I must ask, would someone without biases, or with biases against Mr Howard see it otherwise?

Please, leave a comment and let me know how you feel the nursing press release reads. Do you think that Mr Howard was explicitly referring to himself? If not, do you think it is fair to assume that he was implicitly doing so (and, effectively, using the royal 'we')? If you do think he was implicitly doing so, why do you think so?

How Can I Fulfil My Civic Duty?

I have spent the last few years flirting with various political parties. The Democrats, the ALP, the Liberals, the Greens once or twice, and on one particularly unfortunate night the Libertarian Party.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Democrats, a product of growing up in a left-of-centre household in the nineties I imagine. Amazingly I even agreed with most of their policies. At least until a couple of years ago when it seemed that they suddenly took a hard left turn and lost all semblance of sanity. I have since discovered that they shifted only slightly to the left (from where I fell in love with them at any rate), whilst I had leapt quite some way to the right of my starting point.

Traditionally I have ranged from solidly left to left-of-centre, but over the past five or so years I have slowly drifted to the right. At least it seems that way. A view strengthened by the attitudes of my friends and the fact that I am about as right-wing as most of them could tolerate. The drift has been especially noticeable over the last 18 months. A fact I contribute to my work towards my soul-consuming economics degree.

Where I started on the left puts me somewhere in the less-centrist aspects of the ALP, a position I always supported even though they have often left a bad taste in my mouth. My grandfather was a brickie. I grew up in the outer-Northern suburbs of Adelaide – mostly in Elizabeth and Salisbury. Until recently I have always lived in a very safe Labor seat for both federal and state electorates. My grandparents voted Labor. My parents voted Labor – except on those few occasions when they voted Democrats. My siblings and the vast majority of my friends tend to view the Liberal Party as evil, immoral, and heartless.

Yet, despite this strong history and family support and my (past) general agreement with most of the Labor party’s policies, there has always been something that held me back from joining. I could never quite get behind them. This confused me a little, but I put it down partly to their strong love of affirmative action and their hatred of all-things nuclear. Mostly, I marked it off as a dislike of the way they worked in federal opposition – after all if we were just looking at a state level I was quite happy to support Rann. Though I must confess to supporting Olsen in principal at least (it should be noted that I was not nearly as politically aware during the Olsen government as I have been in recent years).

More recently I have worked out why the ALP always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I can’t stand the unions. This has become increasingly evident to me as I continue my studies and as I lock horns with various left-activists around the campus grounds. It’s not that I am against the underemployed, the poor, or the underpaid. I have a strong desire to help all of these groups. I’ve belonged to each of those groups at one time or another. The unions do not, in my mind, support the labour movement. They support the labour movement as it stood in the 1950s. I have my doubts about the WorkChoices legislation. It goes too far. But it is a superior system to what we have now, and a far superior system to what many unionists seem to crave. Is it any surprise that union membership is so low? I want to work part-time, I want to work flexi-time. I don’t want to work full-time. I’d rather work nights than days. I’d rather negotiate my own contracts without any award underpinning. I’d really rather not have my union stand up to the government and say they represent my moral views on abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage or any other moral position (*cough* SDA *cough*). I'd rather have a higher base wage than penalty rates. Unions have an important part to play in society. Workers have as much need and right to a special interest group as does any other subset of society. Collective bargaining is not an inherently evil thing.

No, my problem with the unions stems from three things. My first concern is their tendency to thuggish or militant actions – a methodology that seems ingrained into the culture of some unions. My second concern is that they do not represent the actual workers but instead represent their ideal view of their workers and try to mould industry into a shape that only supports this ideal 1950s view. My third concern is the same concern that I have of (nearly) all special interest groups. They are blind to the bigger picture. They do not care about the unemployed. They do not care about the corporations that employ their members. To my eyes they either do not care about the broader scope of society or the economy, or they have no understanding of the economy.

This is where I would normally explain the price-floor concept and talk about the damage done by excessive minimum wages. Then I’d talk about the fact that even working at minimum wage you are far, far better off than the long-term unemployed, the homeless, and the destitute. Would our efforts not be better focussed on the most disadvantaged aspects of our society rather than those who can already feed themselves?
These are questions and examinations for another time though. The purpose of this post is not to bash the unions I once thought were heroes.

My problem with the Labor party is the same as my problem with any other party that is strongly influenced or controlled by a single set of special interest groups. Special interest groups represent only their specific set of interests, I want my leaders to represent the interests of Australia as a nation. Not just the environment. Not just the religious. Not just the unions. I believe that special interest parties are nearly as bad as, and far more dangerous than, single-issue parties.

As I have come to realise over the past four or five years, I am not a Labor supporter. Nor do I support the Democrats. Family First and One Nation make me gag. The Greens have enjoyed (or suffered as the case may be) my support on only a few rare occasions, and normally they embody everything that I hate about the left. The Liberal party has always been taboo and anathema to me. Never would I consider joining their ranks. I may find myself supporting certain aspects of their policies, but surely this is merely a bizarre coincidence.

That is how I thought for quite some time. I was a closet-Liberal supporter. I wasn’t even willing to admit my support for the mainstay of their policies to myself. I certainly wasn’t about to do it in front of my friends. I have slowly slid to the right over the past five years and I have slowly come to stand in a more Liberal position than I ever would have thought possible. I still rile against some of their social policies. I am most strongly pro-choice, pro-euthanasia, pro-gay rights. Others of their policies are perhaps harsher than I would like to see, but I am not a strong supporter of affirmative action – it has its place and its uses, but it is over-utilised and over-loved by the left and by Australia today. The further I run down the Liberal party platform the more I find myself agreeing with and the more I start thinking about joining the Liberals. Though there is always a nagging concern that the Liberal party is merely a special-interest party of big-business, I have yet to see any compelling evidence of this fact (feel free to point me towards some).


I went to the South Australian Youth Parliament in July this year. It was a thoroughly exhilarating, exhausting and stressful week. Indeed, I have never had a more stressful week in my life. I have never had a more entertaining week in my life. At the start of the week a guest speaker (I think it may have been the YMCA director) spoke about how the program could be a life-changing one for the participants. I scoffed at this notion. I still don’t support it fully. It is an over-statement, but not an especially egregious one. My confidence has grown exponentially. It was, perhaps, the catalyst that has spurned a major shift in how I view myself and the world around me. I may not appear at all changed to those around me, but I feel different. The week was phenomenal and I met a large number of interesting people. Including some like-minded individuals (at least on the politics and policy front) who, it turned out, are members of the Liberal party. It was an eye-opening and thought-provoking week. I left convinced that I would be joining the Liberal party within the week.

After recovering from the sleep-deprivation that permeated the program I did some further research – including reading the party’s charter and latest platform. I was convinced. I may not support all of their positions, but I support most of them. Yes, the current federal leadership irritates me at times, and yes I would be a very wet Liberal. I thought (dreamt?) that maybe if I joined I could work my way into a leadership position and bring the Liberal party around on those few areas on which I disagree. I signed up for a membership kit that night.

Two things followed on from this decision. I had not expected either of them, though in retrospect I should have expected both. The first thing was that more than a few of my friends suddenly weren’t so friendly. It would seem that it is fine for me to argue a right-wing conservative position in our regular lunch-time debates, but that it is not even remotely acceptable to actually belong to a party which supports that position. I have never been quiet about my beliefs. I have never been shy to voice my opinion on any topic, regardless of the controversy, regardless of the political incorrectness of my view. So it was surprising when a collection of friends started treating me differently, started treating me like I was the enemy. My views hadn’t changed. My beliefs hadn’t changed. My opinions hadn’t changed. My desire and willingness to stand for what I believe in hadn’t changed. I was still the same person. I remain baffled as to their reaction.

The second thing was the federal government losing their minds in regards to the Haneef case. This flagrant civil rights violation had me sitting up and re-examining everything I had thought about the Liberal party. I cannot support the mainstay of the current federal leadership. The mainstay of Cabinet hold views I cannot support, views that I will not support. How can I join a party that I cannot publicly support on important issues?

I thought for quite some time about it. I still agree with the Liberals on a large number of issues. Indeed, I agree with them on far, far more than I disagree. They probably occupy a position closer to my views than any other political party in Australia today. If I join a political party I will be aiming for the important positions, probably even a state or federal seat in parliament and ultimately the parliamentary leadership. I cannot join a party if I cannot toe the party line. I cannot toe the Liberal line on any security or civil-liberties matters. They ban books. They detain innocents. They act against the judiciary. They blur the separation of powers. They ignore States-rights. They ignore Ministerial-responsibilities and accountability. I agree with them on much, but I am neither capable nor willing to toe a line that I do not believe in. Joining the Liberal party would merely set me up for failure.

This leaves me in the same conundrum I was in at this time last year. I have strong political views. I believe, fervently, that there is a social and civic duty, a responsibility to voice your opinions and beliefs. I believe that one is obliged to stand for what they believe in. I believe that one cannot sit by and blithely watch others mismanage their nation or their state. You have a social responsibility to watch for wrongs and evil. If you see them you have a moral obligation to voice criticism. If you see them you have a civic duty to act. For me this means standing in the public eye and presenting my argument. For me this means actively working within a political party to bring about the change that I see as necessary, to work to protect us from abuses of our civil liberties and freedom.

How can I do this if I can support no political party?


Daniel O'Brien.




Note: In the above post I talk about being right-of-centre. Whilst this is not a grossly inaccurate statement it is not a simple truth. The Political Compass notes me as slightly left and slightly libertarian. My own examinations note me as slightly right on an economic scale and moderately libertarian. Defining a political position is a complex and likely impossible thing. I am pro-choice and pro-gay rights. Two strongly left positions. I am against affirmative action and dislike unions. Two strongly right positions. Overall, if you were to sum all of my positions on any given topic you would find me somewhat in the centre. I believe that no position is permanent. On any given topic what is wrong today may be right tomorrow. This is especially true on economic policies. Protectionism has its time and its place, though a free and competitive market is the aim and will bring the greatest good to most. Extreme positions – left, right or otherwise – are foolish and will ultimately fail. A considered, researched and integrated portfolio of solutions that are regularly, frequently and critically reviewed is the only responsible choice.