We have four Major Parties - Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals, and the Greens. If you understand their relative power based on our system of government, you’ll see that we’re somewhere in between the US and the EU with regards to representational democracy. It’s not great, but in the Anglospheric context we do pretty well because the others don’t have our combination of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), Proportional Representative Voting (PRV) and Mandatory Voting.
Labor is the largest single party in the Lower House. The Liberal Party has (almost) never gained a true majority. The National Party, with whom the Liberal Party coalesces (known in Australia as The Coalition or the LNP) is our current major opposition, and they only hold that position as a coalition. The Greens regularly poll between 9-12%, which causes our Federal Senate to end up giving them a significant amount of power. We also (thanks to changes a recent government made) have a significant crossbench made up of The Greens, minor parties and independents. Our current senate (and most previous Senates) has many potential ‘kingmakers’ (including previous AFL legend David Pocock, Jacqui Lambie and others) which mean that governments can’t pass legislation without courting those outside their party.
To the outsider it may seem that we only have two parties, but in our context we understand it to be more complex than that. Many Australian jurisdictions have known minority-government, government-by-coalition and Lower House government tempered by Upper House diversity which tempers the passage of legislation.
Like I said, it’s not a perfect system (and pretty far from direct democracy) but we sit in this interesting position between the absolute Two-Party System of FPTP jurisdictions and other systems that produce 5+ parties that need to form government together. Our system is far from perfect, but it’s not terrible.
I don’t agree with your position that my ultimate penalty was congruent with my crime. EDIT: nor that it represented a just outcome.
The area in which I was speeding was a distributor from our major city, with no pedestrian, bike or parking lanes available. I had exactly zero chance of hitting a child running out from behind a parked car because there’s no capacity to park cars on that road nor are any pedestrians present on the road. I was also driving on a wide corner, where speed/velocity can be easily distorted by many factors when measured from a stationary perspective, so I cannot be sure that the reading was entirely accurate. There are no pedestrians allowed on the distributor either; nor is there a walking space or lane. My only chance of causing injury or death to others due to my minimal speeding was in a collision with another vehicle.
This instance is the only time I’ve ever been fined for speeding in my seventeen years of driving. I’ve personally driven ~5km/h over the limit without any further fines or punishments, including past police cars with active LIDAR guns pointed at me and through speed cameras, indicating that there is simply no viable reason to stop and fine drivers who are over the limit within a reasonable margin of error.
Beyond all of the above, I’ll note AGAIN that I was happy to pay the $560 fine (which I deemed appropriate but costly, and costed me $80 for each km/h over the limit while I was earning $13/hour) but fought only the suspension of my licence. I didn’t believe that a single instance of driving 7km/h over the limit justified a suspension, and I still agree with that idea.
My issue was the severity of my punishment with reference to my crime. I definitely committed a crime (yes, I am a criminal), and deserved punishment for doing so, but I disagreed with the severity of that punishment. That doesn’t infer that I learned nothing; nor that I am uncaring of my fellow citizens.
I don’t think I’m a great driver, mostly because I’ve taken Low Risk Driver courses, have a Bachelor in Psychology (including driver/traffic psychology) and am acutely aware of the effects that driving hubris has on capacity - statistics often show that those who rate themselves as ‘better than average’ drivers are more likely to commit traffic offences. I do, however, know that I’m a competent driver which my last sixteen years since this event without demerit should indicate.
By the way, I’ve been a child protection caseworker for almost a decade now, and so to infer that I don’t care for the safety of children might not be the best argument to make.
I’ve not seen a comparison of $/kWh of rooftop solar versus solar plant in the Australian context for the life of the panels, factoring in degradation; posited increase in efficiency of solar PV over a given period of time; individual cost; governmental cost; overall cost; and net benefit to the individual based upon specific usage. If you have those statistics available, please share them.
In the meantime, our rooftop solar is kicking goals and scoring some serious points while our government still debates whether or not to open a new coal-fired power plant. Individuals in Australia are investing not only in their own potential reduced power bills but in moving towards the next generation of Very Low Input Cost power generation that reduces environmental impact significantly.
I personally have an array of 24x panels that generate an average of 72kWh per day. I’d love a home battery to prevent selling cheap renewable energy during the day and then buying expensive power at night, but they’re still prohibitively expensive and at least I’m doing my part to decarbonise the grid while I wait.
What are you doing about your personal power consumption to decarbonise the world?
Edit: I bought my home with the solar panels already intact. I did not pay for their installation, nor have I needed to pay for any maintenance on them. My direct cost for accessing renewable energy has been $0 and I’ve gained significantly from them since then. This is pretty common in Australia these days.
As someone who lives in a jurisdiction where every single vote I can engage in is RCV (Australia; NSW) I can honestly say that it’s so much better than FPTP. I don’t know what the perfect voting system is (frankly a subjective topic as it currently stands; please feel free to correct me with statistically valid alternatives) but RCV at the very least means that I can (and personally have) never vote for a major party as #1 and I can know for sure that my vote has never been exhausted, because I’ve never left a blank box. We also have mandatory voting, which helps to keep things sane.
In Australia, government election funding is only ever allocated to the parties based on #1 votes, so I can also confidently say I’ve never contributed to a major party’s election coffers as I’ve also never donated to any major party. I obviously support one major party over the others, as based on my preferences, but I’ll always give the election funding to a smaller party or Independent.
RCV is a wonderful step to take from FPTP. I understand that it may not be democratically perfect, and frankly no representative voting system may ever be, but it’s a far cry better than FPTP. It’s a known concept that here in Australia politicians vie to represent the ‘middle’ rather than the extremes, because the vast majority of voters aren’t overly-enthused political lunatics. We still have our issues to be sure, but I’d rather that the political class fight over the centrist majority rather than court the political extremes in order to convince people to actually vote thanks to mandatory voting.
That’s definitely the intent of vested American interests (read:billionaires). The social programming has worked on this person. They’ve been successfully disincentivised from engaging in the political process by being convinced that they have zero capacity to affect change, when the truth is that they do possess a minuscule amount of power. This person doesn’t realise the value of collectivism; of grassroots activism; of gathering with those who are like-minded and trying to shift the Overton Window through direct action. They’ve been convinced that all they have the capacity to do is sigh and wring their hands. It’s a real shame.
Edit: just read that their handle is ‘1984’. Like most who reference Orwell, I think you can make some fairly accurate assumptions about this person.
I’m not sure I understand this question - the $/kWh for rooftop solar is $0. It’s free energy from the sun. In fact, a lot of homes generate excess and sell that back to the grid, meaning for the user they have a negative $/kWh price. My friend’s most recent power bill cost -$50 for three months (ie, the energy company paid him $50).
In some places in Australia we have so much rooftop solar that it overwhelms our grid and provides more energy than we need. WA is regularly running base load generation (coal/gas) as a backup but it’s entirely unneeded during the sunny hours. Granted, we have the best environment in the world for converting solar energy into electricity.
If this Biden feeling ‘jacked up’, I shudder to think what he’s like when he’s not. He’s not doing a great job of spruiking his own achievements and his answers are devoid of stats or figures - likely because they weren’t able to bring notes in. He’s sadly making trump look more coherent and lively by comparison.
This is an argument I’ve been pitching in the Australian context for some 20 years now - we should have been world leaders in solar technology, to the extent that by now we should have massive solar farms across the North of Australia in order to export clean, green energy up to Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and other near-neighbours. We could have created a whole new industry of both research and advanced manufacturing, and if we’d nationally sequester our resources correctly we could be doing every step of the way - dig out the minerals, refine them, manufacture them into panels, export those panels - all the while generating very low cost energy and exporting it for profit as well! Not to mention so many new jobs!
Even once you take away all of the obvious arguments for climate change action (environmental, ethical, prevention of future disasters etc.) there was always going to be a strong financial incentive in a capitalistic market to move to technology that has the lowest input cost to generate energy, which just so happens to be renewables. It just baffles me that so many politicians crucified themselves on the altar of coal when they could’ve been remembered for ushering in simultaneous economic benefit and environmental benefit, with a long term impact of lowered inflation through cheaper power bills, but that’s what the minerals lobby in this country has managed to achieve. What a disgrace.
Good to see a world leader using the economic arguments in addition to the other more obvious ones.
Cubicle is the noun (mini office); cubical is the adjective (having cube-like properties). :)
And it’s also only banned on work devices. There’s no ban on government employees having TikTok on their personal phones, although I personally don’t.