Category Archives: Labor
Sexism and false equivalences
So I guess it’s my turn to pen a reply to Kath. Earlier today she wrote a piece here on AusVotes whose central thesis was that ‘I don’t believe that women are more the victim than men, or that the sexism is better or worse than other varieties of insults.’ Sorry Kath, but this is […]
That Vision Thing
Can we imagine, for a moment, two possible eventualities that could confront us on September 15, both apparently quite unlikely; a re-elected Gillard government and a re-elected Rudd government. What would they do? We have had a three-year period wherein, despite how you may feel about the government, there has been some fairly serious legislation […]
You really wanna put abortion on the table?
There has been much discussion since the – I think we can all agree disastrous – launch of the ‘Women for Labor’ campaign about whether abortion should be back on the table again or not. This flowed from Gillard’s quote “Finally but very importantly, we don’t want to live in an Australia where abortion again […]
A Line in the Sand
I used to think the argument that Prime Minister Gillard has been excessively targeted for abuse was a pretty dubious proposition. I used to think that although there was clearly some elements of sexism amongst some of the criticism and abuse, you could easily find equivalents in, say, the casually anti-catholic nature of some of […]
‘Pressure is mounting’
There is a semi-codified rule here at AusVotes that we do not write about the ALP leadership. This is a rule I intend to hold true to, but events over the weekend have raised an analogy that bears mentioning, and may make clearer the motivations of those non-politicians in the relentless engaging in speculation and […]
Faceless Feeney a massive mistake
With Martin Ferguson’s exit from parliament, the safest ALP seat in Australia becomes one of the more interesting subplots of the 2013 election. Ferguson (a ‘giant’ of the resources industry, apparently, but that rant can be found elsewhere) mumbled his way into the sunset and onto any number of mining company boards, leaving my own, […]
A bribe by any other name
Why do we allow corporate donations to political parties? At all? This is a question that occurs to me every year, surprisingly enough when the AEC release the (by now already dated) data on political donations. This is not an in-depth look at the numbers. I imagine one of our more details-oriented writers is presently […]
ALP: $6.00, Coalition: $1.10
Head out and about to homeless shelters and gambling support groups. Chat to the victims of problem gambling. Ask them what it was that they lost their fortunes, their houses, their families, and even their health to. There’s one response you’re damn near certain not to hear: “I couldn’t stop betting on games as they […]
Are we left with the right centre?
The other day, on the AusVotes2013 Facebook page, we received a concisely-worded piece of feedback. Apparently, AusVotes has become, in its brief lifetime, a hive of Coalition Groupthink™. Never mind the piece I wrote the other day suggesting that I couldn’t conceive of a rational argument for voting for the coalition, or lambasting Joe Hockey […]
Whither the progressive voter?
As Australia careers towards an Abbott government, a question that routinely occurs to me is: “is it really conservatives voting for this party?” There really is nothing conservative about what the Abbott coalition is offering. Rather, it is a strangely inverted conservatism; a big-government, socially regressive proflicracy. How could the fictional classic conservative that exists […]
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