politics

It's election day. Time to exercise your democratic rights Australia.

Horticulturalist. Environmental hand wringer. Open source enthusiast. 

mfer #9187

is it really a right tho if it's compulsory

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Abundance Economy book: book.abundance.id

I guess you can choose to pay the fine or write in a nonsense vote... so I'd still classify it as a democratic right personally.

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"you have a right to break the law" is my favorite kind of right

I don't know if politicians can rely too much on these "structural" advantages to prevent extremism in politics.

Trump had everything going *against* him on paper (outspend 2:1 in some background states, criminal cases, hostile media, etc) and he still won.

At the end of the day politicians need to be effective and be able to "sell" their policies to the electorate.

If they think "the system" (how elections are structured, demographics, etc ) will let them get away with incompetence and unpopular policies, they're just inviting more extreme politics to take hold.

lol

There are pluses and minuses. Compulsory voting pushes politics towards the center because instead of having to "get out your base" everyone gets out by default. So instead of politics getting more extreme and polarized to motivate people to vote, you have the opposite; parties seek to alienate as few potential voters as possible by being as mild mannered and centrist as possible.

So our equivalent of Trump, Clive Palmer, is a marginal figure who spent 120 million dollars to win a single seat last election. The flipside is that our major parties are somewhat cowardly and afraid of bold reform  which is becoming a problem with issues like housing, energy and tax.