this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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Fucksake albo what are ya doing?
Keep in mind a large proportion of our Aussie countrymen are right-wing muppets.
He's aiming for popularity IMO. Wants to hold onto govt next term to.. I dunno.. Keep implementing tepid policy goals and making significant consolations to the right wing?
Does that work in Australia? Does the right wing vote for diet fascism when the "left" party betrays its own voters to appease them?
Labor aren’t left. The only real left party with a viable chance of winning is the Greens.
Somewhat. We have a large body of poorly-politically-informed swing voters that essentially decide each election.
Our historical primary challenger to the Labor party, whom they exchange power with every 2-3 elections is the Liberal party and the Liberal-National Coalition though.. And those idiots ate polling nowhere near Labor. So they could freely implement actual good policies currently, lots of them, but Albo is too busy thinking about keeping all his business and corporate friends happy. 'Gotta keep your options open for the post-politics golden parachute onto the board seats of several multinational corporations for the big bucks in semi-retirement. Those jobs cost a lot of political favours while youre in power I guess.
Or I could be entirely off base. I'm not a politician, but this is how it looks from the outside.
Things have changed a lot in the last year.
We previously had 1 centre left and 1 centre right major party, and an assortment of minor parties on each side.
However, our preferential voting system made our minor parties more influential than in the US.
At our last major election our centre right party was just demolished and demoralised. Its complex but now we ha e several mid size parties on the right, and one major party that was on the left but has really moved to the centre to capture more centrist votes while the right squabbles among themselves.
I do t really believe that the ratchet effect youre describing is a thing even in the US, but it certainly isn't in Australia. On most social policies we have been progressive over the decades.
So are right-wing voters going to vote Labor in the next election because Labor implemented (compromised) versions of right-wing policy? Or are they going to vote for the right-wing parties?
Yes, obviously.
People's political views can be arranged along a spectrum. Those far to the right will never vote labor, but the center right certainly may be enticed.
Is there any evidence that this actually happens? Because at least in America, we learn about that model in school and hear about it on the news all the time, but in practice, it's just a pretense to justify the center-left doing right-wing policy that wins donations but loses elections. People's beliefs aren't 40% communist, 60% fascist, they're a scattering of somewhat random, usually contradictory stances, and they don't pick the candidate whose policy most closely aligns with their views, they pick the guy they like, which is only somewhat influenced by policy.
Why would the center-right vote for a center-left party doing watered down versions of what they want when they can vote for a center-right party?
Does it ever work the other way? Do you ever have a rightwing party implement center-left policy that their own voters hate, and then get rewarded by center-left voters?
Because, as you said the political spectrum is just a model we use to describe how a population might behave, and people dont think about leftness or rightness when they vote.
In this case, Albo has moved a little to the right by being friendlier with Israel's PM than he would ha e previously. Many conservative voters who think of the world in dumb phrases like "israel is the holy land" might remember Albo's softening to them, and vote for them as a result.
He's moved ALP to the right.
He wants to be the party of government in perpetuity.
Looks like, maybe trying to support the war without being accused of blindly following Trump/Israel?
He probably doesn't want to be remembered as fundamentally right wing, how we see people like Tony Blair during the Iraq/Afghanistan wars.
How is this not fundamentally not right wing? Any support for this war aside from humanitarian support for victims of Trump and Israeli aggression is support FOR the the aggression.
Fuck these people.
They're going to defend our allies. Thats not fundamentally right wing.
Yes, it's only wrong when China and North Korea "defends" Russia's war on Ukraine.
He's doing exactly almost what every Democrat in the US is doing
The fact is that Iran has been a thorn in the wests arse for a long time. There isnt a lot of sympathy there for a country we have heard a lot of "death to the west" and other general "nuke Israel" rhetoric from since the 1980s. Especially with more than a few arab immigrants to Australia being Iranian and having left because of who is in power.
The general sentiment IMO is that while The USA are doing their usual international meddling and we are fucking sick of Trumps bullshit, Irans leadership certainly did the international politics equivalent of saying "Go on hit me!" to the schoolyard bully for long enough that nobody really cares that the bully finally snotted him. There have been lots of protests about Israel/Palestine there has been very few about Iran in a country where there is a significant number of people from middle eastern origins, I think thats pretty telling.