this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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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.