this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
42 points (100.0% liked)

Australia

3613 readers
66 users here now

A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.

Before you post:

If you're posting anything related to:

If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News

Rules

This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:

Banner Photo

Congratulations to @[email protected] who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition

Recommended and Related Communities

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:

Plus other communities for sport and major cities.

https://aussie.zone/communities

Moderation

Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.

Additionally, we have our instance admins: @[email protected] and @[email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
42
Raising jobseeker is not 'fiscally sustainable’? Sorry, but that is flat out wrong | Greg Jericho (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
7 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Labor will never significantly increase the payment while the chance of it being used as a successful scare campaign by the Coalition remains. With our short election cycles and Labor's inability to consistently win elections, their priority will always be mitigating the "Labor cannot manage the economy" myth before helping people.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

And also because they're entirely complicit evil cunts. Just slightly less evil than the Dutton button.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don't know about that. Portraying Labor as cartoon villains is a pretty pointless oversimplification and only increases the level of anger in the electorate. Here is a good article explaining the concept of political capital and how Keating's government "spent" theirs on controversial reforms they believed in. Albanese's government tried something similar with the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, failed miserably, and are now concerned with limiting any further damage the Coalition can inflict on them prior to the next election. If Albanese wins a second term then I think it's possible his government might be more ambitious on social welfare than they have been to date.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

That article itself explains the shortcomings of the concept of political capital in the 2013 political environment, and I think those shortcomings have only grown over the decade since it was written.

I also think there's an additional issue at play today that wasn't present (or at least wasn't as significant) in 2013, which is a deeper sense of discomfort with the overall status quo of politics. A sense of unhappiness that may be reason that taking more bold action, accompanied with a sufficiently strong explanation, could be much more viable than it would have 20 years ago. This isn't necessarily incompatible with the theory of political capital; it could be described as a factor that significantly reduces the political cost of implementing those policies. But it does just add more on to why discussions of political capital are less valuable than they would have been in Keating's day.