Aussies and NZers: Four seasons in one protest

[The Anti-Targ]

On 6/30/2022 at 9:17 AM, Jeor said:

(2) if the work conditions and pay of teachers is so great, why are there massive shortages with no one wanting to become a teacher or career change into it?

It's not just that. Parents are actively discouraging their children from thinking about a career in teaching, because it is seen as both not an economically sensible career choice and not a respectable professional career. They are only spending more time than some parents in raising our kids, but it's not a profession worth paying decent money to help attract the best and brightest to do this essential work.

[karaddin]

@Jeor the other issue with teaching is that if you try treat student outcomes as what determines a teacher's pay it's a huge disincentive to work with special needs kids etc. We shouldn't be discouraging teachers from helping the kids that need the most help.

[ants]

On 5/22/2022 at 11:06 AM, Skyrazer said:

It does kinda suck for the moderate Libs though. Their electorates punished the party for being too conservative, but it's the moderates who end up on the receiving end while the actual conservatives hold on.

At the end of the day, they got punished for not representing their electorate. Whereas more right winglibs did represent their members. 

[Jeor]

20 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

It's not just that. Parents are actively discouraging their children from thinking about a career in teaching, because it is seen as both not an economically sensible career choice and not a respectable professional career. They are only spending more time than some parents in raising our kids, but it's not a profession worth paying decent money to help attract the best and brightest to do this essential work.

 

20 hours ago, karaddin said:

@Jeor the other issue with teaching is that if you try treat student outcomes as what determines a teacher's pay it's a huge disincentive to work with special needs kids etc. We shouldn't be discouraging teachers from helping the kids that need the most help.

Love both these comments. Yes, teaching suffers from a real status problem in Australia. It seems that familiarity breeds contempt - everyone's gone to school, so everyone thinks they know how to do a teacher's job and that it mustn't be that hard. Devaluing teaching based on pay is fair enough, but devaluing it because it's not seen to be a respectable profession is a real miss. It's a great profession, one that society entrusts children to, and one where lots of migrants and lower-income families value so highly yet the rest of society not so much. It's also a generational thing; the current generation of grandparents are much more likely to value education and respect teachers than the current generation of parents.

There are lots of issues with student outcomes affecting compensation. @karaddin there have supposedly been "value add" methods where you can measure growth as opposed to raw outcomes, but these have never been all that reliable. It is a weird dichotomy in education in that, if you have a limited number of excellent teachers, you end up putting these teachers on either (1) the very low classes where students really need all the extra help, support, and inspiration, or (2) the very high classes, where high-achieving students are likely to spot fraud/lazy teachers and need a high-performing teacher who can push them and help them actually reach their potential. It means the middle misses out, where presumably a great teacher can help average students become good ones.

[karaddin]

If I was ranking professions based on their potential to improve society it would be a very short list above teachers, it really is ridiculous that the status is so low

[Skyrazer]

17 hours ago, ants said:

At the end of the day, they got punished for not representing their electorate. Whereas more right winglibs did represent their members. 

I wouldn't necessarily say so since even in the electorates that they retained, they still saw sizable swings against them. I'd argue that the seats they retained are just more dyed-on blue who'd vote for libs regardless. If the party was more moderate and in line with the teals, these seats would've still voted Lib and with probably less of a swing against them than they saw.

[The Anti-Targ]

It's a bit of an interesting rationale to suggest that libs who lost their seats to teal independents or Labour did so because they were not far right enough, and if they were as extreme as the lib/nats that did return they would not have lost. It's a potential argument in a country where voting is voluntary and you can look at turnout by voting booth and see that right-wing booths from the previous election had much lower numbers in this election, and so right-wing voters stayed home. But in Australia with compulsory voting depressing the vote by creating voter apathy of a particular segment doesn't seem like it would really be a thing.

It could possibly be a serious mistake for what remains of the coalition if they were to double down on their extreme end as it could mean those teal electorates are lost to them forever and possibly even a new suburban centre-right party emerges, to more or less permanently steal votes from the coalition.

[Skyrazer]

21 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

It's a bit of an interesting rationale to suggest that libs who lost their seats to teal independents or Labour did so because they were not far right enough, and if they were as extreme as the lib/nats that did return they would not have lost. It's a potential argument in a country where voting is voluntary and you can look at turnout by voting booth and see that right-wing booths from the previous election had much lower numbers in this election, and so right-wing voters stayed home. But in Australia with compulsory voting depressing the vote by creating voter apathy of a particular segment doesn't seem like it would really be a thing.

It could possibly be a serious mistake for what remains of the coalition if they were to double down on their extreme end as it could mean those teal electorates are lost to them forever and possibly even a new suburban centre-right party emerges, to more or less permanently steal votes from the coalition.

You have to take a look at who they lost votes/seats to - Teals, Greens, Labor. These are left or centrist parties/candidates with progressive streaks. So the argument that they weren't right-wing enough flies in the face of what actually happened. If they weren't right-wing enough, we would've seen substantial swings towards parties like PHON and UAP instead which just wasn't the case.

[karaddin]

To be charitable to Ants I don't think "they should have been more right wing" is the only reasonable interpretation of what he's saying. That those "moderate" Liberal members allowed themselves to be dragged too far right by their more radical colleagues resulted in them not representing their members anymore also fits his post and is, I think, a pretty reasonable characterisation of what happened. The people of those electorates didn't get to cast a vote for or against Dutton, so the fact that Dutton's electorate is far more right wing and do still feel represented by him says nothing about the preferences of the voters in North Sydney - just that they didn't feel adequately represented by Zimmerman as part of the greater Liberal party.

Which is a long winded way of saying "yeah it feels kinda unfair that they didn't even want to be that far right wing and lose while the radical right survived, but the reality is the radical right still represented their electorates while the moderates did not".

[ants]

I’m saying the moderate libs in moderate seats did zilch to curb Scomo’s right wing agenda and got voted out as a result. They didn’t represent their electorates. 

[Jeor]

I read an article on the recent British political shenanigans and there was a line in there that the Conservative reputation is that they are not well-liked but they are seen to be competent (and the problem with the Tories is that they are not ticking either box in a positive way).

I think the Coalition needs to really focus on that "competent" part and avoid stoking too much of the culture wars. I think we've seen that the general population sides with Labor more than they do the Libs when it comes to culture wars, so they need to try and attack Labor on the competency grounds - which will be hard, given the Coalition's own record on this - but makes more sense. Labor got hammered in the 2019 election for having too many detailed policies, but the Liberal party can get away with some of that more than Labor can.

Essentially I think their line needs to be "We'll do a better job than Labor and we'll be just as nice". Hard to do at the moment when Labor has had a smooth few weeks in office and Albo seems to have started well, though.

[The Anti-Targ]

And it is a lie that conservatives / the right are inherently more competent at government.

So the thing the right really needs to do is try to keep a big enough proportion of the swinging middle believing that lie in order for the right to continue to be the default govt with the left only swinging in when the right really makes a mess.

Or to put it another way: If the mission of the right is for govt to do as little as possible, the are quite competent at achieving that. If the mission of the left is for the govt to "do more" [details to be worked out later] they have the much harder task at being competent, and it is difficult to achieve "doing stuff" without pissing some people off and those people will make a lot of noise.

[Jeor]

13 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

And it is a lie that conservatives / the right are inherently more competent at government.

Lie or not, it does seem to be genuinely believed. As you say, the issue is comparing apples and oranges - the progressive side of politics generally has much more complicated and ambitious ideas to implement, so it's a much higher bar for them than it is for a conservative government.

I still believe the Blair/Clinton argument (it was in one of their autobiographies) that, traditionally, progressive governments have short spurts of power to jump-start the system and set up good programs, while conservative governments then knock off the excesses and get the budget back in shape for longer periods as the general population doesn't like too much change. Now conservative governments of the past decade or so haven't kept their end of the bargain up, but I think it's key to their revival if they can rediscover the roots of those old political maxims.

 

[The Anti-Targ]

Perhaps old school left govts let their budgets get out of whack, but the current neo-lib kind of left-ish govts over the last few decades have not gone crazy and let budgets get out of control. Clinton and Blair both are of that ilk. So there's no need for a conservative budgetary circuit breaker. 

Left of centre govts tend to bring in more regulation and perhaps they still over-reach in that respect. The conservative narrative towards the end of left govt times in power tend to be complaints about nanny-state, regulatory compliance costs and bureaucratic red tape. Left govts tend to get blamed for economic problems more than right govts even when the problems are not of the govt's making. In this post-pandemic hyper-inflation era it'll be left govts more likely to fall because of this economic hit than right govts even though they are equally to blame / not to blame.

The Lib-Nat fall and the likely Tory fall in the UK are / will be for reasons other than the economic fallout from the pandemic. Trump's fall was also not for economic reasons. NZ Labour will fall next year if they are not seen to have righted the economic ship adequately. Most of divisive pandemic stuff from late 2021/early 2022 will have been forgotten, and there will still be residual good will for how the govt handled the pandemic before vaccines came on the scene, though what happened in 2020 won't hold votes for them, they got those votes with the landslide win in the 2020 election, and they've already mostly disappeared.

[Jeor]

On 7/8/2022 at 1:40 PM, The Anti-Targ said:

Perhaps old school left govts let their budgets get out of whack, but the current neo-lib kind of left-ish govts over the last few decades have not gone crazy and let budgets get out of control. Clinton and Blair both are of that ilk.

Yes, I think it was a conversation between Clinton and Blair (it was mentioned in one of their autobiographies, I can't remember whose) where I was quoting that insight into the old right/left maxims. Which is why both of them decided to chart their Third Way course where they married up social progressivism with economic conservatism. And despite some very obvious failings from both (Clinton - personal, Blair - Iraq, and beng quite unpopular towards the end), I think they largely got it right and were seen by a broad spectrum of the population as "good" governments in their day.

Good point about the regulation aspect. That is a definite point of difference but even there the relationship between government and business is getting a little more friendly in the leftist governments - part of the neoliberal left, I guess.

What I find strange is that there hasn't really been any party that has gone for what I would call the "Reverse Third Way" - social conservatism with economic progressivism. I would have thought a lot of religious voters - e.g. a large proportion of Christians - would go for a platform that advocates for conservative family values and culture, but also looks after the poor/needy and deals with income inequality and curbing the power of big business. To me (as a Christian) that's a more faithful reading of biblical principles than the bastardised Christian Right in America which bizarrely goes for big business, neocon economics, with a fierce bunch of nationalism and nativism thrown in.

[The Anti-Targ]

My grandfather who trained as a priest, but never got ordained, used to say Jesus was the perfect socialist.

The problem with trying to be economically progressive and socially conservative is that it's hard to care about people, yet also not care about people. Governing for the institutionalisation of conservative family values means caring about certain types of people and rather detesting those people who don't fit the conservative family value mold, and the way to deal with those other people is to try to force them into that mold whether they like it or not.

I care about people, so while I am morally conservative I am socially liberal. Imposing my morals on others is not how I want to be. People have to find their own way to God, in this life or the next. If they want to have a conversation and hear my perspective I'm happy to oblige. If not, we can talk about other things, both meaningful and frivolous.

[Impmk2]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-04/environment-minister-proposes-blocking-palmer-qld-coal-mine/101302142

While I'm somewhat annoyed that approving more coal mines is on the cards at all, this really does signal a big shift from the previous 9 years.

Really couldn't happen to a nicer person too. Palmer must be spitting chips tonight.

[Skyrazer]

Well appears ScoMo made himself "Minister for Everything" behind closed doors.

Calls now coming in for him to resign, but I don't think he will being someone who doesn't seem to have any shame.

Apparently what he did is actually technically legal, but still extremely questionable. Dunno WTF he was trying to do with this and the GG just going along with it all honky dory raises some serious questions.

[The Anti-Targ]

He's surely not going to be leader going into the next election. Parties normally don't keep leaders who lose control of the govt benches.

[Skyrazer]

His leadership days are well and truly done - that was a given after the election defeat.

There are now calls for him to completely resign from Parliament - as in, leave his seat which would force a by-election for his vacant seat.

As I said before though, I don't think it will happen. I think he intends to stick around in the backbench to soak up as much blame as possible to free up as much breathing space for the frontbench - atleast until the end of this current term.