Amy Remeikis is known for her incisive political commentary and experience as a journalist at Fairfax and Guardian Australia. She is currently Chief Political Analyst at the Australia Institute.
Once upon a time, it was assumed that progressive voters, even if they were gritting their teeth, would fall behind Labor to block the Coalition and One Nation from winning power.
It’s probably best for most people’s mental health that they are not forced to consider the hypocritical and ever-shifting grasping positions of Australian politics. For the most part, politics has the power to do good. Also for the most part, the way politics in Australia is played is very, very stupid.
The Australian Greens have promised to lift the tax-free threshold to $26,000 and pay an extra $1000 a year to people on income support, funding the plan with new taxes on gas exports and mining profits worth a combined $45 billion a year.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese led tributes to Dr Haines in Parliament on Monday, saying the shock from what happened last week was “like a stone in our hearts”.
As we enter this parliament week, there will be a lot of people who speak about Helen and how much she means to them. We will hear a lot about her commitment to integrity, but not a lot of examination of how she applies that equally, and for democratic good.
All reasonable people abhor violence, in all its forms. As a society, we rightly resile from it. But we are no good at examining it, and we certainly aren’t practised at dealing with it.
As with most things in Australia, the ability to shackle women during child birth is a practice that impacts more First Nations women than others, and most women in parliament would never have spoken to a woman who had given birth while shackled to a bed. And yet, the Australian parliament could not even manage to support minimum guidelines.
Double standards are pretty standard in Australia – so standard that the past couple of weeks have been full of them in politics and barely an eyebrow has been raised.
Economic pressure can exploit existing prejudices, of which Australia has many. And it’s very easy, when people are feeling the pressure of economic strain, to shift then into punching down. Tell someone who feels they are missing out that it’s because someone else is getting something and half the battle is won for you.
Australia has a new centre. If any policy finds itself between Labor and One Nation, it’s now considered “the middle ground”. That should be alarming for a number of reasons, not least because it doesn’t consider what is good policy, just what is allegedly in-between what the mainstream media considers the two extremes.
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