Monday, September 02, 2013

The Senate race in Australia

An article in The Age has reignited my interest in the forthcoming Australian elections. It seems that the smaller parties have done preference deals with each other, so that it's possible for one of them to win a Senate seat with only two per cent of the vote.

In NSW this might lead to Arthur Sinodinos of the Liberal Party losing his seat. I profiled Arthur Sinodinos a couple of years ago. He called gender and race "human constructs" and backed mass immigration. I wouldn't exactly be heartbroken if he were to lose out to someone from a smaller party.

The lesson is, once again, that political opportunities arise for those who put themselves in a position to take them. We should keep building up a traditionalist movement with the aim of one day competing for these Senate seats.

I checked out some of the Senate candidates for Victoria. There are lots, so I wasn't able to go through each website. Sad to say, the Democratic Labour Party has gone the wrong way since the last election. They now have a policy of wanting non-working spouses to get superannuation, which further undermines the male provider role (and increases taxes). They also want to expand the level of immigration rather than contain it. I think we can now safely write them off as an option for us.

There is also the Stable Population Party. This party does at least want to limit the size of the immigration programme. But there are two main problems with this party. First, they are anti-natalist, meaning that they want to discourage incentives for Australian parents to have children. That's counterproductive in my view. The current birth rate in Australia is well under replacement level and this then leads to calls for mass immigration. The second problem with this party is that they emphasise liberal values such as non-discrimination and globalisation - but these values then feed into the idea that people are interchangeable and that population transfers don't matter.

The Nationals are closely tied to the Liberal Party. They do want border protection, but have little to say about immigration or population policy in their manifesto. They seem to be most focused on delivering resources to rural areas. Interestingly, they have put a revision of divorce and alimony laws into their manifesto.

There are some other options for Queensland voters. There are two candidates standing for the Australian Protectionist Party, which is an economically protectionist and socially conservative party. There is also One Nation, a party I have little knowledge of, but their manifesto is still committed to zero net migration.

9 comments:

  1. Mark, Mark, Mark...

    How can you honestly say you live in Australia and don't know what One Nation stands for? Please Explain!

    As for the Stable Population Party, they clearly don't like mass immigration either, but they are not part of the "white Power" brigade (Protectionists).

    Read between the lines of their mission statement:

    "We are concerned with environmental, economic and social wellbeing.

    Australia's population is currently growing by over 1000 people per day. That adds up to over one million people every three years - the size of Adelaide! It's no wonder Australia's quality of life is being degraded.

    From a population of 23 million today, under Liberal/Labor policies we are on target for 40 million by 2050 - and rising! We say let's slow down and stabilise at around 26 million by 2050. You can vote for this sensible and sustainable path via the Senate ballot paper."


    It seems they want to preserve Australia as it is - not as it is becoming which makes them a true conservative party.

    Some years ago there was the "Australians Against Further Immigration" party. It was pilloried as Neo-Nazi by the left and disappeared without a trace when One Nation sprung up.

    Sorry Mark but the Second World War turned a lot of people off nationalism as an ideology when 20 million Russians died and 6 million Jews went up the chimneys of Auschwitz.

    The reality is no-one takes white nationalists seriously. If you want Australia preserved as it is vote SPP. It's a politically correct stance against Mass immigration. Sounds quite pragmatic in my view...

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  2. How can you honestly say you live in Australia and don't know what One Nation stands for?

    One Nation gets no coverage at all here in Victoria. I knew considerably more about the party back in the 1990s, but these kind of small parties change over time. On the issue of immigration there seems to be a difference between the party manifesto and some recent utterances by the party leader Pauline Hanson. All that I can do is observe from afar.

    As for the Stable Population Party, I don't mind people voting for it as the least worst option but I'm not going to get enthusiastic about a party which pushes issues like global identity, refugees and non-discrimination so hard.

    We shouldn't be content to accept scraps from the table. Trads did that for decades with the right-liberal parties. All that these parties had to do was to make some nice sounding noises about the family or border protection at election time and rank and file trads would adopt them as "their" party regardless of the actual philosophy followed by these parties.

    We should be networking to build up contacts and working relationships, then finding appropriate outlets for activism, and then standing our own senate candidates.

    If, in the meantime, the Stable Population Party is the only one offering a good policy on containing immigration then we might have to vote for it, but we do it with open eyes, recognising that it is pushing a political philosophy that is alien to our own.

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  3. One correction Mark, Arthur Sinodinos is on the Senate ticket in NSW, not Queensland. For what it's worth my pre-poll vote went to the Australian Protectionist Party.

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  4. The problem is that big business lobbyists destroy any conservative party that shows some potential. On the other hand, the progressive left strike the fear of God into corporations....I can't think of a single multi-national that hasn't been 'turned'.

    Conservatives will need a strategy to get around the open borders, globalist, crony 'free' market capitalists...appealing to the better angels of their nature might help.

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  5. Hi Mark - I sent you an email yesterday using the address given in your Blogger profile. If you didn't get it/aren't using that address could you let me know, thanks. :)

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  6. anon:
    "the "white Power" brigade (Protectionists)"

    Protectionist =/= Nazi.

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  7. The success of minor parties in getting elected to the Upper House in NSW shows that there is a real chance for smaller party candidates in the Senate. It's probably the only way true conservatives are ever going to get into a position to have some real political influence.

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  8. dfordoom,

    Yep, we have to play within the political system available to us, and one advantage of the system is that a party having even three or four senators could well wield some influence by having a balance of power.

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