Politics - The Party System

Political Parties
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Let's have a brief look at the Australian political parties:

Liberals

The Liberals are supposed to be in favour of the rights of individuals and free enterprise. They will tell you that this is the case, especially when making sure people have the right not to join a union, for example. Yet, they are often influenced by religious loonies, and therefore are quite happy to favour censorship and other measures which reduce personal freedom. An appropriate motto would be "Freedom for all, so long as it's not anything we don't approve of."

The worst of the Libs is the "Lyons Forum", a group of despicable creatures who strongly believe in censorship and the right of the government (preferably them, of course) to determine what films people are allowed to see, what books they are allowed to read, etc. They try to inflict these "standards" on everyone, while the "John Stuart Mill Society" section of the Libs tries to fend off these dolts and maintain some semblance of decent freedom.

National Party of Australia

The Nats are the Libs' coalition partners. Much the same mob.

ALP

The Labor party is supposed to champion the common worker and welfare recipient. The ALP traditionally liked to seem to make plenty of welfare available, while not wanting to tax enough to pay for it, so just borrowing like crazy. This was especially true since the union movement basically controlled ALP policy. In recent years, it's moved towards the Liberal position on many matters, while giving more lip service to the Greens. Rather than borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to cover their ineptitude, their latest technique is to raise lots of revenue via speed cameras, targeting mostly safe roads whose speed limits should be higher. Amazingly, the party is trying to water down the union involvement's input and be a little less corrupt in the candidate selection process. Their motto should be "Don't worry about the debts. So long as you are a union member and do as you're told, we'll take care of you."

The Democrats

Now deceased. Used to claim to be the party for those who are sick of the major parties. In reality, they just latched onto any popular, "politically correct" issue, and got pressure groups to write policy for them, knowing that it didn't matter how expensive it was or how much it conflicted with other policy, because they would never be in a position to implement it anyhow. The juggling act eventually collapsed.

Greens

Yes, there are "Green" politicians. They basically run around trying to save the environment, no matter how few people care about the particular object of their current tirade and how many people would be inconvenienced if they were somehow successful. Best summarised by: "We'll save the environment, but we don't give a shit about anything else."