Six Easy Pieces on Australian Politics from Malcolm Fraser

[saithkar]

Last year I had the pleasure and the privilege to talk with former Prime Minster, Malcolm Fraser for a couple of hours thanks to taking a subject coordinated by former federal MP and Fraser's former chief of staff, Petro Georgio. Fraser served as the Member for Wannon for 28 years and was prime minister of Australia between 1975 and 1983. He sadly

Comments

[carminalizarin]

Read this. Like you said, a lot of it sounds pretty straightforwardly sensible, but try explaining that in the world of politics... In any event, the U.S. system is pretty similar and most of this would be pertinent to Americans who wanted to enter the field.

[saithkar]

Glad you found something in this; I can, and often do, talk about comparative politics at great length. I might have mentioned before that Australia is an interesting case as our political system is described as "Washminster" in that we take the notion of parliament and cabinet government from the Westminster system, but at the same time have a constitutional federal system in the US mould

[carminalizarin]

When people in the U.S. use "the government" as a pejorative, it basically means whatever the speaker wants. Typically conservatives use it to mean "The Internal Revenue Service, Democrats in Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Association, and whoever is responsible for handling WELFARE!!!" (i.e. things that interfere with the right of rich people to do whatever is necessary to become richer and then gloat about how they earned it by working harder than all you lazy fucks), while progressives use it to mean "the military-industrial-prison-police-state complex", which they then are forced by their various sub-cults to tie to a bunch of far-left buzzwords like "white privilege", "patriarchy", "heteronormativity", "cisgenderism", and other terms they learned in sensitivity-training courses at Skool. In America, everyone hates "the government." If you're a conservative, your duty is to despise the "bureaucrats" who manage the day-to-day affairs of the country you profess to love, as well as

[saithkar]

As usual, both the extreme right and left get it wrong. Good summary