Y’all have first past the post / winner takes all, don’t you?

No, preferntial i.e ranked choice

There was a vote recently and “labor” won from what I’m reading?

Indeed

Labor, coalition, independents, etc. what kinds of parties are these?

Independents aren’t a party per se, the hint is in the name

We have the Green parry as our centre party and everyone ekse is to the right of them. There is nothing i’d classify as left.

Labor is anti refugee, pro fossil fuel mining, anti enviorment etc i.e part of neo liberal orthodoxy, centre right, Liberal Party (not liberal in the US sense) is climate change denying, anti refugees, pro private health care, TERFs, etc two sides of the one coin. Bit of difference over Gaza, like minded on Ukraine.

We don’t have much of a left in Australia, Greens are the closest, Labor embraced NeoLiberalism and sold the country out in the 70s and has only moved further from its union/worker roots.

Y’all have first past the post / winner takes all, don’t you? There was a vote recently and “labor” won from what I’m reading?

Others have answered you that we have preferential voting, but I’m still really confused about why you’re asking in this way? It makes if sound like FPTP would have stopped them from getting elected, and preferential would have prevented it.

As for what’s going on, Dutton, the leader of the Coalition, and members of that group of parties associated themselves with Trump, who’s really unpopular here. They also provided literally no policies to genuinely help with the cost of living issues people are facing, instead engaging in culture wars stuff. We have mandatory voting here as well, you can’t just sit it out, so it makes the sort of apathy+populism that has gotten Trump elected not possible. The silent majority of voters rejected Dutton and the only other major choice was Labor.

No, Australia does not use first past the post. We use preferential voting for the house and proportional for the senate.

Labor (ALP) is centrist.

The Liberal-National Coalition (LNP) is the largest conservative group and was centre-right, although drifted more to the right after some of the more moderate liberals lost their seats to centrists independents in 2022.

Then there are a lot of smaller parties and independents that range from far left to far right.

It is likely that the ALP won this election due to (1) the LNP running an absolute shambles of a campaign (repeated back flips and changes, lack of details, etc.) and (2) the global backlash to Trumpian politics (which had a huge influence on Canada’s recent election).

We don’t have fptp, we have ranked choice. So if our first choice gets eliminated, votes will go to the second choice and so on. This means that minor parties and independent candidates have a chance.

Labor is our centre-left part with roots in unions. Liberals are centre-right with roots in business and suburban professionals but have been charging hard right in an attempt to pick up the conservative retard vote. Our current actual centre-right is a bunch of independents (candidates not endorsed by a party) collectively known as the Teals. Greens are the biggest actual left party. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (PHON) and Trumpet of Patriots (TOP) are right wing nuts.

Albanese is a “cunt” because he and his party still cater to big business despite claiming to be the party of workers. An example from Tasmania being introducing Federal legislation to protect the salmon farms currently destroying our waterways in an attempt to buy votes in a marginal electorate.

Labour is a centrist party that historically emerged from the union movement. They occupy a center-right to center-left position.

The Liberal/National Coalition is right to far right, though they used to have a center right wing (“wets”). The liberal party mostly represent the interests of the rich and business - liberal as in laissez faire, not liberal in the US sense. The nationals have historically represented the interests of farmers and rural communities.

Independents are representatives without a party allegiance. When your electoral system is designed to reflect the will of the people - ie it’s not first past the post - you can have independents or minor parties.

Y’all have first past the post / winner takes all, don’t you?

Nope. Instant-Runoff Vote, where we rank preferences. It’s much better.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Australia

• ncase.me/ballot/ has a neat interactive visualisation of different voting methods.

Labor, coalition, independents, etc. what kinds of parties are these?

The Coalition is a coalition of allied parties, not just one party. Generally speaking, it’s the Liberal Party and the National Party. Now, if you’re used to American political media, you’ve probably learned an incorrect definition of ‘liberal’ - it doesn’t actually just mean ‘progressive’, liberalism is an ideology focusing on the ideal of liberty, and most parties in modern liberal-democratic countries are liberals, whether they’re classic liberals (think US Libertarians), progressive liberals (think a Green party) or conservative liberals. The Liberal Party of Australia are conservative liberals, and they’ve been mirroring some of Trump’s rhetoric and US Republican Party ideas like the DOGE, and rationalising new coal power plants. Australia apparently didn’t like that.

Labor were historically a social democrat party representing the labour movement and unions, but has drifted further away from that and is now considered either the centre or centre-left party.

The Greens are the third biggest, a populist progressive party, focusing on issues like environment and climate, social justice and housing.

Independent candidates are independent, they aren’t in a party. Some have left their old parties, some were never in one.

I thought Albanese was a “cunt” yet his party seems to have won again?

Since when has that stopped politicians from winning?

What’s going on?

The Liberal Party faceplanted, many of their voters swung to Labor. Others will have chosen smaller parties, but Labor and Coalition each had about 33% of the primary vote in the past few years with Greens and One Nation down somewhere around 10% so Labor was clearly the most likely to win this year.

Interestingly, unlike the House of Representatives which election coverage has focused on, there is still a crossbench in the Senate, it looks like Greens will still have around 11 members there, forcing Labor to appeal to them in order to pass bills in the Senate.

These are generalisations, there are some technicalities I’ve avoided.

Y’all have first past the post / winner takes all, don’t you? There was a vote recently and “labor” won from what I’m reading?

We have a (ranked choice voting) preferential vote system. You number your choices (1-8 for house of rep and 1-6 or 1-12 for senate). If the absolute majority isn’t obtained on first count the preferences are distributed until a majority is gained and that majority forms government.

Labor, coalition, independents, etc. what kinds of parties are these?

Centre-left (progressive), centre-right (conservative) and varied respectively. Independents can be anything from legalise cannabis through Kitkat Palmers (billionaire) wannabe Trump party [wrong, I lumped alt parties in with independents]. Ranked choice allows for support of smaller parties but still picking one of the main two if it comes down to a close call.

I thought Albanese was a “cunt” yet his party seems to have won again? What’s going on?

Im not a fan of Albanese due to him largely coasting on important issues; like housing but Im not aware of the broader population thinking he was a cunt. After Morison (deeply moronic conservative who was last PM) he got the job and at least was professional.

Problem is Dutton, the opposition leader just had that bad a platform. Marking yet another attempt for the coalition attempting to bring US/Trump bullshit over here, being a cop who’d disobey an international court warrant, nuclear power saga and in general just being super scarce on details for his plans as PM.

Even if I’m centre left inclined, the coalitions performance this cycle still somewhat disappointed me. A weak coalition means it’s more likely for a complacent Labor party.

Australian parties?

Doof❗ 🔊🎶

It’s preferential FPTP run-off, if no candidate gets 50% the lowest vote candidate is eliminated and preferences are distributed, repeat until there is a winner

• Labor is centre-left
• Liberal/National Coalition is centre-right but ran on a further right platform and had their arse handed to them
• Greens are left
• Most of the Teal Independents would be considered left to centre-left
• There are a variety of fuckwads running right to far-right platforms (Seriously, what kind of cunt do you have to be to think Palmer or Hanson could run a country anywhere other than into the ground)

The incumbent represents stability, and that is what most people want right now. They’re far from perfect, but the alternative was Donald Dutton

In Australia:

The House of Representatives uses the instant-runoff ranked ballots electoral system.

For the senate they use the single transferable vote.

A lot of the countries that use the first-past-the-post system were formerly part of the British Empire.

cunt is a compliment

I’ll preface this by saying I’m not as informed as some so if I get something wrong, apologies.

We don’t have first past the post.

Australia has federal, state and local government elections. This election was federal. Each state is subdivided into large federal regions, and we vote on representatives for our area (green ballot and lowe house). We also vote on which party we want to see in control (white ballot and upper house).

The green ballot is just counted up, and the person with the most votes wins. The white ballot is harder to explain, but basically you need a majority of seats to take government and have to win 76 seats. There’s a transfer system you can read about on wikipedia.

Idk about Albonese being a cunt but every politician in Australia is considered a bit of a dickhead. We don’t worship them here. So we vote out the biggest dickhead (Peter Dutton) most of the time (some could be lovely but most people are aware how many do very little and earn $400k salaries).

Dutton ran a campaign on nuclear power and other things I won’t go into. Nuclear power has 0 infrastructure in Australia so we’d be starting from scratch. It would take 15 years to begin powering Australia. We will have a crisis in 5 years due to population growth. This is extremely easy to point out as stupid, and hard to argue against, especially when half the country already has solar power on their roofs. They also told everyone they’d make fuel cheaper and buy more military equipment even though we have a deal to get military equipment from the US and UK. It’d be nice to have but stupid to run on it.

They didn’t have many other policies that made it to me, but I largely block ads so you could go read more about it online.

Conversely, Albonese ran on things like healthcare, the housing crisis and affordable living. Things people actually care about given the times.

Parties:

• Labor is pro union, and commonly quite centred with a slight lean left. They won the election in a landslide.
• the coalition is two parties, they’re supposed to be centred-right and conservative but they were going off the deep end and going with America/trump style politics. They ran a bad campaign is what I can say with stat’s to back me up.
• greens party is very progressive, sometimes a little to aggressive with that stance.
• there’s the trumpet of patriots who were meant to be Aus MAGA and are just annoying.
• there’s one nation who are basically racists who want white Australia to be strongly enforced again.
• independents will vote with whatever they think is right, but will often align with one party more than the others. They can win seats in government and work with all parties as they want.

TL;DR Most people would probably say the liberals ran a bad campaign, hence they lost badly. Albo is likely a cunt but he’s better than the guy we voted out who wanted to force the country to go with nuclear power, which would start producing energy 10 years after we had a shortage. At least Albo is going to do things with healthcare and affordable living. And if he fails, we’ll vote him out and get someone who will because we aren’t a cult.

Winner takes all in the house of representatives. The senate uses proportional representation

The big two parties labor and the coalition change the rules and gimp small parties every time they start to get popular (see the recent party name bans, increase in members needed to register, caps to self funding and expenses)

The actions of the republicans in the US have pushed voters away from the coalition and their leader Peter Dutton (who lost his seat) as they were cozying up with the Trump administration and mimicking them in various ways

Therefore Labor wins