Blackadder wrote:Seven Prime Ministers in ten years? Will everyone in Oz get to have a go at some point? How does it work? Is there a random draft for the job? Sounds like a bonzer idea.

It's a bit of a snakes and ladders game. First step is to join the right party. If you join any other than the so called Liberal Party or the Labor Party you've just terminally slid down the first snake. Next, you need to join the right faction. If you've chosen the left faction of either party you've joined you've just terminally slid down the second snake. Make sure you don't have dual citizenship. That, as eight or so politicians have discovered in recent months, threatens to disqualify you from being a member of parliament. Our previous deputy Prime Minister was among that lot. What got him undone in the end, however, was his dalliance with a staff member in his office, which is quite an unusual thing in Australian politics. Until that happened personal affairs of that sort were studiously and rightfully ignored by the press and the public.

The crux of the matter is that Prime Ministers are not elected by popular vote. They are chosen by the parliamentary members of the winning party in the case of the so called Liberal Party, and the parliamentary members plus ordinary members of the Labor Party if the Labor Party wins the general election. Something like that anyway.

So, it is up to the respective parties to appoint - or sack - the Prime Minister. Whatever the system, the respective snake and ladder rules apply.

Blackadder wrote:I just re-read this whole thread, laughing and shaking my head. The gustavoo/waga guy is a certifiable window-licker. There are certain people who should not be allowed access to any technology more advanced than a rock and a wooden stick to hit it with, and he’s Exhibit A for that thesis.

The opening post was sufficient evidence for me to come to a similar conclusion. Anyone who argues that not being able to remember "every single seconds detail from that time when you born" means you may as well "accept Krsna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. You accept it; then your searching after God is finished", has a kangaroo or two running loose in the top paddock. Add to that the choppy sentences, weird punctuation and formatting of his text, and there really is no point in reading any further.

I regard gustavoo as a profoundly unbalanced person rather than a troll. Nevertheless I am surprised that he lasted long enough to get away with posting 71 times.

Anyway, back to Tones. He is not the only cause to make Australians feel embarrassed. On the other side of parliament we have the erstwhile leader of the Labor Party, fulltime psycho Mark "break an arm" Latham, and on the crossbenches we have Pauline "please explain" Pantsdown, whose party latham has recently joined in order to provide irrefutable proof that there is no spec of sanity left in him. I kind of wonder if he had any sanity at all to begin with. The embarrassment is not so much that they exist. It's that we vote for them as much as we do. We did vote Tony Abbott into prime ministership. We almost did the same with Latham, and Pauline Hanson attracts up to 20% of the vote in some seats. For crying out loud, not only is she a fucking Senator, but there is another one of her party sitting in the same chamber, one state member in Queensland and three in Western Australia. I want to hide somewhere.

Hamster wrote:

Hermit wrote:
Anyway, back to Tones. He is not the only cause to make Australians feel embarrassed. On the other side of parliament we have the erstwhile leader of the Labor Party, fulltime psycho Mark "break an arm" Latham, and on the crossbenches we have Pauline "please explain" Pantsdown, whose party latham has recently joined in order to provide irrefutable proof that there is no spec of sanity left in him. I kind of wonder if he had any sanity at all to begin with. The embarrassment is not so much that they exist. It's that we vote for them as much as we do. We did vote Tony Abbott into prime ministership. We almost did the same with Latham, and Pauline Hanson attracts up to 20% of the vote in some seats. For crying out loud, not only is she a fucking Senator, but there is another one of her party sitting in the same chamber, one state member in Queensland and three in Western Australia. I want to hide somewhere.

I would contend that Tony largely got in because Labor had made themselves un-electable through the Kevin-Julia-Kevin debacle.
That, I would say, was a drover's dog election - though Tony was effective in opposition, the real enemy of the government was Kevin in exile.

[Latham was always has been a loon but losing to Howard seemed to render him certifiable.
I will always blame the (ill-named) Liberal party for Pauline. She only became infamous by winning Oxley back in 1996 because she had been a Liberal candidate who was dis-endorsed (for racist comments) too close to the election to be backfilled, so she became the only "conservative" with a profile on the ticket. Polls never seem to reflect the actual votes her "team" gets in actual elections which most recently was 4.29% in the senate and 13.7%. She has way too high a profile for her actual "popularity"].
...just sayin...

Yeah, voters don't like party putsches, as the so called Liberals will rediscover by March next year. Too much instability.

As for Pauline, her ride on the coattails of the so called Libs has ended years ago. 22 years after her expulsion she is winning and losing votes all on her own. She and her party have attracted enough of them for two senatorial seats federally and four seats in Queensland's and Western Australia's state parliaments.

The Gillard-Rudd fight was - to say the least - most unfortunate. I regard Rudd's terms as PM as the best we had in decades, and Gillard's was not far behind. That is despite the fact that both were unforgivably reticent about doing anything to fix our offshore concentration camps. Rudd in fact started them. As for Gillard, I will never forgive her kowtowing to the Christian Lobby and increasing funding for the School Chaplain Project when she should have axed it altogether. It was a brazen power grab. South Australia's Labor extremely conservative numbers man, Senator Don Farrell would not have permitted her to become Prime Minister, had she done the right thing. She sacrificed principle for power.

Fixed your quote tags, by the way.