Australian Issues1:
Immigrants/Refugees. Australia currently has very harsh laws designed to protect its borders from illegal immigration, predominantly via arrival by boat. Several of these violate current UN guidelines on the treatment of refugees, such as mandatory detention. There's division over whether these laws are fair or unnecessarily harsh, but the current political party takes pride in their track record of "turning back the boats." The perception is that many seeking entry into the country through refugee status are actually simply economic migrants looking for a better quality of life than that found in their own country. Given our isolated location and lack of direct access, refugees typically have to pass through many other countries to reach Australia, and the argument is that if they were true refugees simply looking to escape threats to their life, they would have stopped there instead of actively attempting a dangerous journey via boat to Australia. For additional references, see the articles on the
Pacific Solution and
Operation Sovereign Borders.
2.
Declining Iron Ore Demand: Australia experienced an unprecedented boom in trade over the last ten years thanks to overseas demand for iron ore, particularly in China and the Asia region. From 2005 to its peak in 2014,
exports skyrocketed (see graph), and the mining industry in Australia was big business that made a lot of people rich overnight. Sadly the demand has downturned, and while Australia is lucky enough to have existing infrastructure and resources to continue offering their ore at the lower end of the price spectrum, we're in competition with alternative sites such as South America, which has lower labour costs and ore deposits of a higher quality. This in large part has been a continuing debate in politics, as many budget predictions were planned on the (misguided) assumption that income from ore exports would continue growing.
3.
2016 Federal Election: Due to repeated failure to agree on legislation by a divided Senate, the current government has called for an early election to resolve the deadlock. It's anyone's guess who will win, but currently the opposition are slightly in the lead. The last six years has seen no less than five different people take a turn at the position of Prime Minister of Australia, as a unique feature of Australia's political system is that the political party decides who gets the job and can vote to change their preference if they're unhappy with the current leadership. By comparison, one person held the job for eleven years prior to that.
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Topic: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread! (Read 217273 times)