And with that, another state swings sharply to Labor.Of all the states, this leaves only NSW and Tasmania as having a Liberal party Premier. The Tasmanian one is likely to stay, the islandstrayans have been pretty conservative for a long time, but are experiencing a swing towards independents rather than the main parties, and the NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian is basically still in her honeymoon period after "Casino" Mike Baird resigned.
Naturally, the Labor meme machine is in full swing.
Prior to 2015 or so, only SA was Labor. Queensland ousted Campbell Newman's LNP (a fusion of the Liberal and National parties, essentially a permanent, less distinct Coalition; in other states the Libs and Nationals operate in a coalition together) and elected Annastacia Palaszczuk, the head of the Labor Party in Queensland. Queensland's state Labor is not a particularly strong unit, and Palaszczuk's government has been generally weak, more so after a member of the party was forced out after it was found he had domestic violence charges. At the time of the election, it was basically a "not Newman" vote, as he was the worst kind of conservative political crony.
Victoria elected Daniel Andrews pretty strongly. His reign so far has been divisive; but all can agree that the massive money he's pouring in to infrastructure to keep the Victorian economy (one of the largest in the country) going while the Federal government dangles trickles of our infrastructure funding above our heads.
This followed years of Baillieu (a rich boy with real estate lobby links) and Napthine, who was so ineffectual many called him Naptime. This was because Shaw, a rogue MP, had resigned earlier that day, causing Napthine to be forced to take power with a minority government.
Eventually, Labor got rid of Napthine, and Daniel Andrews has taken over. Like I said, while his deep links to various unions is kinda suspicious to the average voter, he's pouring shitloads of money into making traffic flow better (upgrading nearly all of our arterial freeways as well as removing as many level crossings as are feasible) and upgrading train lines with the intent of by 2030 decentralising our train lines from being a "hub-and-spoke" model where single points of failure exist at the terminus stations, instead making several "joined lines" that stop in the city but continue out the other side, eg. a Pakenham-Sunbury line (Pakenham is 58km SE of the city, Sunbury is ~40km NW, both lines are extremely heavily populated) bypassing some of the older city stops.
SA's Labor has had a few hiccups mainly due to the attacks by the Libs on their "renewable focus", when SA was without power after a storm, the Libs blamed the heavy investment into renewables rather than uh, "clean" coal, when in reality the power failure was due to transmission towers being destroyed; the solar panels and wind turbines were producing, they just couldn't transmit it.
And now, WA's eight year long Lib reign has been ousted in a hilariously huge landslide.
It is estimated that 60% of voters, regardless of political alignment, disliked that the WA Liberal party preferenced Pauline Hanson's One Nation above their long-time compatriots, the National PartyAdditionally, Labor needed maybe nine seats to win the election initially; they've since gained almost 20 and are well and truly in a majority government. THe best bit is, Pauline Hanson's arch conservative and insane One Nation party got 0 seats. Not a one. They have no say whatsoever in WA. How great is that?
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Topic: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread! (Read 227597 times)