Heh, that post was a few months back.
Ahh well, still to address Kogon's points; the right (ironically known as the liberals) represents business and conservative morals, so their stance only tends to deregulation on areas fiscally related (freeing up trade, etc.) though they are sort of divided on some areas even there; in Western Aus., we have limits on sunday trading, and latenight trading.
Generally, very very few stores are open past 6pm, or open at all on a Sunday (
). Liberals on the one hand want to appease their business backers by deregulating hours, but because their main voter base are the religious right (think Helen Lovejoy from the Simpsons; "Won't somebody think of the children!") and late night/sunday trading is seen as detrimental to families (BS of the highest degree), they can be somewhat schizo about the whole thing. Then of course the two religious parties we have over here, the Family First and Christian Democrats parties, who are just plain batshit insane (They want to raise the legal drinking age to 21! It doesn't effect me anymore, sure, but it's the principle of the thing).
By contrast, our "left", the Labor Party (at least in W.A., there's a lot of regional variation in the parties) is opposed to it. That said, Labour (at the federal government level) did try and introduce mandatory internet censorship, so they have their own unfortunate case of moral-guardian-itis too.
Basically, neither side really tends one way or the other on 'deregulation' in general, it depends too much on the details of the individual item. Also, finally, everything I've said only holds true for the most isolated chunk of Aus, the rest of the country is a bit more civilised.
(And goddamn I have a lot of parenthetical asides).
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Topic: Australia has a new government. (Read 6944 times)