‘There is nothing to differentiate Labor and Liberal in Tasmania except the artificial battle for personal power.’

Um…you don’t say. Just the same as with every other state!

As I said on another forum in answer to this article:
Maybe it’s time for a 4th party to be formed. One with basic decent middle of the road policies that will give the ignored constituents a place in the political scene. I have had it remarked to me recently, that “I would sooner make my vote informal than have the preferences go to either the Libs or the Labs, both totally against what I stand for”.
A 4th party or a lose coalition of independents would at least provide a place for preferences away from the Liblabs.

As Ludwig said.

There is also no difference between Federal Labor and Federal Liberal.

Today a new personal benchmark has been set:

I can agree with both Ludwig AND Leigh in the one thread.

However, I suspect our reasons may well be different.

Sarnian, we really madly deeply need an alternative.

As we saw in WA the Greens are likely to pick up more lower house seats with every election. Perhaps at the State level Greens are more pragmatic than their Federal counterparts who appear to live in a dream world. It would be nice to have a political alternative who are neither ecological vandals nor dreamers.

To illustrate my point I've been taken aback by the cutting down of those magnificent swamp gums at Camp Florentine. Whether the protesters were dirty hippies or not thousands of local, interstate and foreign tourists called in there to admire the trees. It became part of a tourist drive taking in Lake Pedder. The next 400 years will not see a repeat of the cool, damp, shady conditions those trees need to grow so large. Now they are low value wood chips and floor boards when they had been a major tourist attraction. Yet this was done with the full approval of Premier Bartlett. Therefore I cannot vote for Bartlett or his Liberal clones.

Taswegian, I am with you in this. If we get Libs instead of labs, will it make any difference at all, the cozy relationship with Big Business will continue on as usual. I would like to see the greens prevail but they seem unable to convince the thinking voter to actually give them a chance.

Just change the name of the place to Gunnsmania and have done with it.

Or maybe the Pope could step in, just like the good old days, and divide the place equally between Gunns and Federal Hotels.

Yeah, too right.

I remember a skit with Max Gillies back in the 1980s. “In news just out, the Labor and Liberal parties have now released their election platforms and the differences have become apparent. In the third paragraph on Swamp Reclamation, the Labor party has a semi-colon, while the Liberal party has a full stop and a capital letter.

We don’t need a new “middle of the road” party. It’s the tendency of both parties to tend toward the middle ground that has caused the problem. Anyone wanting to vote middle of the road has got at least *two* parties to choose from.

The problem is precisely that both parties are so utterly unprincipled, and neither can be relied on to stick to any general principle either in ethics or practice.

This problem in turn arises out of the ethics, or rather the lack of them, in redistributionism. Once we accept the principle that the valid function of the state is to violate people’s property rights, it necessarily follows that they have a right to arbitrary power generally, because we get our property through working, so what is taken is our time and our freedom, and ultimately all we have in life is time and freedom

"[Both sides] endorse whole-scale clear-felling; aerial spraying of catchments; wood chipping at double the current annual rate; forestry “regeneration” for the establishment of monocultural plantations; triazines in drinking water, dioxins in the marine environment;"

Umm..really? I'd want to see this in writing.

The main problem with Tasmania is that it is massively overgoverned. There simply isn't enough talent and diversity in an island of 500,000 people to supply forty state politicians, twenty-nine local councils, ten(?) Federal senators and three(?) Federal MHRs, while retaining enough bright people to actually do something useful. Given the current debate about abolishing the States, the best thing Tassie could do is cut a deal with Kevin Rudd, hand over the keys to Hobart Parliament House, and declare itself a Territory. If they can get funding on the same level as the Northern Territory then they can all pretty well retire.

Every election, federal or state, I am faced with a dilemma. Who do I put last on the ballot paper, Liberal or Labor?

There is a great temptation for me to find some method of making that choice completely randomly but in the end I usually work out which of the two has abused its powers most since last I was given the opportunity to cast my vote. I put them last and since the incumbent is usually in the best position to cause damage and to abuse its powers - and they usually grasp the opportunity with both hands - they normally get the wooden spoon.

Below is a link to a series of videos that tie together the economic, energy and environmental factors embedded in the status qou which work together to push our civilization to the brink. While it focuses on the US (a basket case I would suggest) it nonetheless is relevant to all capitalist economies.

http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse

Well worth a look.

“Every election, federal or state, I am faced with a dilemma. Who do I put last on the ballot paper, Liberal or Labor?”

I appreciate this dilemma Kulu, because your vote could very easily end up counting for whomever you put second last, in our incredibly antidemocratic compulsory preferential voting system. In other words, your vote could very likely count for a party that you are specifically voting against. It blows my mind that we can have a system like this.

This system applies at the federal level and in Tassie and some other states. In my state of Queensland we have optional preferential voting, which is almost infinitely more democratic!

I vote for no one at the federal level, where if you vote for a minor candidate and have no intention of your vote filtering down and counting for one of the lib/labs, you may very well have your vote hijacked straight in to the count for whichever one of those two scoundrels you put second last on your ballot paper.

I don’t believe in voting for the lesser of two evils unless there is a big and obvious difference between them, and the lesser evil has some pretty good stuff to offer...in amongst its evilness!

Submitting a blank ballot paper has been the go for quite a few elections now.

.
I can thoroughly recommend Chris Martensens’s crash course on economics.

Kulu

Thanks for the link.

Agree with both you and Ludwig.

It is a shame that there isn't some kind of legislation to ensure that oppositions actually behaved like oppositions and considered the future of Australia instead of pursuing their ideology. It seems to me that the Greens have been behaving more like an opposition at the federal level. Apart from the Gunns lobby, I'm not certain about the situation in Tassie - I agree that there is a dearth of talent down there.

Ludwig, Fractelle,

I still think that the Greens with all their flaws are a better bet than nothing. So if given a choice to vote Greens or Democrats or a worthy independent I will tick those boxes first although I am then left with a catch-22 situation on which major party to put last.

Clearly a blank voting slip removes any possibility of a change away from the status qou. Also in this country the protest value of a blank vote or a spoiled paper is lost because there is no publicity given to it.