Biden wins and rightwing/centrist democrats proudly proclaim they can now ignore the progressive voices in the party. They spend the next 4 years trying to “reach across the aisle” to the republicans/right while bashing the left and being openly hostile to progressive policy.
Nothing of any meaningful benefit to working class US americans gets done, and they get pantsed in the next election.
Sames going to happen in the UK with Starmer, and if after this Labour term people arent seeing any meaningful improvement in their day to day lives, i think there will be a heavy swing to the right here as well.
And you expect this is what is going to happen here? I’m not sure what your basis is for that. Or how youd think I said that. The only thing I’ve been saying is that the Greens have a big opportunity this term, but they need to be a bit more savvy than they were last time.
This is the bit im confused by.
Labor gobbled up ALL of centre left politics in Australia and have a massive lower house majority and the lesson from the election is they need to move left and vacate the centre that gave them a genuinely historic win?
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see a more progressive Labor party - I think it will shift a bit this cycle, due to the new MPs, need to rely on Greens in the Senate, some of those NSW Right heavyweights starting to look a bit tired (so long Ed Husic and Mark Dreyfus, apparently), but I think thats coming as a reflection of the electorate, not the other way around.
Suuuuurre… ok well - I guess I’m trying to use the terms as they’re generally understood in Australian politics.
If you’re assuming Labor isn’t going to seriously address destroying capitalism (I love your profile pic, btw) - then, yeah that’s probably a safe prediction.
If you doubt they’re going to try and distribute wealth a bit more equitably, then I reckon. You’re probably being a bit too cynical.
Rent caps and ending negative gearing isn’t exactly destroying capitalism either. But they were still way too radical for the Labour party. In fact that’s exactly what a centre left policy would look like.
I think Albo took rent caps to the states last year and they weren’t interested?
I would not rule out changes to negative gearing in this term, more likely the next. Something along the lines of bending it back towards more productive investment.
I don’t think reform there is just too radically leftist for Labor to touch, as much as Australians like it and don’t want it touched and it’s not really thing that’s going to filix the housing market anyway? The last party I remember that went hard on negative gearing now has somewhere between 0-1 MPs left in the house…
No, we really didn’t. About a third of voters who contributed to Labor’s 54% 2PP didn’t vote 1 Labor. So we need to ensure that we don’t alienate those who merely preferred us to the Libs after their first choice.
I’m not talking about vacating the centre either. You bring people with you by developing policies that solve problems and convince people it’s the right thing to do. Y’know, doing politics.
They destroyed the right wing fossil & nuclear fantasy by backing renewables plus storage, publicly, and trounced the Libs on this issue. The Libs tried to blame renewables for the cost of living crisis and basically fought the election on it, and Labor decisively stood up to it with the most left-wing energy platform any federal government has taken to an election. I don’t think that capturing the “centre” gave them a win.
I feel like we’ve been watching a different federal political term… can you elaborate how the Greens did anything that can fairly be called “obstruction” on these three issues? The Greens have certainly tacked left of Labor on Palestine, but they didn’t obstruct anything IIRC, because the Libs sided with Labor.
The issue with rent controls is that residential tenancies are a State matter.
As I understand it, there’s a further set of pretty simple economic issues:
rent caps work for the people who are in a property that gets its rent capped, but when they leave there’s little incentive to keep the property on the rental market*, and
rent caps can stymie supply of build to rent properties, because who’s going to build a property that they can’t make a return on?
There’s a fair bit of academic research on rent controls in the US and there are certainly people who benefit but I think it’s clear that there are big winners and big losers, whereas focusing effort on dampening investor demand for existing property and incentivising the supply side makes a lot of sense with fewer negative effects.
This all sits over a broader issue that we’ve created a culture of treating housing as an investment class rather than a necessity of life, and it’s gonna take some time to undo that.
Ideally (and no politician who wants to win a majority can ever really say this) we will want wages to rise faster than house prices for quite some time, but because of the situation we have got into (and that our banks have got into), if house prices actually start going backwards, especially if they do it sharply, there are a bunch of issues that will affect financial stability and eventually the real economy.
TLDR: If I were looking to risk losing a bit of paint to fight for something in housing it wouldn’t be rent controls.
*This isn’t necessarily terrible - it’s not like the houses disappear, but not all the people who are looking to rent a place can choose to buy it instead and that doesn’t help people who are looking for a place to rent.
Side question. Lots of talk about left and right, what defines the centre?
The definition of progressive and conservative has shifted so much, consider 1900 vs now, so it’s not really based on past position.
So is the centre the centre of current societal expectation? The centre of political parties? How do you define that or is it just a vibe? Does it differ country to country? Right wing here is left wing in Indonesia?
Or is it not really anything substantive/objective behind it and just tool for comparative discussion for one person/party vs another?
I guess it varies on the person, but the vibe I get is that someone that is centrist is more likely to be progressive either socially or economically, but conservative with the other. I can think of several examples even in my own social circle where they are socially conservative but economically progressive.
I think most of this discussion is boiling down to perspectives. I’ve got one person saying that there is not a single thing even centre left about Labor and another saying they took the most leftist energy policy in Australian history to the election. And me in the middle saying, I think they’re pretty much just centre left maybe trending leftward.
Edit: and these aren’t random idiots. They’re reasonable, rational people who I like and tend to agree with most things they say.
It’s the middle 50% of the Overton window, defined as the range of ideas which are considered acceptable to a mainstream populace at a given time, as you pointed out.
Other than a class of loyalists (whether self-declared or otherwise) who often take their cues on policy from the party or podcaster or influencer they follow and so have a set of views as cohesive as their party, most people kinda feel their way and often have views that are idiosyncratic to them, and informed by their experience and the information they have access to or have been exposed to.
So a person might have a view on a certain policy or issue that sits in one place on the left/right libertarian/authoritarian spectrum and it won’t exactly correlate with their other views.
People’s views also change, and sometimes in a piecemeal way. I’m pretty sure my father in law never voted Labor before he met me, but his views on Abbott and then Dutton make me sure he has since. But he thinks wind farms look awful and he has other views that wouldn’t neatly fit with a Labor voter.
Ultimately, voters get to choose what they care about, and the label is an afterthought.
Given that the window is defined literally by what people think, it’s hard to see how that could be the case for most people, some people may be surprised by shifts, especially since the rise of social media and the endless social manipulation that comes with it.
Agree with this. Think about the speed of movement in respect of support for same sex marriage. In the early noughties it was an effective wedge issue for the right to chisel off voters from the centre left, and now it’d probably be the reverse.
