Monoculture sounds like the kind of thing they’d accuse communists of wanting.

It’s dog whistling, absolutely.

There’s a contradiction at play here. One Nation is often vague and even self-contradictory, which combined with targeted messaging (and microtargeting in the digital realm) allows people to project onto them, I believe. They don’t want to alienate the white supremacist much, nor the “everyday aussie”, nor the non-white immigrant who agrees with some of their messaging.

It’s a juggling game. Sure, you get the neo-Nazis agitating directly about Gina saying we should give free land near Townsville to the Zionist Regime^[1], and an ON MP disclosing they have an immigrant Muslim boyfriend^[2], and more. But… who else are they going to vote for? Neo-Nazis are opportunists, they won’t just abstain. They’ll just call it ‘optics’ for the ‘normie lemmings’ and try to recruit those brought into their sphere through ON. So ON gets to sanitise their message and claim “we’re not really racists” and “stop calling everyone you don’t like a nazi”, without alienating the hardcore open bigots.

You can’t put the immigrant voting for ON and the neo-Nazi in the same protest for long, or a public meeting, but if it’s just votes from unenthusiastic masses you need, then vague mass messaging and contradictory targeted messaging works.

What rubbish. Predictable and pathetic.

Would have been cool if you preempted it, since it’s predictable.

^[1] : [official transcript] / [leftist article] / [nazi article (TW for bigoted ads)]

^[2] : [centrist article] / [nazi article (TW: homophobic framing, bigoted ads)]

Just realised Tom shared a link to the background loop video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XQSLnVRefeI

( ; ~ ; )

¯\( ’ - ’ )/¯

Did you read the article?

You’ve raised great questions.

I second those notes on national figures. I personally see an orange flag when people point to national metrics of economy, luxury, etc. as a sign of governance success (or failure). I’ve seen neglected public housing and gentrified tech-worker luxury a suburb apart, jump a couple more suburbs for mega-million mansions on the waterfront. This is all within an electorate or two. So what the heck do national statistics matter?

You mention means, medians and modes… I like to see medians when they show their face, do you have some critiques of medians in these kinds of statistics? I’d like to be aware if I’m giving them too much credit, perhaps because they so clearly contrast against means to demonstrate inequality in distribution.

Anybody have good data sources they’d like to share?

I’m afraid I don’t, especially not for Australia. I could try and adapt the Wealth Shown to Scale explainable to Australia’s ultrawealthy…

Yes, wow how did I miss that. I’ll delete and repost.

And why the heck are there six upvotes on an empty post?

Consider the following: aussie.zone doesn’t want either the campist anti-Western propagandists nor campist pro-Western propagandists.

Them existing elsewhere does not give you a right to repeatedly spam political think tank pieces here. From your behaviour now and in the past, it is crystal clear that you have no respect for our community.

That’s a great point about social media, especially considering the biggest examples (Meta group, Twitter) are owned by some of the most ultrawealthy people on Earth, with technofeudal ambitions. I was thinking about more traditional media so I’m glad you emphasised social media.

I’m not saying the following to argue, but to add caveats and challenge assumptions.

Not wrong, but all over the world does not have compulsory voting

I see some other people treating compulsory voting as an anchor, but we’re seeing a prolonged shift away from the dominance of Coalition and Labor. We’re talking about a reactionary politician promoted by plenty of mainstream mass media outlets with astronomical funding - many casual apathetic forced-voters will be exposed to more of her populist policies and less of her terrible perspectives and Gina-service than we see. Especially if everyday people like us don’t talk to people about it.

Add to that a high proportion of immigrants

Many immigrants will vote for One Nation. It sounds unintuitive, but there are plenty who openly support Hanson. They’ve already immigrated, and might trivialise the racist attitudes of the party in support of other gripes, especially if they feel association with Australia and see themselves accepted as “one of the good ones”. One Nation is a racist party, but as a whole, it’s selectively racist: they will back candidates from most non-Arab ethnicities and have elected immigrants [admittedly not the best example].

a solidly left leaning younger demographic

Yes, but that doesn’t outweigh the larger, solidly right-leaning older demographic. Unfortunately Wikipedia haven’t updated their table since 2016 and I cbf summing the numbers on the ABS population pyramid, so I’m happy to be contradicted.

Also consider that (judging by the first line of the ABS 2024 age/region summary plus my own assumption) younger populations are likely to be concentrated in cities, reducing the influence of a young vote on suburban and rural electoral seats.

and Trump’s example

And that’s been a useful tactic in dissuading ON prospectives, according to GetUp!, which to me also implies that plenty of people don’t recognise the similarity of Trump’s USA and Pauline’s ON.

So, my perspective is, we should be optimistic and confident, but we must not be complacent and passive. These points you make only work if politically-informed people share our knowledge with the apathetic. And this doesn’t have to be preachy or direct, even passive exposure and “didjyahearabout” conversations will accumulate.

Plenty of surprises on this survey. Historical or contemporary enemies (Vietnam, China, Russia, Philippines, perhaps even Mexico) are balanced or outright favourable compared to Northern & Northwestern Europe.

It’s not a contradiction, but it’s still unintuitive.

Still reading, I want to give you thanks for posting the archive link and copying the text across. It’s much easier for me to read (especially now that the archive.md Google captcha is now asking some people for phone verification)

And to emphasise my perspective, it’s harmful to supply “airtime without criticism” - that stunt drew attention to a sharp critique. It hijacked what would have otherwise been a notable occasion regardless. And as a minor side effect, the event highlighted the party’s fragility.

What does that even mean?

I suspect it’s a reaction to “multicultural”. Their demand isn’t a cohesive vision, it’s a tantrum.

I missed the news of it.

Hanson demands a homocultural nation.

Fair call, promotion wasn’t the best word. What I meant to say was, they give her airtime without criticism - I’d say that’s a form of support, for a similar reason to your concern about giving her attention. Even if we’re talking about cases where the reporting is neutral, factual and with minimal bias, it’s still selected and reported on regularly, and that shapes the worldview of the audience, especially if the heavily-flawed ideas Hanson espouses aren’t addressed in the reporting. Repeating their messages verbatim through a megaphone is spreading their ideas - outlets almost never do the same with open neo-Nazis’ speeches, for obvious reasons.

And as is common knowledge, there are additionally some mass media favourably promoting PHON, like Sky News, who have already called this event a “failed stunt” (lol)

For the most part, yes.

Voting for a representative every four years is not democracy, in any meaningful sense. The AEC is outstanding compared to other countries, I hold them in high regard and I am grateful, but we cannot pretend that people and their needs have more political influence than capital.

and the media are just. Cool. Our turn!

and this makes plenty of sense once we inspect the owning shareholders of media corporations. Protip: it’s owning-class ultrawealthy parasites, same as in the USA

I do have to question if that is giving her more attention, eg. “interrupted by protest banner” vs “Pauline Hanson’s press club address” really what we want?

PHON is not a problem that can just be ignored, considering that capitalist mass media is constantly promoting her and the party is regularly claiming polls and some election results of >20%. We are past the era of denying attention. If we’re lucky, we’re still in the era of education and inoculation against their propaganda.

If news outlets are going to promote her on the big stage no matter what, let’s mock her on that big stage.