Australian political leaders who refuse TDA interviews lose elections

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Australian political leaders who refuse TDA interviews lose elections

5 May 2025

Australian youth news outlet The Daily Aus (TDA), asked former Australian Liberal Party, and Opposition leader, Peter Dutton several times for a one-on-one interview, but he refused every time.

The same, apparently, went for former Liberal Party leader, and Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. Both leaders refused to speak to TDA, both leaders went on to lose elections they subsequently faced, Dutton over the weekend, and Morrison in 2022.

Current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meanwhile sat down with Billi FitzSimons, TDA’s editor-in-chief, in early February. Angus Taylor, the Opposition’s shadow treasurer, did however speak with FitzSimons in April (Instagram link). He was, I believe, the most senior Liberal Party/Opposition member to be interviewed by TDA.

FitzSimons, and TDA co-founder Zara Seidler, recounted the experience (palaver?) of attempting to invite Dutton to speak with them, in a recent podcast. Spoiler: Dutton seemed pretty obstinate, an attitude in general that probably cost him the 2025 election.

Australians favour early voting, time for politicians to take notice

24 April 2025

Shane Wright, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald:

A record 542,000 people, or 3 per cent of those on the electoral roll, cast a ballot on the first day of pre-poll voting on Tuesday. It was a 72 per cent increase on the 314,000 who cast a vote on the first day of pre-polling at the 2022 election.

According to the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), there are a little over eighteen-million Australians registered to vote in the upcoming federal election (Saturday 3 May 2025). To expect all of these people to attend a polling booth on a single day, is absurd, especially in more populous regions. Could that many people possibly vote in one day? Despite the best efforts of polling booth staff, I think some people might miss out. This after having possibility waited hours in a queue.

Of course eighteen million people wouldn’t all descend on polling booths on election day. Some people would have sent in postal votes, while a supposedly small number would voted early, as they were unable to do so on election day because of work or travel commitments. But with up to half of Australians expected to cast their votes during the two weeks ahead of election day, it is clear not all of those people will be working or travelling on the day. When it comes to voting early, Australians are voting with their feet, by walking to into pre-polling booths in droves.

Voting is compulsory in Australia, as it should be, and all the more reason people be given — particularly in the absence of an online voting system — a reasonable amount time to vote. Naturally there are risks in voting early. The candidate a person votes early for might make a serious blunder in the lead up to election day. The party someone backs might announce a policy on the eve the election that is not popular. Parties typically do not release the costings of their policies and promises until the last minute. People who have voted early might find the proposed expenditure excessive.

Then again, policies can quickly be altered, or dropped completely, immediately after the election. An elected lawmaker can unforgivably err shortly after assuming office. There may be little a voter could do at that point, except wait for the next election. But nine million, maybe more, Australians cannot be wrong. The option to vote early, unconditionally, is something the people want, risks notwithstanding. It is time all politicians in Australia accepted early voting as an inherent part of the election process. I also wrote about early voting at the last federal election, three years ago.

Say what you will, this is a democracy after all, but I’m sold on it.

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Australia, current affairs, politics

Seeing Trump’s America through the eyes of a historian in 2100

18 April 2025

One way to make sense of the present upheaval in the United States might be to see it through the eyes of a historian writing about US history in the early twenty-second century. This perspective, envisaged by Peter Leyden, which doesn’t address every last (often heavy-handed) policy of the Trump administration, sees a system of government long overdue for reform:

The Pax Americana with America as the global policeman enforcing order in the international system was coming to an end. That system had a great long run of 80 years, starting at the end of World War II, but could not go on much longer.

The United States military budget in 2025 was $850 billion — more than the military spending of the next dozen countries combined — and America was saddled with chronic budget deficits that could not sustain that kind of spending.

The bureaucratic welfare state that had been the backbone of post-war society in America and throughout the West was also fiscally unsustainable and way past its prime in effectiveness. The large aging populations of these developed economies were putting mounting pressures on the budgets of entitlement programs, which were devised for the smaller numbers of elderly long ago.

Leyden’s article is completely speculative, but is a fascinating read nonetheless. The Democrats appear to have been firmly pushed aside at the moment, but in time will return to centre stage:

Trump, his MAGA administration, and the current crop of Republicans now in Congress are not going to come up with the new systems that will reinvent America in a way that allows it to thrive in the 21st century. The odds of that happening are miniscule.

However, they almost certainly are going to create the space for some other political force, some other movement, some other set of leaders to pull that off. I expect that will come out of Blue America, with new movements and a new generation of leaders looking forward with truly transformative ideas.

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America, current affairs, politics

Australian Electoral Commission posts new guidelines for influencers, content creators

11 April 2025

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has issued an updated set of guidelines clarifying the role of content creators and influencers.

The move comes in the wake of mild controversy surrounding a recent interview Sydney based podcaster Abbie Chatfield recorded with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Some listeners felt the interview constituted what is considered to be electoral material, something that requires an authorisation statement from the political entity issuing said material. These are usually adverts, that variously promote a party candidate, or policy, although they can take a number of forms.

The AEC however concluded the interview did not breach any regulations. The revised guidelines come in addition to a publicity campaign being run by the AEC, warning people to be cautious about material relating to the upcoming Australian Federal election, they may encounter on social media, and, no doubt, blogs and websites.

If IndieWeb took off, became mainstream, would it still be IndieWeb?

26 February 2025

The IndieWeb doesn’t need to “take off”, by Susam Pal.

It’d be great to imagine all those people who cling to social media — as if it were a life-support system — suddenly coming to their senses and launching personal websites. Owning their own content, on websites belonging only to them. And in the process, hastening the demise of the social networks, who would abruptly find themselves with no members, after the personal website exodus.

But as I wrote last May, such a groundswell would not be great at all. Because once the action returned to the website space, we’d see a repeat of what happened prior to the arrival of social media: websites monetised to within an inch of their life. And opportunists galore, looking for a channel to pedal their wares, and rocket the noise-to-signal ratio off the gauge.

Yet, such a cataclysm might have occurred in 2021, when now US President Donald Trump launched a blog, after being banned by Twitter and Facebook (how unimaginable such happenings would be today…). With his own blog though, Trump effectively became part of IndieWeb. But someone with Trump’s profile, going “IndieWeb”, could easily have opened the floodgates.

And it wouldn’t have just been the likes of Trump. Politicians of all stripes might have followed suit, if they decided IndieWeb was the place to be. When people talk of IndieWeb “taking off”, I somehow doubt that’s what they have in mind. But Trump’s sojourn into “IndieWeb” blogging was short lived. A few months later he launched his own social network, Truth Social.

On the other hand though, even if IndieWeb had, if you like, gone mainstream, IndieWeb would still be IndieWeb. It would have continued to thrive, right where it is now, in its own corner of the web. In a strange sort of way then, IndieWeb is all the richer for the existence of social media. Die-hard adherents can keep their algorithm chocked socials feeds, and declining engagement, leaving IndieWeb to flourish, and be what it is.

A pre-war deal between Ukraine and Russia? What deal exactly?

20 February 2025

If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had made a deal with Russia three years ago, the war in Ukraine could have been avoided. According, that is, to United States President Donald Trump:

This could’ve been settled very easily, just a half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without the loss of much land, very little land, without the loss of any lives, without the loss of cities that are just laying on their sides.

Was an undertaking not to join NATO meant to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to take back territory he’s long considered part of the old Russian Empire? Or were the Ukrainians expected to offer a whole lot more?

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current affairs, politics, Ukraine

Intercepted, a Ukraine war documentary by Oksana Karpovych

19 February 2025

Ukrainian film director Oksana Karpovych’s documentary, Intercepted, which features phone calls between invading Russian soldiers and their families in Russia, has one of the starkest trailers I’ve seen in a long while.

Phil Hoad, writing for The Guardian, described Intercepted as chilling, and compelling:

Juxtaposing intercepted calls back home from frontline Russian troops with shots of the devastation they have wreaked in Ukraine, this film is a bleak and searing wiretap into Putin’s warping effect on his people and the psychology of power.

Slow and steady wins the culture wars?

7 February 2025

Keeping track of what’s happening (or being said) in the world, particularly the United States, in these past few weeks feels like an impossible task. Trying to make sense of it all is another matter entirely. But as Tyler Cowen, writing at Marginal Revolution, seems to suggest, it’s all part of a bigger scheme:

You will not win all of these cultural debates, but you will control the ideological agenda (I hesitate to call it an “intellectual” agenda, but it is). Your opponents will be dispirited and disorganized, and yes that does describe the Democrats today. Then just keep on going. In the long run, you may end up “owning” far more of the culture than you suspected was possible.

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America, current affairs, politics

Don’t believe all the news you hear on commercial TV and radio

4 February 2025

Amanda Meade, writing for The Guardian:

People who get most of their news from commercial TV and radio are more likely to believe the conspiracy theory that climate change is a natural phenomenon rather than caused by humans, a new study has found.

The research conducted by Monash University, based in Melbourne, Australia, also found people who sourced news from commercial media outlets, generally scored lower on a measure of civic values, compared to those relying on non-commercial, and public, broadcasters. People with lower civic value scores tend to be more reluctant to take on views that clash with theirs.

And, if I’m understanding the study findings correctly, almost sixty-percent of Australians source news from social media platforms. With Facebook about to do away with fact-checkers, that’s going to be a lot of people with access to news that possibly has not been substantiated or verified.

How to fact check in places where Facebook is the whole internet

20 January 2025

Upcoming changes to Meta’s fact checking and content moderation policies might precipitate greater free speech in some parts of the world. But the removal of these checks and balances could trigger unrest and violence in other regions, say Libby Hogan and Natasya Salim, writing for ABC News:

Nobel laureate and Filipino journalist Maria Ressa warned of “extremely dangerous times ahead” for journalism and democracy. Celine Samson, a fact-checker with Vera Files, said roles like hers were especially important during the last election. Vera Files recorded a rise in misinformation posts that used a particularly dangerous tactic in the Philippines — portraying opposition leaders as communists. While the term “communist” may seem relatively harmless elsewhere, in the Philippines, it can be life-threatening.

In countries where Meta platforms are among other media channels, questionable content can potentially be disputed, but that’s not the case everywhere. In some places, Meta’s social networks are considered to be the internet. The removal of fact checking and content moderation controls in those environments could have dire consequences.

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