{"id":51486,"date":"2010-12-08T09:24:59","date_gmt":"2010-12-08T15:24:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/?p=51486"},"modified":"2010-12-08T09:25:52","modified_gmt":"2010-12-08T15:25:52","slug":"australia-democratic-politics-in-its-purest-form","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/?p=51486","title":{"rendered":"Democratic Politics in Its Purest Form"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/v32\/n24\/david-runciman\/look\" target=\"_blank\">Read it.<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Certainly that\u2019s how it turned out after this year\u2019s general election  in Australia. That resulted, as over here, in a hung parliament, the  first for more than 70 years. As here, the incumbent Labour Party lost  the vote by most meaningful measurements (they ended up with the same  number of seats as their conservative rivals, and under Australia\u2019s  version of the AV system a considerably smaller share of first  preferences). The three independent MPs who found themselves kingmakers  all came from rural constituencies, whose electors appeared much happier  with the idea of a centre-right government than a centre-left one. But  that did not stop two of the three from throwing in their lot with  Labour, allowing the seemingly humiliated Julia Gillard to remain as  prime minister. The rationale was straightforward: they were able to get  more out of her, in the form of money, jobs and all the other little  titbits of power that a government has at its disposal. They also  believed that her relative weakness made her a more trustworthy partner:  she was less likely to cut and run, because she had much more reason to  be frightened of the voters. And luckily, being politicians (and  Australians), they seem to have been unembarrassable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Read it. Certainly that\u2019s how it turned out after this year\u2019s general election in Australia. That resulted, as over here, in a hung parliament, the first for more than 70 years. As here, the incumbent Labour Party lost the vote by most meaningful measurements (they ended up with the same number of seats as their [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dystopia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51486"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51489,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51486\/revisions\/51489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dyspepsiageneration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}