Wonders will never cease! The Labor government and the RW opposition actually agree on something!
Funny how they can agree to protect their cosy duopoly even though they disagree on every single other thing.
Yes, it's good to keep the billionaires out of it, but that's just an excuse to try to nobble the Independents and minor parties that threaten to make government accountable by stopping the major parties from having sufficient votes to form government in their own right.
The fix is in.
Oh, for sure. No one wants it to be like America.
But this doesn't actually solve the main problem. On its face, the $20K donation limit and the $800K per seat spending are great.
But Gina Rinehart can still donate $20K to her pet Liberal/Nationals in all 150 seats, and both big parties can still aggregate their spending into a pot of $120 million to buy advertising and whatnot.
Then, there are separate entities that both parties secretly run. The advertise too. 🤷♂️
@DyDave The good news is that the parties don't have to spend money on getting out the vote or suppressing the vote, and the campaigns are really short compared to the U.S.. I'll bet they don't litigate as often, nor do they litigate in 51 or more jurisdictions.
That's all 100% true! 👍 👍
Compared to the US system, ours is delightful.
But there's still a delta between relatively delightful and actually delightful that needs seeing to. 🤓
What the parties don't like is that we've found a way to help Independents by setting up an organisation that operates like a big party does, but only to help community-chosen Indies. Fighting fire with fire, basically.
Now they're stopping that but keeping all the bad in place.
Very cynical stuff.
@DyDave It's better than the U.S. system where a tech entrepreneur can spend $119M to elect a party of his choosing and become $20B richer overnight.