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A Throne of Lies, RPG Updates
In a result which seems to have surprised pretty much everyone, the conservative Liberal-National government was re-elected on Saturday in Australia. As many others are doing, I've done my part in going over the entrails, but really the results come down to one basic fact, which I raised as an alert a several days prior; people were lied to, as Australia has no laws regarding truth in advertising when it comes to election campaigns. Trapped in my own bubble of being a politically engaged boffin who fact-checks everything by nature and training, I completed under-estimated how important this will be, and how democracy can be broken under such circumstances. As The Australian heralds the re-elected happy-clappy PM, as the "Messiah from The Shire", the trending hash-tag on Twitter is #LiarFromTheShire. I suspect it's the latter that's going to stick, especially given on the opening day of work a key promise of tax-cuts is broken. Curiously, Donald Trump has perhaps inadvertently revealed the issue by comparing the re-election of Morrison with his own election and the Brexit referendum. Yes, those elections were carried out with a fully informed voting public, too.
Whilst I have a new item in my political agenda that I now desperately want to see implemented, my highly structured life and leisure goes on. Of some note was our final session of RuneQuest Questworld on Sunday which came to an acceptable conclusion; the GM wants to shift to the most recent edition and its Glorantha setting. Later that evening was the monthly committee meeting for the RPG Review Cooperative, which reminded me that I have to get RPG Review 42 out this week ("Wilds and Wilderness" subject), especially considering that it's already about eight weeks late at least. For my own part, I have review articles on the old Avalon Hill boardgame, "Survival", and the AD&D supplement Wilderness Survival Guide. Not to mention I still have around 5,000 dull words (monster statistics) of the Cow-Orkers supplement for Papers & Paychecks. Also, this weekend coming will be possibly the final session of Eclipse Phase, or maybe it will stretch out for a couple more depending on actions. After this, we have slotted in place a truly interesting retrospective of playing Cyberpunk 2020, which is a real blast from the 80s. Must be said, I'm rather looking forward to it, and I'll find myself in the strange position of not GMing a regular game.
Whilst I have a new item in my political agenda that I now desperately want to see implemented, my highly structured life and leisure goes on. Of some note was our final session of RuneQuest Questworld on Sunday which came to an acceptable conclusion; the GM wants to shift to the most recent edition and its Glorantha setting. Later that evening was the monthly committee meeting for the RPG Review Cooperative, which reminded me that I have to get RPG Review 42 out this week ("Wilds and Wilderness" subject), especially considering that it's already about eight weeks late at least. For my own part, I have review articles on the old Avalon Hill boardgame, "Survival", and the AD&D supplement Wilderness Survival Guide. Not to mention I still have around 5,000 dull words (monster statistics) of the Cow-Orkers supplement for Papers & Paychecks. Also, this weekend coming will be possibly the final session of Eclipse Phase, or maybe it will stretch out for a couple more depending on actions. After this, we have slotted in place a truly interesting retrospective of playing Cyberpunk 2020, which is a real blast from the 80s. Must be said, I'm rather looking forward to it, and I'll find myself in the strange position of not GMing a regular game.
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To this I would add the NDIS, which the Liberals have well and truly ringbarked. Some people have reported that they got what they need without issue or complication. Many other people report that they are being stonewalled, arbitrarily denied vital things, and generally being fucked around, in some cases until they literally die. In the meantime systems which worked have been shut down on the promise of a system which hasn't been rolled out to all areas yet, nor will it because it's literally not allowed to hire anyone to be able to do the work or pay out the money it has set aside (that way Morrison gets to claim the credit for funding the NDIS by putting a lot of money in the pot, then making it impossible to spend all that money and grabbing back everything that's left over and claiming the credit for the bump to the budget. Heads, the supercilious fucker wins; tails, the disabled community loses).
For a system to be universal, you have to be able to go in to it (and remember, this is a system that no-one wants to have to be in) with a good idea what the benefits will be, which includes those benefits being independent of where you're applying for them from. The NDIS has been set up there to fail horribly, and it's difficult to see how it wasn't done deliberately. (Which is to say: not even the Liberals are that financially incompetent, and even if they were the Public Service bods in charge of the meshugas certainly are not, which means their best advice and experience has been explicitly overridden by ideology.)
Ironically, Unimelb hosts the Melbourne Disability Institute,ยน which as far as I can see was set up by Bonyhady, who also designed the NDIS, to use data from the NDIS to inform disability support in the future. It seems to me that the most likely results they're going to get are "if you don't provide enough manpower to run a support system, then the system is going to be patchy, piecemeal, and shambolic. And people will die."
[1] Which annoyed me no end when they announced their site, because I had wanted to use that address for a disability support portal for the Uni itself, as a disability support portal, but then it's just another sign of how they're keen to do everything they can with disabled people except acknowledge and support the ones around them. I've been grinding on Autists@Unimelb for 18 months now, and I've got a website in a place where no-one will ever, ever find it unless they already know where it is, and works towards sensory-friendly spaces, which is actually looking promising but only because we're hooking into groups (Library and EdFac thus far) who are already predisposed to being sympathetic and groping themselves independently towards doing something. Gah.
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The Tories have really prevented some of the great nation-building plans of this century.
Oh, greenhouse gas emissions pricing as well. :(
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That's not going to happen. I mean, maybe once you might have suggested it without anyone laughing, but you can't get there from here; not any more.
Labor hates the Greens with a deep antipathy that they don't even hold against the Liberals. Because the Liberals are their opposition, but the Greens are their competition.
Which is why the Labor talking heads for the last few days have been the Right factions getting very angry about how Labor has been allowed to drift too far to the Left, and it needs to be pulled back to the Center.
Or, the line coming out of the next likely leadership of the party is that they are more or less officially going to give up pretending to be a party of the Progressive Left, and are concentrating on being a Socially vaguely Liberal (unless it offends anyone), otherwise Conservative Center party.
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In the longer run the competition is between the Liberals and the Greens in the new economy inner-urban seats whereas Labor's competition is with One Nation.
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It's taken as read that Greens preferences will go to Labor, and vice versa, how-to-vote cards notwithstanding. But when it comes to the parties, the Labor machine hates the Greens. As evidenced not least by the current talk about how vital it is to suck up to the average religious Queensland rural voter and move the party to the Center (that's "the Center" as defined by the LNP, it seems) and repudiate anything which might be confusingly progressive. The thing is, Labor likes to define itself as "the progressive party" while simultaneously owning the "sensible center", and the existence of the Greens is evidence that Labor essentially is a Center party, and it has been for decades now, occasional Nation Building exercises or not.
I'm in Macnamara, and it (like me) may not be a representative sample: for the last few cycles it's been a more or less a three-cornered contest. Typically Liberals first in primary, then Labor and Green fight it out for who gets the other's preferences and the victory. This time was a bit different. Partially, I think, because everyone's a bit over Danby and happy for a new face, and partially because the Liberal candidate revealed herself to be a petulant privilege-rich and empathy-poor twerp. (She tried to attack the Labor candidate as being not Jewish enough to represent Sk Kilda/Caulfield. He went to Mount Scopus FFS.)
The swing to Labor came almost completely from the Liberal vote. Comparatively, the Green vote barely changed at all. I don't think this was about anyone trying to grab Greens votes at all, this was about Labor taking Greens preferences for granted and working on the Liberal primaries. Which is, they didn't engage with the Greens at all, and tried to ignore their existence. Because if Labor try to compare themselves against the Greens, more people might realise that they prefer the Greens and once the Greens primary is in front of the Labor primary, the game's really on.
Mind you, a small vignette from Election day: As my wife and I were walking out of our polling place, being where our kids go to school at Glen Eira College, there was another couple walking in, presumably to vote. One said to the other, "I'm voting One Nation. Pauline's not that racist." And my wife and I walked back to the car, eyes wide, wondering if we really just heard that in Caulfield.
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No I'm not. The evidence on the ground is there was a switch in resource allocations, especially by the Greens, away from the Labor-held inner north seats in favour of the Liberal-held inner-east seats. Which is good. I rather suspect if Creasley's campaign didn't blow up like it did that the Labor campaign in Melbourne would have been fairly modest as well.
Of course the right-wing part of the Labor Party leadership hates the Greens, at least in part because they're further away from them politically than even the Liberals. The left is a little more sympathetic for the inverse reasons, except of course, when the Greens run hard against sitting left members.
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As it is, I think Labor learned a lesson, but it was the wrong one. They look to be preparing to fight the Liberals on their ground, on their terms, and I'm worried that end result will be that "the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
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It also suggests that Danby was a factor in pulling the Labor vote down, contrary to the argument he tried to use for years.
Good to see the back of him.