Can someone explain what's going on for someone who's never heard of Peter Dutton until today
Fucking Voldemort might be our PM. I swear most of the PMs we get are the ones we don't vote on. Fucking hell.
It's Karl Pilkington
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Peter_Dutton_at_Parliament_House.jpg
Well, Scott Morrison has come out of absolutely nowhere to gun for the top job as well. It looks like today will be the last day of Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull. There's question time in like 2.5 hours, at this rate he won't have any cabinet members left!
The Liberal party (part of the Liberal National coalition in power currently) is Australia's centre-right party but has a sizeable conservative minority. The moderates and the conservatives in the Liberals pretty much hate each others guts and have been trying to get one up on each other for years. The reason why Australia had a non-binding survey on Marriage equality was because the conservatives would have revolted had it gone to a parliamentary vote (as it should have), so Malcolm Turnbull acquiesced and promised them a plebiscite. The plebiscite was voted down in parliament because no-one except the conservatives wanted it. To keep the party from splitting, Turnbull used his powers to ask the Australia Bureau of Statistics to conduct a survey on all voters about the matter and got promises from the conservatives that they would respect the survey results and allow a parliamentary vote to occur afterwards, which they did. One Liberal MP, Cory Bernardi (who is very conservative), resigned from the Liberals and created the Australian Conservatives party in protest. He was hoping to precipitate a split and create a strong, independent Conservative party but the whole thing was a fizzer because everyone recognised it'd destroy the Liberals and the Conservatives electoral chances for years to come.
That's not completely related, but it gives you an idea of the current climate in the Liberal party. The conservatives, who were in the ascendancy when Tony Abbott was PM, have been relegated to the back and have been lashing out.
Cue discussions of Australia's energy policy (which has been the downfall of previous PM's and is a poison chalice, see Gillard). Turnbull, as a moderate and someone who wants to take action of climate change, wanted to bind Australia to the Paris accord emissions targets but was rebuffed by his party. The conservatives hate the idea of reducing emissions for reasons only known to themselves, and fought a guerilla campaign in the Liberal party to keep it from happening. Turnbull's been slowly getting more unpopular with them and there has been rumblings of rolling him for a conservative for a while now.
Anyway, Turnbull again acquiesced to the conservatives demands and dropped the Paris accord targets (lol). The conservatives then sensed weakness and smelled blood in the water, so they've gone on the attack to replace Turnbull. Of all people they've chosen Peter Dutton, the minister for Immigration from Queensland, a former cop who has been notoriously callous towards refugees and immigrants as a minister.
Turnbull still had some clout a few days ago, seeing as the moderates outnumber the conservatives, so the first leadership spill vote ended up with Turnbull retaining the leadership. Except a bunch of his ministers have resigned in protest, seeing as many of them are conservatives given the job as an appeasement to that side. This has had a snowballing effect and has been a fatal blow to Turnbull, who has lost the confidence of everyone and would very likely lose a vote of confidence in the House of Representatives.
There will be another vote on the leadership of the Liberals later today or tomorrow, which will decide who will be PM. Turnbull's lost all morale and has decided he wont even contest it, instead allowing his right-hand man Scott Morrison (another former hardarse Immigration Minister) to duke it out with Peter Dutton. Neither Morrison or Dutton are popular with the voters and the whole affair has shown how little the current government cares about doing their job. There'll be an election within the next year, most likely by the end of this year, because the government is completely disfunctional.
Like the marriage equality survey, this is another sign that the conservatives and big-L Liberals cannot function together and the agreement between them that has been in place since Sir Robert Menzies government in the 1940s will fall apart. I think it is unlikely they will actually split, but the whole ordeal has exposed their infighting to the Australian public. They've essentially delivered Labor a victory at the next election that will match Kevin Rudd's 2007 sizeable electoral victory. It'll be at least half a decade before they come close to being a functional opposition again.
God i hope so, less conservatives the better. Especially ones who suck off tony.
They're a dying breed, until our version of Trump comes along with Russian backing. Australia has swung very far towards moderate politics recently due to the change in leadership inside the liberals.
I wonder how much dirt Malco keeps on all of his colleagues. It’s awfully convenient that there are suddenly questions about Voldemort’s eligibility to stand as soon as he throws his hat into the ring.
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