I have to fill you guys in on this. You know I'm a keen follower of American politics, partly because Australian politics is nowhere near as entertaining. But this week has been a doozy. We have a new Prime Minister! The seventh PM in eleven years, and the fourth to take power through a party room coup rather than winning an election. Our PM for the last three years has been Malcolm Turnbull, independently wealthy and known for attempting to abolish the monarchy. He's been leading our right-wing party (called the Liberal Party, just to confuse American visitors), though he himself is not socially conservative. He took power by knifing the previous PM, Tony Abbott, on the grounds that Abbott was a reactionary moron who was roughly as electorally popular as scrapie. Being an entirely valid criticism (three criticisms), Turnbull won. However, to win the conservative faction's support, he basically promised to roll over for them at any opportunity. He spent his time in office running from his own principles on climate change, same-sex marriage and republicanism, with the result that while he could beat scrapie in an election, he might struggle against, say, a prolonged bout of tinea.
He nonetheless foolishly called a double dissolution election in 2016 on the pressing issue of investigating union corruption, and just union corruption, with the understanding that the VERY IDEA of corruption among the banks, businesses or right-wing politicians is just laughable. Laughable, I tell you! With this master stroke, he managed to reduce his party's majority in the House of Reps to exactly one. (Granted, it was the first time in over ten years that a sitting government had kept any majority, but still.) More than that, due to the vagaries of a double dissolution election, he managed to give succour to the wackaloons of Australian politics. One Nation, our very own brain-dead xenophobes, returned to parliament with four Senate seats. The government finished nine seats short of a Senate Majority.
Naturally, after the election, the demand for a commission investigating union misdeeds (i.e. the entire justification for the election) disappeared without trace. However, public outcry forced a commission into the banking sector, which is still ongoing and revealing truly astonishing levels of corruption. Polling reveals that Australians would now rather entrust their savings to "under the mattress, even if the mattress were on actual fire at the time". The government, having fought against this commission for months, is once again panicked by scrapie's resurgence in the opinion polls, and indeed the suggestion that ebola might be a viable dark horse candidate.
Now, when I say "the conservative faction", you mustn't think they're a unified group. I mean, they all hate Turnbull, but they're split between the ones who think Abbott should be PM again and the young bloods who believe there are entirely new ways to offend and outrage the electorate, and entirely new morons who should have the chance to do so. On that distinction, Turnbull has held power lo these three years. But with the Libs facing oblivion at the next election, Turnbull's one argument to stay in power was in tatters. This was not helped by Abbott basically attempting to bring the government down from with. Apparently he has to destroy the Lib's chances in order to save them. Mission half complete.
The election also spawned the most ludicrous and pointless political scandal I've ever witnessed. Our Constitution specifies that people standing for Parliament can't have dual citizenship. It was subsequently discovered that eight senators and seven representatives were in breach - including the deputy PM, revealed to be a closet Kiwi. The senators were all booted and replaced by also-rans from the same ticket. The reps were also booted and forced a series of by-elections. The booted bods won most of these, after renouncing their foreign entanglements.