#centre-left

Running where: Qld, Vic, and WA for the Senate, plus the Dvision of Banks (NSW) in the House of Representatives

Prior reviews: federal 2013, federal 2016, federal 2019, federal 2022

What I said before: “Overall, this is quite centre-left stuff, but it’s not immediately clear why you would support the Democrats instead of, say, the Greens. There is little here that is actually distinctive, and they lack charismatic candidates to make you believe that they will be able to deliver on the platform they spend so much time trying to explain.” (federal 2022)

What I think this year: My first reaction was “oh god really?” It’s genuinely befuddling that this party is still alive. A strange and over-optimistic band of true believers persist in maintaining registration and contesting elections, despite the fact the party’s death knell was clearly in 2007 and even some of its former elected representatives now promote other groups such as the Greens.

The Democrats were indeed the third force in Australian politics from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, but they stumbled badly during the big debate over introducing a GST in the late 1990s at the same time as the Greens were eroding their vote—and a mooted “Green Democrats” merger never eventuated. The Democrats' last senators left office in 2008 after failing to retain their seats at the 2007 election, their final state MP quit the party in 2009 (David Winterlich in the SA upper house), and a few years later different factions fought for control of what remained of the party. I did my best as an outsider to try to piece together what was going on in my 2013 and 2016 reviews linked above. By 2019, however, they managed to largely get things back together, originally on a bland centrist platform and then with a more centre-left skew in 2022. Their national director since 2019 has been Lyn Allison, their Senator for Victoria in 1996–2008.

Not much has changed in the Democrats' platform since 2022. They offer to be “the people’s watchdog in the Senate” and they maintain a “Rorts Watch” on their website as a nod to their tradition of holding the balance of power in the Senate to “keep the bastards honest”. Some policies have been updated during the current term of parliament and in response to world events: their liberal-feminist-informed foreign affairs policy, for instance, criticises Donald Trump's misogynistic behaviour as a contrast to the party's focus on the need for women’s leadership on the international stage and on the safety and liberation of women in patriarchal societies and crisis zones.

Drawing on the quote at the start of this entry from my 2022 review, I’m just not sure what the Democrats are offering to win votes from near rivals with similar platforms. If you are a Greens or Animal Justice voter, a supporter of Fatima Payman's new party Australia's Voice, or if you’re on the Labor Left and have made your peace with not always getting your way over the Right factions, there isn’t much here to make you do more than put the Democrats third or so. Without eloquent and attention-grabbing candidates to inspire voters and get media coverage, the Democrats are wasting their time, not to mention their money on deposits with the AEC, which are only returned if you achieve 4% or more of the vote. In 2022, all they could manage was 65,532 votes, 0.44% of the national tally, from standing candidates across five states (their best proportionate performance was in Victoria, where they got 0.75% of the statewide total). As a comparison, David Pocock stood in just the ACT and won 60,406 (21.18%) first preferences and got into parliament.

I’ve no major problems with the Democrats’ platform; I just don’t see the point. I'm not sure what noteworthy gap on the political spectrum they fill, or why there’s still fire in the belly to run for office. There’s nothing here to make me say “hey if you care about x then consider the Democrats rather than other left-leaning options”, and nothing to prompt me to do anything but put them in a decent enough spot after parties that evoke a stronger positive response. Maybe they’ll speak more to you?

Recommendation: Give the Australian Democrats a decent to good preference.

Running where: Elsa Parker for Kingsford Smith (NSW) and Jordan Colless for Page (NSW)

Prior reviews: none, this is a new party

My goal in this review is to introduce the as-yet-unregistered Good Party and say a little about their background; I won’t engage with an awful lot of their policies because they are not contesting the Senate and I am unsure if I have any readers in either electorate where they have endorsed independents. Yes, I reviewed in detail Rebekha Sharkie and Dai Le, but they are incumbent MPs. Sharkie is very likely to retain her seat and Le will be competitive in an intriguing contest, and as crossbenchers their views are relevant nationally—especially if no party wins a majority (an outcome that seemed almost certain until the wheels came off Dutton’s campaign; now Labor might retain its majority). Elsa Parker and Jordan Colless, by contrast, have no chance of winning their seats, though I understand Parker in particular has been an eager campaigner.

The Good Party is seeking to recruit enough members to gain registration, but at the moment must settle for endorsing independents. They claim to be running three candidates, not two, but VJ Gunawardana is not on the ballot for Macnamara. The party emphasises that it seeks to appeal to and represent young people: “we believe the future of young Australians has been squandered by successive federal governments … Our aim is to spearhead generational change in Parliament with youth, fresh ideas, and the values of decency, respect, and inclusiveness.”

The Good Party’s policy pages are extensive, much more extensive than you normally see for a newly minted micro-party, and this intrigued me as to their origins. Besides the candidates themselves, nobody is named on the website. As Kevin Bonham notes in his party registration tracker, the party does not have the standard (and required!) authorisation statements on its website or Facebook. The Facebook account sometimes posts reels with two grey-haired men—not young Australians at all, though presumably they were once—and it turns out these gents have a separate Facebook account called Park Bench Politics, where they actively promote the Good Party.

I have been informed privately that these “two old blokes” (as they dub themselves), Shane Barry and David Rollins, are actually behind the party. There is not an awful much about either online, and you get a lot of search hits for other people with the same name, though David Rollins is the author of that name who writes thrillers. In one of the Park Bench Politics videos that I watched, they present themselves simply as having “heard about” the Good Party, but from what I’ve been told they “heard about” it because it came out of their own mouths. The person I spoke to believed that Barry and Rollins were sincere in their intentions, which is to create a platform for younger people to run for parliament. Neither they nor I have found any information to suspect there is anything untoward here: both men want to take a back seat and promote young candidates as the face of the party.

If that is so, though, it seems Barry and Rollins are the brains behind the policies as they stand. You can do a simple comparison of the Good Party’s defence policy and Rollins’ thoughts as expressed on his Substack. The shared themes and suggestions, right down to common phrasings, are striking. This policy does not have a youthful feel. It is more favourable to AUKUS than most I have read this campaign, and it reprises two predictable stances from Australia’s political history: a fear since the 1850s that China might covet our land to settle its large population and control our resources (a fear so powerful that anti-Chinese policies played a major role in the federation movement), and military training for civilians to have a trained populace of reservists for national defence. Now, the Good Party is clear that they are not promoting mandatory national service, so this is not quite the Universal Service Scheme of 1911 or its mid-century successors, but the echo is there—and it’s not the sort of thing I normally see young politicians proposing!

In any case, if you live in the electorates of Kingsford Smith and Page, have a dig into the Good Party’s policies. They generally lean centre-left, although some specific aspects are quite bold or out-of-the-box and might prove to be dealbreakers. For me, I’m lukewarm because I disagree with much of the defence and housing policies, I don't share their support for extending parliamentary terms from three to four years, and I firmly oppose their proposed reduction in immigration numbers (for specious environmental reasons not too dissimilar to Sustainable Australia).

Recommendation: in Kingsford Smith, I would put Parker above Family First and the Liberals and below the Greens, but I would need more direct local knowledge to determine where to place her relative to the Labor candidate; in Page, there is a large field of eleven candidates—but most of them are from quite undesirable parties so likewise Colless would be in contention for at least a top three placing (maybe top four, but on a quick search I’ve got nothing for indie Richard Wells and that’s never promising).

Centre-left parties should reject any dialogue with the far right in the EU countries, said leaders at a Party of European Socialists (PES) congress held at the weekend in Berlin.

PES’s short-term plan is “to win the European elections in 2024”, the party’s leading voices said, underlying the importance of the battle against the rise of far-right parties.

Former Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven was elected as the new PES President at the gathering, and Löfven played down the prospect of co-operation with the new-right parties that have gained strength in recent months.

“Cooperation? Yes, but you have to also draw a line where cooperation is not possible. We will cooperate with those who at least admit that every human being has the exact same value,” Stefan Löfven told journalists.

“We are confronting autocrats with our EU cohesion,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a speech at the end of the congress, where he also endorsed the European Commission’s efforts to deal with rule of law violations, which are “unacceptable”, according to Scholz.

The head of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group in the European Parliament, Iratxe Garcia Perez, took an even harder line, telling journalists that on issues such as treaty change or Russia sanctions, there is no space for dialogue with them.

Italy centre-left to seek coalition with populists

Image copyright EPA

Image caption Mr Zingaretti has submitted a list of five conditions for a coalition

Two days after Italy’s populist government collapsed, the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) leader has told the president he will try to reach a deal with one of the populist parties, the Five Star Movement.

Nicola Zingaretti said…

 In recent times the political debate in the UK has become much more radical. Ideologies that were once isolated from the mainstream political debate are now very much at the fore-front of discussion and are shaping policy decisions in the traditional big parties. Jeremy Corbyn has just been re-elected as Labour leader with an even bigger margin, Nigel Farage’s UKIP  took us to the exit door of…

What might the presidential election produce under a parliamentary system?

Click to enlarge Hat tip to Ian Bremmer – who hates the idea. I still chuckle over folks stuck into the 2-party mythology, ideology. Poisonally, I think this wouldn’t be a bad start. Of course, with smaller representation from the Right. Include the usual parliamentary ability to have a vote of No Confidence to force an election.

Enough of ‘the need to move to the centre-left’ crap, they've always been around. 

They called themselves the SDP and they let the Tories stay in power; they called themselves the SDP-Liberal Alliance and they let the Tories stay in power; they moved back into the Labour Party and called themselves Blairites and took us to war on America's coat tails and increased inequality until they were electorally unable to stay in power; they called themselves the LibDems and they joined a coalition which let the Tories stay in power; now they command big business funding and call themselves 'Progress' and are already plotting another takeover of Labour. 

And they were never 'centre-left' they've always been centre-right, wealthy, privileged, and anti-trades unions and their role has been to keep any left of centre Labour members or MPs from coming to power. 

Before receiving their pay-offs from JP Morgan, the well-known channel for CIA slush funds (and watch this space for the next round of pay-offs).