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The Queen’s Coup

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Re: The Queen’s Coup

#71

Post by rgavuliak »

anonymous_sorry wrote: post #42
mellosouls wrote: post #33

This seems a rather passionately biased take on the - undoubtedly very controversial - constitutional moment, that seems determined to push "blame" onto the late Queen. The title is absurd clickbait. Reading into the background in less partial news articles it seems that the Royal team were rightly answering the GG's questions in his uncommonly frequent letters and stressing the action should be a last resort. If the…

The monarchy means that prime ministers, who are generally only directly elected by people in a small geographic constituency, get to exercise the power of a head of state, via the monarch. Even weirder in this case, the prime minister (not directly elected by the general populace) appointed an Governor General (not elected at all) to a position with monarchic powers, and that power was used against him.

> not directly elected by the general populace Why does this matter? A Prime minister is the result of a general populace choice.

Re: The Queen’s Coup

#73

Post by dannyphantom »

Hmm...the site may have been hugged a little too tightly; I can't seem to establish a connection to it. Thankfully someone archived it. [1]

1: https://archive.ph/2zqbE

I've really enjoyed reading the discussion in this thread; having approached this general topic with no prior knowledge I now have about 8 Wikipedia pages up that I'll skim throughout the day! Always a fun time.

Re: The Queen’s Coup

#74

Post by mikelward »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #49
mst wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think having a nominal monarch for people to form parasocial relationships with rather than getting overly attached to any given politician has its advantages. But (note, UK person here, add salt accordingly) it seems like you could retain that part while also stripping any actual power - i.e. 'power-wise practically a republic, emphasis on the -nominal- in my first sentence.'

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how Australia works this one out. I think becoming a republic is a matter of when not if, and there's a ton of ideas around about what to do about a head of state. We're not averse to trying out new ideas if they seem good - the Aussie voting system is about as close to perfect as you can get (but our politicians not so much).

I used to think that Australian preferential voting was the best practical method. Though the Ranked Choice Voting debate in the US has taught me that STAR voting and approval voting are both easier to count and avoid some edge cases.

Re: The Queen’s Coup

#75

Post by ChoGGi »

nirimda wrote: post #70
Jedd wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I am aware of a 51/49 class split between Liberal and Labor over Gough .. This may be a somewhat outdated appraisal of the situation. The number of people voting for neither of those parties (including coalition members) has been steadily growing for years, with the most recent federal election reaching 33%. I recall, more hazily, that the previous federal election (so several prime ministers ago) it was just n…

> I recall, more hazily, that the previous federal election (so several prime ministers ago) The most recent federal election was this year. The previous federal election was 2019. There were no changes of prime minister in that time; Scott Morrison was the prime minister going into the 2019 election, and Scott Morrison was the prime minister going into the 2022 election. I realise this takes a bit of getting used to…

One minor nitpick, I don't think we've ever (or at least for quite a few years) called the conservative party Tories?

Re: The Queen’s Coup

#76

Post by School-Cotton »

flerchin wrote: post #53
VictorPath wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Enough people think Gough was bonkers There is much discussion about how in the cold war, a swath of countries from East Germany to China ran as states led by one party. Not much discussed is how many western aligned countries did as well. As the Cold War heated up, from 1949 to 1972, the Liberal coalition ran Australia. In 1972 another party is elected into power, and an extraordinary amount of energy from within…

For crying out loud, a long term majority is not One Party Rule. The primary difference being that dissenting parties are not outlawed.

Maybe true for Australia but this definitely depends on the country. Mexico had one-party rule throughout most of the 20th century by any reasonable definition, but opposition parties weren’t formally banned. They were just never allowed to win anything.

Re: The Queen’s Coup

#77

Post by MagnumOpus »

rgavuliak wrote: post #71
anonymous_sorry wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The monarchy means that prime ministers, who are generally only directly elected by people in a small geographic constituency, get to exercise the power of a head of state, via the monarch. Even weirder in this case, the prime minister (not directly elected by the general populace) appointed an Governor General (not elected at all) to a position with monarchic powers, and that power was used against him.

> not directly elected by the general populace Why does this matter? A Prime minister is the result of a general populace choice.

I think OP means the prime minister has to be voted in by his own party's members of parliament - and OP trusts the integrity and foresight of 300 MPs more than that of the unwashed general electorate. (He might have had a point 50 or 100 years ago when the majority of MPs took pride in integrity and public service and weren't mostly full-time party hacks and climbers of the greasy pole...)

Re: The Queen’s Coup

#78

Post by bee_rider »

3pt14159 wrote: post #59
anonymous_sorry wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The monarchy means that prime ministers, who are generally only directly elected by people in a small geographic constituency, get to exercise the power of a head of state, via the monarch. Even weirder in this case, the prime minister (not directly elected by the general populace) appointed an Governor General (not elected at all) to a position with monarchic powers, and that power was used against him.

I know this seems weird to outsiders, but as a Canadian I quite like it. Having PMs elected by MPs means that it is harder for a single rabble rousing politician to sweep to power and distort the use of, say, the military. Having Governers General appointed by PMs, and confirmed by the monarch, means that someone outside of politics (usually a well respected figure like a university president or astronaut) holds the…

Is your system notably different from most parliamentary systems? The PM is usually selected by seeing who can put together a large enough coalition of parties, in terms of the sum of MPs in those parties, right? Is the difference that your MPs actually vote, rather than it being assumed that they follow their party leadership, or something like that? But I imagine the parties must have a way of keeping their MPs in line…

I mean that isn’t how it works in the US of course but I was under the impression our system was more unusual. Parliamentary systems seem quite popular.

(In the US it often seems like we’ve got this weird old version of Representative Democracy XP, while most of the rest of the advanced democracies have updated to Representative Democracy 10: Parliamentary Edition. We had a bunch of the original devs on staff, so they wrote a bunch of in-house patches, which let us keep XP running well past EOL, but now it turns out layering on patches like that results in an incredibly fragile system and we can’t update anything without possibly taking down the whole system.)

Re: The Queen’s Coup

#80

Post by VictorPath »

flerchin wrote: post #53
VictorPath wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Enough people think Gough was bonkers There is much discussion about how in the cold war, a swath of countries from East Germany to China ran as states led by one party. Not much discussed is how many western aligned countries did as well. As the Cold War heated up, from 1949 to 1972, the Liberal coalition ran Australia. In 1972 another party is elected into power, and an extraordinary amount of energy from within…

For crying out loud, a long term majority is not One Party Rule. The primary difference being that dissenting parties are not outlawed.

In France the largest political party until 1956 was the communist party. In 1948 the communist/socialist alliance was almost elected to power in Italy, and the communist party was getting over one third of the vote to 1976 (the Italian socialist party with hammer and sickle logo got about 10% of the vote, and Maoist parties got hundreds of thousands of votes). Too much widespread support at the time to ban.

Not in West Germany which reinstated the Nazi ban on the communist party. Not the USA which banned the communist party, criminalized the party and jailed its leaders ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_195... ). South Korea, South Africa, Indonesia wtc. all followed the same path.

Dissenting parties were outlawed in western and western aligned countries all over the world, and many of them like Japan, South Korea, France, Italy, Australia etc. became one party led states.

Australia did not outlaw the Labour party, but we can see what happened when the Liberal party interrupted the 1949 to 1983 Cold War rule led by the Liberal party - pressures national and international undermined any ability to rule until a foreign monarch had her footman toss him out.

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