Most of my mentions for the last day have been from strangers telling me “You aren’t being shouty enough!!! Everyone should shouty about everything!! Stop trying to explain things and join the shouting!”
Sorry. If everything is required to be a crisis, we can’t tell where to focus.
@mattblaze some of us are hobby psephologists :) And you produce useful papers on electronic voting.
Looking at awful voting systems is a worthwhile reminder to folk in places like Australia that while our voting system has many flaws it's definitely not as broken as some people try to pretend.
As a thought experiment, could a norms-defying Prime Minister with a disciplined majority subvert the Australian elections? I'm pretty sure a Canadian PM could.
@PeterLudemann @mattblaze Easier to control the people elected than the mechanism (AEC) I think.
"The Dismissal" is close, but that was the Queen and allegedly the CIA, not the Prime Minister.
Clive Palmer is another answer. He spent ~$AU100M to win IIRC four senate seats and they all defected rather than remain his minions (but stayed as senators).
Looking at "The Coalition" shenanigans right now, nothing stops someone persuading 80 MPs and 40 senators to join them in revolting.
@PeterLudemann @mattblaze but if you just mean "pass laws to implement fascism", they've already done that. The trick is applying them selectively. Anti-protest laws are hot here right now, but we have others.
Changing some of the laws around elections is easy if the PM has said disciplined majority, the constitution is fairly flexible. They could further limit the franchise very easily, for example.
But as with the Iraq war, lots of people would be very unhappy if they did. Oh, wait.
Matt Blaze
Moz
Peter Ludemann