'Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.' So they should

The recent QLD Election only exemplified our broken, violent "democratic" system. Neither women nor children stood to be protected — not by the Liberals and not by Labor, writes Tom Tanuki.

THE LNP WON the recent Queensland State Election with a campaign marked by proposals to criminalise abortions and introduce "adult time, adult crime" laws, which would contravene international human rights standards in order to paint targets on the backs of children.

By pandering to racist, "youth crime"-fixated voters and the anti-autonomy religious Right, then, yes, it won. Or Labor lost.

It’s a tragedy and a disgrace because I don’t want to see women’s reproductive rights stripped and I don’t want to see the safety and welfare of Indigenous kids ditched to curry cheap political favour with some of the worst people in Australia.

Queenslanders have one hope, at least: that LNP leader David Crisafulli is full of shit.

After all, while he did promise his MPs a conscience vote on the matter last year, the unpopularity of the bill – which seemed to erode the margin of the predicted win from a landslide to a near-minority government – led to the typical mainstream bi-partisan panicked weaselling and back-flipping that we expect from Labor and Liberal.

Denying hungry kids and women’s rights with David Crisafulli et al

There is something wrong with our national priorities if we allow Crisafulli's LNP to prop up mining and development interests, and decide women's reproductive choices while denying hungry children.

The "only hope" for the women of Queensland then, again, is that the LNP wants to retain power more than it wants late-term abortions criminalised.

The ALP is nobody’s hope. Recently, in South Australia, Upper House MPs voted on a Liberal MP’s abortion reform bill which would essentially strip women of their rights to access emergency late-term abortions. It was narrowly defeated, by one vote — but we know that two Labor MPs voted in favour of it.

If the ALP’s "Left" platform accommodates the same kind of disgusting anti-abortion sentiment as the LNP tolerates, are we surprised that this same party could not fight a sufficiently full-throated battle against these unpopular laws to swing the recent election?

"Adult time, adult crime" laws succeeded at this Election — after years of targeting Indigenous kids in places like Townsville instead of highlighting the systemic and political root causes of rising youth crime.

So, now the ALP has basically announced it doesn’t care. It now says the LNP clearly has a “mandate” to lock up more Aboriginal kids and that they were “too slow to respond to the escalating crimes that we saw in 2021 and 2022, particularly in places like Townsville”. Because it wasn’t electorally fruitful for them to fight it, now the ALP has rolled on beating up on kids for votes.

I am watching the Left hand-wringing that takes place after an election: internecine bickering between Labor and the Greens and otherwise shaming people on the Left for not caring as much as they ought to about the result.

Pinning your hopes on electoralism’s four-year waves comes with momentous peaks and troughs; when things don’t go our way, we feel emotional, we moan and we bicker. But the reality is that Queensland Labor was already ignoring – and suspending – human rights laws in order to legalise extended periods of child imprisonment.

So what exactly can we now expect to happen in this LNP Government that wasn’t already happening under Labor?

What’s the difference between them?

Even if my organising has been structured around anarchist principles, I have always maintained that we might as well participate in the political process. Good strategy is flicking away at all the levers of power arranged there right in front of you to operate, I think, no matter how little effect they appear to wield. If an activist stunt is worth it, so is a vote. So is organising during elections, periods of time when the layperson’s interest in politics generally peaks.

Dodgy governments, corrupt institutions and shadow states lurking beneath our democracy

The Sofronoff shambles, Robodebt Royal Commission, hijacking of the Voice Referendum and permeation by PwC (among others) of the public service cannot recur.

But this Election was fought chiefly between two bi-partisan groups of parasites who will fight for votes by gambling the safety and sanctity of women and Indigenous kids, or by ditching them altogether in an unprincipled grab for power. Neither of those groups’ vulnerabilities stood to be protected — not by Liberal, and not by Labor.

So what was the difference between the two parties vying for power? What, in the end, was the point?

I was taught a lot about the democratic political process and the Westminster System by an elective politics class I took in high school, aeons ago. My teacher used to repeat a certain adage: “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.” Nobody wins. They lose.

Someone seems bound to lose the U.S. election in the next few days. Currently, we’re all watching the unavoidable political theatre of it — turn your phone on and there it is.

I recall a debate started earlier in the year by Cheek Media Co., which styles itself as a news outlet. One of its founders put up a video talking about how "we" should get behind Kamala Harris and stop the Left from "eating itself" over issues like the unfolding genocide in Gaza. She was criticised in reply by a host of other local lefties, who essentially insisted that if a current genocide isn’t an excellent single issue to vote on, then nothing is. (I agree with the latter group.)

Many Australians decide they’re internationalists when it comes to the exciting U.S. electoral process. They tend to abandon said internationalism whenever talk of any other country comes up.

Raging at Trump and getting behind swish Dems campaign advertising is compelling, accessible political theatre. As is the other side, if the recent return groundswell of (Make America Great Again) MAGA hats I see out in public is anything to go by. (People forget which country they live in.)

But the matter of whether to hold a party to account for the abuses they preside over transcends U.S. politics. So my thought about that debate was: If you expect me to be internationalist enough to stick behind Kamala Harris – whatever that means, when I live half a world away – you should expect me to be internationalist in sticking behind the people of Gaza.

In other words: Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.

Kamala Harris finds John Farnham's powerful 'Voice'

Naomi Fryers examines what Kamala Harris and a sizeable portion of the internet have in common — and concludes it’s a connection to Johnny Farnham.

For years I mulled the adage over in my young head, watching it come true again and again. Parties don’t win elections, they lose them.

I’ve since located that my high school teacher got it from Emeritus Professor of Politics Adam Przeworski. But for a long time, I debated over whether it was intended as a historical observation or an idealist notion. Is this simply how things usually go down in elections? Or did my teacher mean that this was ideally the way they "should" go?

The notion of simply kicking people out in merry-go-round fashion didn’t appeal to my young teenage head. But I believe I thought our system worked back then.

Now I see that it doesn’t work. Our system runs a flimsy cover for genocide as it happens before our very eyes. It repeals its own historic wins for women’s reproductive rights. It renders Aboriginal kids into brutalised fodder for authoritarian crime laws, again and again.

So, now I wonder if the best you can do with this broken, violent "democratic" system is to ditch whatever parasite is currently in and curtail the violence it has been enacting.

It would be a disgrace and a tragedy if Donald Trump wins this Election off the back of a frankly fascist mass deportation platform. But his political party opponent has for over a year now, presided over, defended and helped fund a genocide which is killing children in the tens of thousands. What is your preferred flavour of crime against humanity? That’s the choice on the table for Americans.

Trump doesn’t deserve to win that election. But there’s no doubt that, given her complicity in this genocide, Harris deserves to lose it.

I will continue to fight for what I believe during an election, just as I will after it is done. I have plenty to believe in and plenty to fight for. But don’t expect me to agree that any of these pricks in power believe in something like I do.

Tom Tanuki is a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist, whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter @tom_tanuki.