Election - Australia

[trev]

The GG as representative of the Queen last used the monarchial powers in 1975 in Australia to break a deadlock between 2 houses of parliament which meant governing had become impossible ( budget could not get passed meaning gov't was out of money) and force an early election to solve the crisis. Labor has never forgiven the GG for sacking their PM.
Probably 80% plus here are for a republic, but there is not a majority that can agree on a particular form of republic, so monarchy remains as a system that has worked for us till now.

[notyoueither]

Wiki says it was in Queensland in 1987 and that the Governor behaved properly.

It amounts to the monarchy being a check against bad, or very bad, government.

I'm quite happy having a head of state and representative who do not do very much at all except arrive at good decisions in the uncommon event that it matters.

That, and it is easy to control the expenses of the monarch and GGs. They don't have much of a mandate to argue for a larger role and more money for budgets.

Electing some twit to the same office would be much worse than what we've got, as that twit would not feel the constraints that the royals and the appointed representatives do.

[Zevico]

I can't think of a single government program that isn't either moronic (free laptops for high school kids: yay!) or subject to gross ineptitude or fraud on the part of the government.

Government should not be in the business of being an ISP. It should not be in the business of giving handouts for "work" done on Australian homes if it is not going to police the people who did that "work." It should ensure that the work it does fund is done safely, instead of leaving contractors and employees ignorant of its true dangers. It should not be in the business of mass-producing school buildings when such expenditure best left to local school communities to decide. This Labor government has done all of these things. It has thrown billions away. A few people have even died as a result of its "building programs." A mining tax was announced without a second thought--a de facto declaration of war in some bizarre, quasi-Marxist atmosphere, with Labor going up agains the "big bad corporations" only to find out that people thought they were talking out of their arses.

And now they declare they want a regional processing centre for asylum seekers coming by boat, declare the site will be in East Timor, imply East Timor's agreement before obtaining it--and hey presto, piss off East Timor's people and government as a result.

All because they were desperate to market themselves as being "anti-boat people" for the purpose of domestic consumption.

All this is not to mention the half-witted idea of freezing Afghan and Sri Lankan refugee processing claims--merely because some refugees were breaking the rules by coming here by boat.

Political cowardice, throwing good money after bad and appalling foreign policy decisions. That's the Labor government in a nutshell.

Tony Abbot and the Liberals may not be angels sent from above but they're far better in at least one thing that counts: they don't think the government should be slicing our bread and putting vegemite on tables. And nor did they commit foreign policy blunders of this kind when they were in office all for the sake of upping their polling numbers before an election.

[DaShi]

Hey! I've been anti-boat since before it was popular. Stupid nautical vessels that think they are better than submarines. Yeah, well try hiding from pirates, you arrogant bastards!

Alternative post:

Australia has politics?!!

[Zevico]

By boat without a visa. Illegally.

[Drake Tungsten]

I can't wait for the US Justice Department to sue Australia over its attempts to stem illegal immigration.

[Wezil]

I'd be opposed to any government that put vegemite on tables.

[Zevico]

I'd be opposed to any government that put vegemite on tables.

Few things are worse.

[Dauphin]

I can't wait for the US Justice Department to sue Australia over its attempts to stem illegal immigration.

I thought the US has a law saying you can't sue sovereign states.

Australia best retain the sovereign.

[Elok]

He probably envisions royalty running around ordering heads to be chopped off.

I don't know about him, but I envision "royalty" as a parasite class of inbred nuts with bad teeth who do nothing but wave at cameras and spawn mini-royals to create scandals for the tabloids on slow days. Reality television has made them obsolete even for those functions.

But did someone on here say they have actual political powers of some kind?

[Heraclitus]

Democracy: The God That Failed

The German guy who wrote this books is in favor of Monarchy at least compared to Democracy.

In June 2005, Hoppe gave an interview in the German newspaper Junge Freiheit, in which he characterized monarchy as a lesser evil than democracy, calling the latter mob rule and saying, "Liberty instead of democracy!" In the interview Hoppe also condemned the French revolution as belonging in "the same category of vile revolutions as well as the Bolshevik revolution and the Nazi revolution," because the French revolution led to "Regicide, Egalitarianism, democracy, socialism, hatred of all religion, terror measures, mass plundering, rape and murder, military draft and the total, ideologically motivated War."[10]

Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.

The American model – democracy – must be regarded as a historical error, economically as well as morally. Democracy promotes shortsightedness, capital waste, irresponsibility, and moral relativism. It leads to permanent compulsory income and wealth redistribution and legal uncertainty. It is counterproductive. It promotes demagoguery and egalitarianism. It is aggressive and potentially totalitarian internally, vis-à-vis its own population, as well as externally. In sum, it leads to a dramatic growth of state power, as manifested by the amount of parasitically – by means of taxation and expropriation – appropriated government income and wealth in relation to the amount of productively – through market exchange – acquired private income and wealth, and by the range and invasiveness of state legislation. Democracy is doomed to collapse, just as Soviet communism was doomed to collapse.

So it appears he agrees with Kitschum.

[OzzyKP]

Once again.... monarchists

[DanS]

Register me as another who would be just fine if the guillotine were started back up to complete the job.

[C0ckney]

i've been reading some of the stuff that guy in hera's link wrote. what a fruitcake.

[notyoueither]

But did someone on here say they have actual political powers of some kind?

Yep.

Appoint and dismiss prime ministers, summon and dissolve parliament, and approve or withold approval of legislation. They are called reserve powers.

Someone has to wield them. The question is if it is better to have a non-partisan appointee or hereditary monarch in that position or would it be better to have a politician filling the post.

19 years out of 20, or 49 out of 50, or some such, everything is running smoothly and the appointing of PMs, summoning and dissolving of parliaments, etc goes without a hitch according to accepted norms. Then there's the odd (usually) situation where a PM and his or her government may want to stretch the boundaries of what is constitutional (like stick around in government when it is not clear that they are properly doing so). Then we have a controversy as the PM would be asking the monarch or GG to do or not do something with questionable or unclear legal basis. The controversy may be increased if the Queen or GG denies the PM.

When the powers are used in such a controversial situation it is the politicians who have screwed things up. IMO it is better that a non-political person use the reserve powers with the benefit of legal and scholarly advice.