May 10, 2019
Welcome to Finance and Fury, the Furious Friday edition
This is a continuation from this week’s Say What Wednesday episode, in part one on Who to vote for? Check it out here.
Part 1:
- Political culture
- Tribalism
- 3 main parties policies and promises
Today:
- How to tell the difference between promises and policies?
- Break down how votes tend to end up with 2 parties
How to tell a promise from a policy?
- Every promise focuses only on the outcome
- Look at if the policy proposal is stating an outcome versus how it will be done
- Example: “Uni should be free” – how is this achieved?
- The breakdown is the difference between dialectic and rhetoric
- Rhetoric - language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect, but which is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content.
- Dialectic - discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned arguments – but truth requires facts/information
- Social media and the spread of disinformation makes rhetorical very powerful
- Look at the Russian collusion of the election in the US
- Scott Morison targeted by social media accounts affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party
- Comedy is used as a subversive tactic
Subversive tactics are used to pass policies with positive rights:
- Previous episode on positive rights
- Negative rights make it illegal to do something to you, positive rights make it legal to force you to do something
- Healthcare as an example: Nobody can stop you from seeking medical treatment vs medical treatment is covered by the taxpayers. Someone is forced to pay for it, falling into the positive right territory.
- Rhetorical statements get used in regards to something being free or human rights
- Labor website
- Liberal website
- One relies on policies and the other relies on rhetorical statements
- The how or focus to achieve an outcome is very important
What are the polls saying?
- Polling in Australia is more accurate, as it is compulsory to vote
- Current polls suggest Labor will win, but now not so much
- But what about the Primary Vote? Why can a party with more votes end up losing?
Preferential voting:
- Does your vote count?
- What you think about your vote is important
- The number of formal votes a party needs is 50% +
- 2 systems of preferential voting
- House of representatives – box with a number in order of preference
- Senate – above the line and below the line voting
- Above the line: preference a party
- Below the line: number all individual candidates
- How does preferential voting work?
- The full distribution of preferences is used to calculate the two-party-preferred statistics
- Your vote isn’t wasted
How do we vote for our PM?
- We don’t, we vote for a member of a party and they chose the PM
Summary:
- Break down of messaging used in campaigns
- Evoking emotional responses versus focusing on outcomes
- Every vote is important and does actually count
Thanks for listening, if you have any questions you can ask them here.