Public Option guy walks through Conservative Teabag demonstration with sign (vid)

xdrive said:
I am just sick of the thousands of threads about it, i even get it in the news in my country. Typical americans thinking everything revolves around you guys.
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It's your news talking about it, how can you blame that on the Americans? Tell your fellow countrymen to stop caring and they'll stop reporting it. And I really don't see why you're bothered by the fact that people are discussing something in threads that you don't have to click on.

Make a thread about whatever the **** is happening in Australia if you want.
 
xdrive said:
I am just sick of the thousands of threads about it, i even get it in the news in my country. Typical americans thinking everything revolves around you guys.
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Hey... we're making the fattest people and building ourselves a gravity well as a result, SO EVERYTHING WILL CONTINUE TO REVOLVE AROUND US!
 
smwScott said:
Make a thread about whatever the **** is happening in Australia if you want.
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No need. Not to much is going on, on the political front. To be honest, not too much has happened in Aussie politics in recent memory since the end of 2007. Our Prime Minister has spent most of his time trying to build up and reconnect the between Australia and our neighbouring indo-asian nations, ties that were severed during the prior 12 years of John Howard's government (yep, we don't have term limits over here. You get elected for four years and you can rerun for election over and over again, as many times as you want).

I like to think our politics now are far more progressive than the U.S. but that may not entirely be the case. We both have leaders who appear seemingly more progressive than their politics suggest, but neither will come out firmly in favour on any progressive issue (Gay marriage for example.)

Overall though, on a national level, our nation is pretty content with its leader. But we're only really content in the way that...well... no one's paying enough attention to notice him doing anything wrong. But no one has really noticed him doing anything good either.

If you were to ask the general populace "What's the best thing Kevin Rudd has done since being elected?" the answer would be two things. Dropping WorkChoices (which had an initiative that allowed employers to sack employees without disclosing why, allowing for unfair dismissals) and saying "Sorry" to the Aboriginal people for basically stealing a generation of their children and raising them how we thought they should be raised. Besides that, there's not a lot of issues that specifically come to mind for the general populace.

I'd bet the reason the healthcare debacle is even reported in Australia is because of the huge amount of name-calling and dirty tricks the conservative media has been pulling. If up to 70,000+ people were protesting to the British Parliament and calling Gordon Brown a fascist, socialist illegal immigrant hellbent on destroying the U.K., we'd hear about that too. Just as everyone has been paying attention to Iran in the past few months as well, and now Afghanistan.
 
Sparta said:
No need. Not to much is going on, on the political front. To be honest, not too much has happened in Aussie politics in recent memory since the end of 2007. Our Prime Minister has spent most of his time trying to build up and reconnect the between Australia and our neighbouring indo-asian nations, ties that were severed during the prior 12 years of John Howard's government (yep, we don't have term limits over here. You get elected for four years and you can rerun for election over and over again, as many times as you want).

I like to think our politics now are far more progressive than the U.S. but that may not entirely be the case. We both have leaders who appear seemingly more progressive than their politics suggest, but neither will come out firmly in favour on any progressive issue (Gay marriage for example.)

Overall though, on a national level, our nation is pretty content with its leader. But we're only really content in the way that...well... no one's paying enough attention to notice him doing anything wrong. But no one has really noticed him doing anything good either.

If you were to ask the general populace "What's the best thing Kevin Rudd has done since being elected?" the answer would be two things. Dropping WorkChoices (which had an initiative that allowed employers to sack employees without disclosing why, allowing for unfair dismissals) and saying "Sorry" to the Aboriginal people for basically stealing a generation of their children and raising them how we thought they should be raised. Besides that, there's not a lot of issues that specifically come to mind for the general populace.

I'd bet the reason the healthcare debacle is even reported in Australia is because of the huge amount of name-calling and dirty tricks the conservative media has been pulling. If up to 70,000+ people were protesting to the British Parliament and calling Gordon Brown a fascist, socialist illegal immigrant hellbent on destroying the U.K., we'd hear about that too. Just as everyone has been paying attention to Iran in the past few months as well, and now Afghanistan.
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Well said.

Kevin rudd has done alot so far in his pmship, people just haven't really noticed.

I am glad politics in australia isn't like the u.s.as. Just as long as the government is doing it's job, no one will care.

The biggest thing this month that has happened in the world of politics is our pm swearing at other members of parliament. He said to one senator "You can get ****ed" and said to a few others when discussing something, "I don't care what you ****ers think"

Big news. :D
 
I actually wonder if conservtives even know what they're protesting about, or they just protest because Bill O'Reilly told them to.
 
KRudd made pre-mixed drinks expensive as ****, that was all I really knew about Australian politics.
 
Sparta said:
If you were to ask the general populace "What's the best thing Kevin Rudd has done since being elected?" the answer would be two things. Dropping WorkChoices (which had an initiative that allowed employers to sack employees without disclosing why, allowing for unfair dismissals) and saying "Sorry" to the Aboriginal people for basically stealing a generation of their children and raising them how we thought they should be raised. Besides that, there's not a lot of issues that specifically come to mind for the general populace.
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I think handling the economy well would be a big one for most people.

Signing Kyoto and Climate Change would be another.

Withdrawing from Iraq.

National Broadband plan.

I suppose some might mention the "Education Revolution", although personally I haven't seen anything to warrant that ambitious term yet.

Overall I think he's been pretty good and I plan on voting from him again next election. I also wouldn't be against Labor getting more seats in the Senate, I feel that the current Senate's forced compromises and blocks have generally been a negative influence.
 
Noobs, you don't buy women drinks. You lurk outside till one stumbles out and offer her a ride.
Works everytime.
 
The thing is, America currently spends two or sometimes three times more money on health care (as percent of the GDP) compared to other first world countries, yet the result is worse (in terms of child mortality rate and life expectancy, for example). So I don't see how anybody could deny that things need to change.
 
I often think to myself that I should be more involved in politics and maybe help foster some change, but then I come across videos like this (or of protests or whatever passes for politics these days) and I think that there's not a chance in hell that a protest like that will change something. Have there been protests that changed the political direction where the protest wasn't basically a small (or large) war or the political direction was going to change anyway? Why do people do that? Maybe they have and I'm just not familiar with them, but until then I'll stick to voting or until something really bakes my noodle.
 
People don't have any other real way of showing the government how strongly they feel about something. At the very least, protests bring this unrest into the light so people in charge can see it, and so other, previously uninterested people can be inspired to learn more about why they're protesting. Protests hardly ever result in immediate change. Thats because the government simply can't change that quickly. So with enough protests, and enough time, they do indeed change the way things happen. Civil unrest and protesting got us out of Vietnam a lot sooner than we would have, for example.
 
Operational said:
I suppose some might mention the "Education Revolution", although personally I haven't seen anything to warrant that ambitious term yet.
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That was the biggest load of crap ever. I think they probably forgot all about their education revolution until Labour decided to spend loads of money on construction projects to boost the economy, they then build a whole lot of new school buildings which make everything look nice but improve nothing and yelled "look here it's the education revolution!!!".

Kevin Rudd campaigned for office promising a whole lot of things that I'm fairly sure he never even looked into. Then once in office realized that you can't shut the coal industry down because it's the largest part of Australia's economy and that the issues with education are far too complex that to be fixed with a bit of extra money and some cheesy catch phrases.

I just can help shaking the feeling that that party got into office with little idea of what they were doing and have since realized that 'actually we can't do all that stuff we promised which is probably the reason it hasn't been done in the past".

Anyway enough ranting, the point I think I was trying to make is that while those protesters are annoying as hell be thankful you have a leader that is willing to piss them off.
 
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