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Possibly of interest to US folk, locally we had coal billionare Clive Palmers “United Australia Party”. The “party” was more of a marketing machine to stand aga

Possibly of interest to US folk, locally we had coal billionare Clive Palmers “United Australia Party”. The “party” was more of a marketing machine to stand against strong climate policy by taking a public position that tapped into anti-vax anti-government sentitment and ran on a tagline of “FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM”. Clive carpet bomb the Election with paid ads, daily buying ads on the cover as well as multiple full page spreads within each daily paper not to mention YouTube ads. Spending in some seats more than 200x the next candidate and drawing much inspiration from Trump 2016 tactics, but he’s so far failed to land even one seat lower or upper house. Australia is a significant coal producer and the outgoing conservative government quietly had much alignment with Clive and the other Australian coal barrons despite weak public claims they were unaligned.

yen223 4y ago
The Green party, who didn't bombard me with text messaging spam, managed to eke out a seat in traditionally conservative Queensland, with two more possibly to come. It is clear that climate change was a big issue with many voters, perhaps unsurprisingly given the bushfires, floods and generally miserable summers we've been having. This was particularly interesting because neither major party really went hard on climate this time round, thus leaving a vacuum that was filled by third parties and independents