The Senate race in Australia

An article in The Age has reignited my interest in the forthcoming Australian elections. It seems that the smaller parties have done preference deals with each other, so that it's possible for one of them to win a Senate seat with only two per cent of the vote.

In NSW this might lead to Arthur Sinodinos of the Liberal Party losing his seat. I profiled Arthur Sinodinos a couple of years ago. He called gender and race "human constructs" and backed mass immigration. I wouldn't exactly be heartbroken if he were to lose out to someone from a smaller party.

The lesson is, once again, that political opportunities arise for those who put themselves in a position to take them. We should keep building up a traditionalist movement with the aim of one day competing for these Senate seats.

I checked out some of the Senate candidates for Victoria. There are lots, so I wasn't able to go through each website. Sad to say, the Democratic Labour Party has gone the wrong way since the last election. They now have a policy of wanting non-working spouses to get superannuation, which further undermines the male provider role (and increases taxes). They also want to expand the level of immigration rather than contain it. I think we can now safely write them off as an option for us.

There is also the Stable Population Party. This party does at least want to limit the size of the immigration programme. But there are two main problems with this party. First, they are anti-natalist, meaning that they want to discourage incentives for Australian parents to have children. That's counterproductive in my view. The current birth rate in Australia is well under replacement level and this then leads to calls for mass immigration. The second problem with this party is that they emphasise liberal values such as non-discrimination and globalisation - but these values then feed into the idea that people are interchangeable and that population transfers don't matter.

The Nationals are closely tied to the Liberal Party. They do want border protection, but have little to say about immigration or population policy in their manifesto. They seem to be most focused on delivering resources to rural areas. Interestingly, they have put a revision of divorce and alimony laws into their manifesto.

There are some other options for Queensland voters. There are two candidates standing for the Australian Protectionist Party, which is an economically protectionist and socially conservative party. There is also One Nation, a party I have little knowledge of, but their manifesto is still committed to zero net migration.