It’s legislative and electoral cowardice more than political pragmatism.
The only reason you can say this is because you have no skin in the game. If you were in Parliament, faced with a fringe issue (I don't think it is, but the vast, vast majority of Aussies do, probably because they don't understand the ramifications), then, unless you wanted to commit political seppuku, you'd have done the rational thing and supported this bill.
Politics isn't like Internet armchair quarterbacking, you do what you can to ensure that a) your position is safe, and b) that you will lose the battle to eventually win the war.
The privilege of never compromising on your values is reserved for the rest of us who have nothing to lose by criticizing the process.
You can choose from any of the following one broad categories of incompetence.
So to hell with pragmatism.
Politicians deserve, and should be subject to, unrelenting ridicule and scorn.
Yes it fucking sucks. But please point out to me any other democratic country that is not a 2 party system? I don't know of any and maybe that says something about democracy itself. This may be any issue that can't be fixed.
This is not a failure of democracy. It's a failure to teach people about voting systems and game theory.
Proportional representation is the solution to this, so that new ideas can enter government incrementally instead of only when they get the majority vote, by which time it's probably too late.
But this is really hard to get through people's heads, because it is very hard to get someone to understand something, when their influence and power depends on not understanding it.
In the past decade, we've had parliaments only able to establish a majority by negotiating a deal with a third party or independents.
I absolutely, as an Australian citizen, resident and voter, have skin in the game.
Labor losing the next election just because they refused to pass this specific bill is an extremely unlikely course of events. I don’t find it particularly rational – especially when the urgency to do so is blatantly manufactured and it was so widely opposed by public submissions – to pass a potentially disastrous, under scrutinised and widely criticised law, just because you’re worried a hypothetical scare campaign might work. It sounds a lot like paranoia or cowardice.
> Politics isn't like Internet armchair quarterbacking, you do what you can to ensure that a) your position is safe, and b) that you will lose the battle to eventually win the war.
What’s the war here? If you keep losing battles you’re certain to lose the war.
If the war is the election, Labor could certainly have afforded to lose this PR battle. If the war is cybersecurity policy in Australia, then I think the tech industry and tech users are getting quite sick of people trying to make excuses for yet another surrender.
> The privilege of never compromising on your values is reserved for the rest of us who have nothing to lose by criticizing the process.
A lot of people have a lot to lose if the process is abused or outright fails.
sigh, I meant real skin in the game, i.e. you would face another 4 years in opposition if Murdoch and mates politicized your "support of ISIS".
>Labor losing the next election just because they refused to pass this specific bill is an extremely unlikely course of events.
I wish the world were different, but it just isn't. Given a modest 1/10,000 possibility of some "terror" attack over Christmas, would a rational actor hang their political future on an issue that 99.99% of average Aussies don't understand?
I hate this bill. I hate that we're moving in the direction of a world with mass surveillance, but realistically, if we take off our rose coloured glasses, and putting aside political idealism, would we expect Labor to do any different?
I mean, in this scenario most Labor MPs keep their jobs, while thousands of people face an uncertain future as companies openly contemplate the risks of hiring Australians or doing business here, and perhaps millions risk their cybersecurity being covertly weakened. If you are subject to Australian law, you have just as much skin in this ‘game’ as the politicians themselves, if not more. After all, the law does apply to you.
> I wish the world were different, but it just isn't. Given a modest 1/10,000 possibility of some "terror" attack over Christmas, would a rational actor hang their political future on an issue that 99.99% of average Aussies don't understand?
Again, please define rational. Is Labor’s only rational plan to amass as much political power as possible at the least cost? To absolutely eliminate any risk of losing the next election by being as uncontroversial as possible? I’m not so cynical as to think there aren’t any technologically literate or principled people in the Labor Caucus, so I’m rather disappointed they simply went AWOL when they were needed most.
Labor just had an election in Victoria where News Corp went pretty hard after them on law and order for several months – yet they won. They weren’t going to lose federally in the next six months because of this bill.
> I hate this bill. I hate that we're moving in the direction of a world with mass surveillance, but realistically, if we take off our rose coloured glasses, and putting aside political idealism, would we expect Labor to do any different?
You’re sounding awfully defeatist. Labor didn’t have a gun to their head, either metaphorically or literally. They do actually have political power and they are allowed to use it. Be as cynical as you like, but opposition parties are still allowed to oppose things on principle.
yes, unfortunately this is the game called politics. It stinks, but it is what it is.
>Be as cynical as you like, but opposition parties are still allowed to oppose things on principle.
Again, is it rational to oppose a bill which, for the Murdoch media would boil down to "Labor loves ISIS"?
It's unwinnable. Smart political operators fight battles that have some chance of being won. This wasn't one of them. I wish it was.
I actually think they've created a huge problem for themselves. Instead of shelving this issue away for the election, they have guaranteed it's going to come back. The government is already flagging they will not accept amendments as a political tactic to prolong the discussion because they think it will distract from all their other policy failures. This may actually be a massive own-goal from Shorten.