THE PSYCHOLOGIST

We did it! My home State of Queensland blocked the Leftist "certainty"

Queensland has always been a thorn in the side of the Left. That was really spectacular in the election of December 1975. In that year the Left got only one of Queensland's 19 Federal seats. So the Queensland vote alone would have defeated Federal Labor -- even if the other states had stayed put. So this time too Queensland swung the Federal election to the conservatives.

Labor have always got to swing Queensland if they want to win and that is not easy. Queensland has strong conservative tendencies -- probably because it is very decentralized, with lots of voters in regional and rural areas. Country people are too close to the daily reality of hard work to fall for the impractical dreams of the coffee swilling Green/Left elite of the big cities

There are a lot of people who think the way I do where I grew up -- in small-town Queensland

Labor has been left reeling from a bloodbath in Queensland, as the Coalition celebrated a return to government.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison took a moment to thank Queensland in his victory speech in the early hours of Sunday morning.

"How good's Queensland?" he asked, to chants from the party faithful of "Queensland! Queensland! Queensland!"

"I have always believed in miracles. I'm standing with the three biggest miracles in my life, and tonight we delivered another one."

Labor lost at least two of its Queensland seats to the Coalition, leaving it with five seats amid a 4.31 per cent statewide swing against the party as of Saturday night, while the ALP was left with no representation north of Brisbane [i.e. in country and regional Queensland]

Senior Labor frontbencher Brendan O'Connor has blamed the party's misfortunes on heavy spending by Clive Palmer, and One Nation – which received a swing of 3.18 per cent statewide – directing preferences to the LNP.

However, the result will raise questions in Queensland Labor party headquarters about what this means for the Palaszczuk government and its handling of the Adani Carmichael coal mine, and an examination of strategies leading into the next state election in less than 18 months.

The Palaszczuk government will also need to consider what a Coalition victory means for next month's state budget, including missing out on $2.2 billion pledged by federal Labor for Cross River Rail.

As counting closed on Saturday night, the LNP had 23 seats in Queensland, Bob Katter retained Kennedy and Labor looked set to claim five. Lilley, previously held by former Labor treasurer Wayne Swan, was too close to call.

Seats in central Queensland closest to the Galilee Basin and the proposed Adani mine swung towards the Coalition on a two-party preferred basis, boosted by minor party preferences.

The LNP's Michelle Landry retained her seat with a two-party preferred swing of 11.91 per cent in Capricornia, while LNP incumbent David Littleproud had a favourable swing of 6.95 per cent in Maranoa and the LNP's Ken O'Dowd was returned in Flynn with a swing of 8.35 per cent.

At the same time, Labor incumbent Cathy O'Toole, who held the Townsville division of Herbert on tiny margin of 0.02 per cent, lost to the LNP's Phillip Thompson with a 7.47 per cent swing, two-party preferred.

LNP MP George Christensen, dubbed the "member for Manila", seemed to suffer no repercussions from revelations about his frequent travel to the Philippines, winning Dawson with a 11.96 per cent two-party preferred swing.

Former prime minister John Howard said Queenslanders were "commonsense" and worried about job security.

"And when they saw a Labor Party prepared to destroy jobs in the name of climate ideology in relation to the Adani mine, they said, 'That's not for Queensland'," he told the ABC.

Liberal Senator Arthur Sinodinos said Bob Brown's anti-Adani convoy, which drove through Queensland half-way through the campaign, annoyed Queenslanders.

In south-east Queensland, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton fended off a strong challenge from Labor's Ali France, retaining the marginal seat of Dickson with 53.61 per cent, two-party preferred.

On Saturday night, Labor's immigration spokesman Shayne Neumann was struggling to hold onto his Ipswich seat of Blair amid a 10.08 per cent first preference swing against him, but was sitting slightly ahead of the LNP's Robert Shearman at 50.78 per cent to 49.22 per cent, two-party preferred.

Labor incumbent Susan Lamb, who held the outer-suburban seat of Longman on a margin of 0.8 per cent after a by-election last year triggered over the dual citizenship debacle, lost to LNP candidate Terry Young.

Former treasurer Wayne Swan's previously safe seat of Lilley looked set to go down to the wire and was still too close to call, with a swing of 5.41 per cent towards the LNP's Brad Carswell, but Labor's Anika Wells was ahead by less than 1 per cent on two-party preferred.

The Greens had hoped to win the lower house Brisbane seats of Griffith, Ryan and Brisbane but looked set to get none in Queensland.

LNP incumbent Trevor Evans retained his seat of Brisbane, despite a small swing against him, and said he looked forward to "all the hard work ahead" after a sleep-in. "I always told everybody that you never want to be overconfident but you've got to be cautiously optimistic and you've got to work hard right up to the last moment," he said.

Labor's Terri Butler retained the inner-Brisbane seat of Griffith, despite a close race with the LNP and a 6.98 per cent swing towards the Greens.

One Nation received 8.74 per cent of the House of Representatives vote across Queensland, Clive Palmer's United Australia Party received 3.45 per cent despite a massive campaign advertising spend, and Fraser Anning's Conservative National Party received a measly 1.75 per cent.

None of the three minor parties looked likely to win a lower house seat in Queensland.

According to preliminary results from the Senate, the LNP will secure two or three of Queensland's six seats and Labor one or two, while the Greens (Larissa Waters) and One Nation (Malcolm Roberts) could each get one seat.

Mr Palmer was unlikely to return to politics with a seat in the Senate, while Fraser Anning's Conservative National Party was nowhere near close to reaching the quota required.

SOURCE

1 comment:

GeneMay 24, 2019 at 7:43 AM
Here in the US, there have been a few reports on this claiming that Labor Party leaders were blaming this on the small minded, backwards, racist voters of Queensland. Much like what the Democrats say about people who voted for Trump. I wouldn't be surprised if CNN doesn't blame it on Trump and claim it is the hate he is spreading around the world, rather than people just figuring out the leftism doesn't work.
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

All comments containing Chinese characters will not be published as I do not understand them

Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights