Senate – Western Australia – Australia 2022

@NP the requirement for a federal senator is a lot higher and also that was when they had different regions for the upper house also this is a state wide vote as is the new LC

Nether Portal, id you don’t want to be called an Uncle Tom, then do not engage in genocide denial while trumpeting your ancestry as a shield against any claim of anti-Arab racism. That is most definitely identity politics.

That’s nice that your family are Catholics, but I don’t see how that being different to Muslims is pertinent, given Palestinians have significant numbers of Christians as well as Muslims, as does the whole Arab Australian community. I’ve met Arab Christians who as fervently in favour of the Palestinian struggle for rights and dignity as any Arab Muslim. It’d be wrong to imply that all Christians have one stance and Muslims have another.

It has been reported that Fatima Payman has been suspended indefinitely

Yep. Not surprised.

Seems like a really dumb decision to me. Labor have been struggling to retain the Arab and Muslim voters they’ve traditionally taken for granted, not to mention small-l liberals and even just the basic Labor rank-and-file that haven’t been very impressed with Labor’s American lackeyism, indifference to the genocide and betrayal of the party’s own policy platform. I don’t see what Labor gains by spitting in their faces. Dickheads who think it’s antisemitic for Palestinians to have freedom and not be bombed into oblivion generally aren’t going to vote Labor anyway, no matter how desperately Labor panders to them.

Labor are in such a hard position having to rely on Jewish and Muslim votes. Their stance of fence sitting has cost them with the Jewish community going to the libs and tr Muslim community the greens this could do well to sure up those Jewish votes as any lost Muslim votes will only come back on preferences

I think the Greens are going to win Wills now. Albo has just delivered it to them.

With the Jewish vote, it’s a contest between Labor and the Libs. With the Muslim vote, it’s between Labor and the Greens. Since it is becoming increasingly impossible to appeal to the both of them, it’s better for Labor to sacrifice Wills since in all other seats the vote they would lose will flow back to them on preferences. Whereas if they lose Jewish votes to the Libs it will flip quite a few marginal seats to the Libs.

I do think Peter Khalil’s position is dire in Wills now. I pointed before Peter Khalil is very pro American, AUKUS and the Greens can use this in their Campaign material. As FL stated, this conflict has also led to Anti-Americanism among Muslim communities around the world. In many outer suburbs we will probably see a shift from UAP to Greens/Socialists as well and in part this conflict has caused many Muslims to forget about the lockdowns and loose interest in LGBT issues etc.

It’s not just the Greens. See Fowler 2022. And I don’t think Labor are at all happy or even moderately disappointed to lose to the Greens anyway. This decision seems much more likely to be motivated by the wounded egos in the party leadership than any sort of electoral strategy. It would have made much more sense to just let the story die or, since they ran on Palestinian recognition anyway, to just assent to the Greens motion. Either that or they’re worried about Zionists dumping money into Liberal electoral coffers.

No Wills is not ”Lost”, You guys are assuming the seat of Wills is antisemitic. It is not. Antisemitism never succeeds and has no place in Australia.

Now it is time to expel Payman. Labor can’t afford to lose the Jewish vote, and the action today helps them keep it. Had they defended Payman. they would lose a ton of seats to the coalition. Putting the PM’s seat in doubt in 2025.

Woke Greens are not going to gain Wills, Cooper or any other seats with a high Islamic population.

@ FL
I think something i find ironic is that that the right flank of the Libs prior to October 7 often talked about seats like Calwell being their future especially the Sky After Dark mob see link below. However, more recently the same people have accused the Labor party of pandering to the same seats which until recently they were praising as not being “woke”. Today, the Libs call the Pro-Palestine protests “woke”.

https://ipa.org.au/ipa-today/the-liberals-need-to-embrace-their-working-class-voters-to-win-over-the-outer-suburban-freedom-fighters

@daniel t Grayndler is one of the safest seats in the country. The lib vote is so low it’s a alp v GRN contest on a high margin

I guess it’s worth talking more about Jewish Australian demographics. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the Jewish Australian vote is unquestionably aligned with the maximal, colonialist and essentially fascistic norm of Israeli politics- which in reality, it absolute is not. The vast majority of Australian Jews do not live in electorates that Labor has to worry about. In Sydney they’re mainly concentrated in Wentworth (safe teal/Liberal seat, Labor will never win it) Kingsford Smith (safe Labor, Liberals will never win it) and Bradfield (Labor will never win it). In Melbourne they’re mostly in Macnamara (recent years a Labor/Greens marginal), Goldstein (teal/Liberal) and Higgins (which now doesn’t exist). Out of all of these, Macnamara is really the only electorate Labor has any interest in pandering to an imagined all-powerful Zionist constituency. One seat in the country pales in comparison to what they stand to lose by a collapse in Arab and Muslim support.

@Daniel T I generally agree with you sentiment but I still think Wills is a very good chance of falling over this issue.

@Furtive Lawngnome Labor could be competitive in Wentworth when Spender retires, especially since the seat can only expand south and west. Labor probably would’ve won Wentworth in 07 if it weren’t for Malcolm’s personal vote

Tomorrow’s July, I think I can start making predictions. This is first.

I’d say Wills is a tossup. Brunswick votes heavily Greens but the really Muslim areas vote Labor. As Daniel T pointed out, even if many Muslims are dissatisfied with Labor’s stance over Gaza, the Greens are very progressive on issues like LGBT rights, and socially conservative Muslims typically oppose things like gay marriage and abortion (even though they aren’t debated anymore since they’re legal everywhere here unlike in the US where evangelical Christians and Republicans are pushing to restrict gay marriage in some states and abortion is now banned in many states due to the overturning of Roe vs Wade). Therefore, they wouldn’t go for the Greens because they’re too woke.

If a Galloway-style candidate ran here, he or she might win or at least win some northern booths with high Muslim populations. Like a reverse teal: economically left-leaning (pro-trade union, etc) but socially conservative, with a pro-Palestinian position and reaching out to disaffected ethnic voters.

On that assessment, if the Greens want to win this, they need to win big in places like Brunswick in the progressive south, whereas if Labor win they’ll need to hold on to their strongholds in the Muslim north.

@John I think he meant the PM’s seat as in who becomes PM (i.e Albo or Dutton).

@Scart Wentworth should be a Liberal seat if a moderate runs a good campaign. If Kellie Sloane (the state Liberal member for Vaucluse) retires from state politics and is open to moving to federal politics then she should seriously consider running for Wentworth. Same goes for James Griffin (Manly) in Warringah, etc.

@ NP
One point that i disagree with you about Muslims not voting for socially progressive candidates is that the Victorian Socialists did well at the last state election in working class ethnic seats with a large Muslim population such as Broadmeadows, Thomastown and Greenvale. The northern parts of Wills which has the most Muslims overlaps with Broadmeadows state electorate where Victorian Socialists already did well prior to October 7th. They actually fielded a Muslim candidate, Omar Hassan. The Victorian Socialists will preference Greens ahead of Labor. I expect the Socialists who are Pro-Palestine, LGBT, Abortion to do the heavy lifting in the north to help take out Peter Khalil.

@Nimalan that is true (and the Greens-Victorian Socialists combined primary at the 2022 state election in Broadmeadows was 16.4%), I don’t think it’s enough to win. Those voters were likely more progressive Muslims or even non-Muslims with progressive views.

This is the WA Senate thread, just as a heads up.

Daniel T, do not speak on antisemitism or the motives of people posting here, because you clearly don’t even have the first clue about either of them. Spare us all the ignorant speculation.

@ James
Apologies, i will take the conversation onto the Wills thread now
@ Nether Portal et al, i have posted on the Wills thread for us to continue the conversation there.

Dan M, which Labor seats will flip from Jewish votes? I can only think of Macnamara. My understanding is that the Jewish Australian community is pretty heavily concentrated into a couple of seats, namely Wentworth and Macnamara, rather than being geographically widespread. Macnamara might fall to the Greens since it’s a true three way contest at present, but Wentworth has never been a Labor seat at any point since federation.

And in general, if Labor has to choose between hanging onto either Muslim votes or Jewish votes, from a pure numbers perspective it makes more sense to hang onto the Muslim votes. After all, the census data shows there are over six times as many Muslim Australians as Jewish Australians. While many of them are concentrated in safe Labor seats, Labor found out in Fowler 2022 what happens when they start taking a community for granted and try to impose things they don’t like.

@Nimalan – Don’t stress about it. I was just saying as it is now a conversation about Wills. I’m not a mod after all lol.

@scart by the time spender retires the parliament will have likely expanded thereby shrinking Wentworth back to favourable boundaries for the libs.

@np please explain that statement

@Nether Portal Sharma was a moderate and he still lost convincingly because people there didn’t like ScoMo

@scart sharma got lucky in my opinion and so did the libs. By losing to spender he got a Senate spot and may have lost his seat to labor on the new boundaries and having spender there safeguards Wentworth until the next expansion of parliament when the boindaries would shrink and become favourable to make it safe liberal again

SCart I don’t think hoping for a future Labor victory in Wentworth based on predicted boundary changes and a 17 year old election result (when they *still* lost) makes any sense. Labor’s primary vote was less than 11% at the last election. Spender isn’t going anywhere any time soon. When she does she’ll likely have a successor groomed.

Sorry but the idea that this decision was taken for strategic electoral reasons is ludicrous. The only sense I could conceivably believe it is that they’re worried about the Israeli lobby becoming what AIPAC is in the United States. Of course if they were really worried about that, they have more than enough political capital to head it off with the kind of broad campaign finance reform that isn’t practically possible for Biden and the Democrats. But that’s clearly not a tack they’re interested in taking. Richard Marles and Penny Wong have been pretty open about their motivations in the media. Penny Wong’s whinging about her cowardice in the face of the SSM debate was self-centered, self-serving nonsense – she delayed reform for years, subjected the LGBT community to a humiliating referendum for their rights and completely forfeited the initiative and the majority of the credit for reform to Turnbull and the Coalition – but it was pretty illuminating about her character and the general thinking in caucus. This has all the earmarks of ALP powerbrokers flexing muscle.

I don’t understand why Muslims have been linked to a culture war over abortion upthread. It seems like a conflation of the US Evangelist Christian obsession over abortion with Muslims, simply because they’re both religious and often socially conservative. But Muslims in general are a lot less absolutist about abortion. For example, almost every Islamic scholarly view of abortion permits it in order to save the life of the mother, as the mother’s life is considered more important than that of a foetus, whereas many Evangelical Christians disagree with that notion. Some Islamic authorities even state abortion should be permitted for the first 120 days after conception, which is longer than almost every US state permits it.

A 2022 poll in the US found that 56% of Muslims surveyed thought abortion should be legal in all or most cases, which makes them no more conservative in this regard than Catholics. So if Catholics aren’t susceptible to a culture war over abortion in Australia, I struggle to see why Muslims would be.

Source for the poll – https://www.ispu.org/2022-abortion-data/

@ Wilson
See the Wills thread please. I also dont know why Muslims are susceptible to a culture war on Critical Race Theory, Welcome to country etc like White Working Class voters.

@Wilson I somewhat agree but there’s general consensus that Australian Muslims (and British Muslims for the record) are more socially conservative than American Muslims. Whether statistics prove this or not is a different question, but the general assumption seems to be that that’s the case.

In the same sense, Australian (and British) Christians are usually much less socially conservative than American Christians. Though in saying that Australia (and the UK) are less religious than the US in general, with less than half of Australians identifying as Christian.

Anyway, let’s take this to the Wills thread as Nimalan said because we shouldn’t be getting too off-topic.