So much commonsense in this post.
And this is the problem. None of the greenies, radical left makes sense. You cannot join the dots to their thoughts and policies because you get to dead ends not other connections.
Greenies would love Australia to be a permanent dead end. I feel it’s not just about their loopy environment & climate policies it’s about stopping progress, it’s about having a communist view on being jealous at anyone prospering and working hard.
Until Labor cuts the cord with them and gets more Centre with their thoughts and policies they’ll be a long time in opposition.
Well, if we continue to generalise across whole voting patterns, the conservative position is fundamentally flawed.
The main way this can be seen is by recognising that "conservatives" in Australia ARE the radical left, compared to most people in most places for most of history.
We are all very radical. Proposing such radical ideas as everyone (mentally fit, not incarcerated adult citizens, anyway) getting a vote, education provided by a government, the general populace being able to read, people of mixed races being able to marry (or live here), and especially voting for a government, would have had you killed in a most unpleasant way, in many societies.
So humanity has progressed a lot over the 80 000 or so years it has existed, and thankfully Australia is one of a few countries right at the forefront of that progress (though sadly not at the very front).
If you'd proposed 80 years ago that women should be able to work after being married, many would have thought your ideas were dead ends without connections. Let alone women being doctors, lawyers or engineers.
I just find it interesting, that over about 80 000 years of political progress (give or a few tens of thousands of years, depending on latest archaeological and biological anthropological evidence), the era your mum and dad raised you is the pinnacle of human progress, and no more progress needs to be made.
Go back 50 years, everyone is too conservative for most current conservatives. Go back 100 years and we are scarily conservative (though 100 years ago was way too radical for 1000 years ago). But right now, the progressives are so scary. Their ideas are sure to end life as we know it, as KAK would say (and us lefties are accused of fearing the falling skies...).
So 20 years ago is the magic spot (maybe 10 years ago for a slightly more moderate conservative, maybe 30 years ago for Abbott). No bias there. Nothing to do with you clinging to your upbringing. It just magically happens that your childhood/young adulthood was the perfect level of political progress, out of the 80000 years of progress, so now anything more radical than that makes no sense, and would lead to a permanent dead end/end of life as we know it.
Labor, incidentally, has always been a long time in opposition. Moderately conservative parties have ruled here, and in most democracies, for most of the periods that democracy has been a thing. A party may be more popular if it becomes more "moderate" (to me Labor are already pretty moderate) but that would defeat the point of being a more radical party. The most generous thing I can say about conservative politics is that it acts as a sort of lubricant to smooth the spaces between periods of progress that all democracies experience.
People don't like change, even when it is good, and often need to adjust to change before they are ready for more. I wish that wasn't the case, and people would be more ready to challenge their assumptions and traditions with a critical eye, so we could progress more rapidly. But history has shown that democracies do progress, thanks to the "loony lefties", in short bursts, and then things settle for a while under conservative rule, until people are ready to make progress again.
