Party Games 54/55 The Coalition

The Coalition is a bit of a hybrid beast, being made up of the Liberal Party, the Nationals, the Liberal National Party (QLD only), and the Country Liberals (NT only). For the most part they all work together in lock step, so there's usually not much need to consider them seperately (I checked the list of policies on both the Liberal and Nationals sites and they were identical.)

This election going into the list of the policies I've found more that I like than last time around. More funding to help the surf life savers is pretty good, as is helping families of kids with type 1 diabetes. I think I can even get behind more sports in school (since I'm not a kid anymore and it doesn't apply to me.)

When it comes to the bigger items they sound nice enough but their actions over the last 3 years make it harder to believe in them. The biggest one is Better and More Accessible Digital Services, where their big claim is a better rollout of the NBN. Between vastly expensive purchases of a degraded copper network from Telstra, switching to a mixed technology system which means people on what is even now just an ok cable connections are considered to be on the NBN, abandoning of fibre to the premises, they're giving us a worse solution that won't stand the test of time that isn't cheaper and isn't being delivered sooner.

I'm also not convinced that Turnbull will be able to rein in the far right of the party who have been undermining him since he replaced Tony Abbott. These are the folks who are saying marriage equality is an issue that is so important it needs to go to a vote of the whole population, but then that they won't commit to voting in line with the outcome of the plebiscite afterwards. These are the folks who tie up the senate with hearings on Halal labelling.

The coalition is a group that have made all Australians a party to inhumane treatment of asylum seekers in our care at offshore dentention centres. This is a group that has worked to limit the knowledge of citizens about the actions of its government. This is the government that made the phrase "on water matters" a punchline. This is the government that when Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said she was spied on by staff at Naura replied the allegations were completely unfounded until said staff came clean and admitted they did so.

This is the group that brought in mandatory data rentention laws with an attorney general who can't even wrap his head around what exactly metadata is. This is a group that axed a carbon tax and then saw emissions rise again. This is a government that proposed making young people wait 6 months before being able to claim unemployment benefits.

So, while they have more good ideas this election, it's not enough for me to look past the last 3 years.