In among the hubbub of the South Australian election, DemosAU has unleashed one of its occasional multi-level regression and post-stratification polls, designed to project seat outcomes based on their demographic characteristics. Its projection is (deep breath) for Labor to win 77 to 86 seats, One Nation to win 46 to 55, the Coalition to win nine to 17 (including zero to two for the Nationals), the Greens to win zero to three, and two to six to go to others. This is based on vote shares of Labor 29%, One Nation 27%, Coalition 21% and Greens 12%. The surveying was conducted from Janury 13 to March 3 from a sample of 8484.
@Dr Doolittle at 10:50pm
That’s honestly hard to say. The Victorian Nationals seem to be the most competent state branch recently. In 2022 they won seats back from Independents in Mildura, Shepparton and Morwell.
That’ll have to play out as well in the next few months.
Miskal
Can go back to the 1990s, when people said Labor would be out of government in Victoria for a generation, and Labor had to end it’s links to the unions since few people under 40 were joining.
steve
“Hanson is a cult. Lets face it.”
No it’s not. Read a few books on cults.
First of all the leader is very charismatic. hanson is not.
Secondly they don’t last long. She has lasted as long as Albo.
Third they dont survive their leaders downfall. Barnaby etc could take over.
It would be a mistake to think that.
Exactly Landlord; the political landscape is always shifting, and shit changes real quick.
Labor trounced the LNP last election; thats beyond doubt.
But this trouncing has increasingly been less based on 1st pref, and more on other pref flows; this means that the current 94 seats are built on a foundation of voters saying “hey, they arnt my first pick but they arnt as bad as Greens/LNP/ON etc”.
That means they are increasingly more susceptible to changing landscapes, and where in small “losses” now hurt alot more.
Labor will lose small voting counts for being seen as pro Iran war, and being connected (unfairly) to alot of the shit this was will cause.
If your PV is 50 plus? Thats fine. If your PV is 30 or lower? Those small swings start eating away alot more.
I saw a study that showed that the political landscape is changing much faster worldwide than it used to. Social media, 24 hour news cycle, more polls, reduced attention span, the world moving faster etc etc were given as the reason.
– Pauline Hanson: The Battler’s Friend Who Arrives by Gulfstream
There’s a scam so old it predates democracy itself. Find the angriest people in the room. Tell them you’re one of them. Then rob them blind while they’re busy hating whoever you’ve pointed at.
Pauline Hanson has been running this scam for 30 years. And the only thing that’s changed is the mode of transport. She used to drive. Now she flies private. On someone else’s jet. Without telling anyone. Repeatedly.
Hanson is a fraud.
—
The trades (or at least their effects) are quite visible when you set any reasonable market trading software to show price and volume at one-minute intervals. It is not rocket science. I often see these with Trump announcements. Yesterday the spikes were clear on the E-mini Russell2000, S&P 500, Nasdaq 100 and Brent Crude futures. In a couple of cases there were consecutive trades a minute apart, suggesting perhaps minimum two players. No doubt there would have been other securities being played and I didn’t even try to look at what went on with options. Theoretically these would be traceable if the US had law enforcement. I gather there were also significant moves on Polymarket via crypto- also now a regular occurrence.
One nation ahead in 4 Sa lower house seats and looking at 3? Upper house.
That’s from a standing start when their one candidate deserted them.
22% that’s many millions to spend now.
Breaking…
https://www.news.com.au/national/south-australia/one-nation-secures-historic-first-lower-house-seat-outside-queensland-in-south-australia-election/news-story/e64109b78237d302785f3e0fb438fb20
I don’t think the ALP juggernaut really discriminates. It’s just as powerful at reducing the NLP to 3rd party status as it is at eliminating 75% of lower house greens, and once cooker nation have taken over what’s left of the NLP, it’ll crush them too. Maybe if the NLP and the greens started barracking for Australia they’d stop losing all the time. Oh well.
Hanson is not a cult leader and ON is not a cult. They’re the opposite, really, they’re a stopping place of convenience for their voters, who are in it for a party which appears to listen to their grievances on immigration etc and in it for what they think will improve their lot, but are not especially attached to either Hanson personally or ON and don’t necessarily listen to everything Hanson says (let alone what Bernardi etc say). ON happened to be occupying the right space when the Coalition suffered a political anuerysm to pick up many of their voters.
You compare this to the MAGA cult and Trump where Trump is everything and they will abandon every policy they once said they wanted and follow him through every backflip no matter how awful. That’s a cult. Pauline doesn’t have that kind of hold over ON voters.
steve davis
Populist rely less on good policy and more on people upset with the system, and is why populist fail to deliver good government wherever they get control.
@steve
Indeed. Plus the help of endless platforming and spruiking from the media rather than pointing this stuff out. Not reaching anybody under 40, but great for her position with the Gen Xers and Boomers who actually vote for her.
@Arky at 11:20pm
That’s a fair point. It’s still another 2 years until the next Federal election is due, and there would have to be a limit in how far Pauline backed by Big Gina can go when it comes to backing Trump. Assuming he lives, he’ll still be President in May 2028, and if/when the world goes to shit under his watch and all Pauline has to say is shallow MAGA policies then I doubt that’d be enough to defeat Labor who is enacting many long-term policies that will most likely make things better in the medium term at least.
Heh, was cleaning my glasses re-reading my last post and thought I wrote “Palpatine” instead of “Pauline”. Probably not much difference between them.
Hanson needs to be taken more seriously given ON vote and asked more serious policy questions by the media.
@Diogenes at 11:30pm
Yeah, she does, but I don’t think they will. After what we’ve seen from MAGA America, it’s just so much more entertaining to have a racist dipshit in control of everything.
And like the American Media, the Australian Media has no soul so they’d gladly smile with delight as they say “Prime Minister Pauline Hanson says… (insert morally outrageous thing here like puppy catapults or whatever)”
Diogenes at 11.04 pm and Arky at 11.20 pm
The Macquarie dictionary gives a defintion of a cult as “an almost religious veneration for a person or thing … by a body of admirers”. Some of the drongoes whom Boerwar has been talking with clearly fit that description. Most of the SA”ON” voters do, since they voted on vibe and impressions, regardless of policy, and ignorant of the actual way in which decisions are made by Hanson, and of her repeated expenses abuses etc.
It was in that sense, plus enormous brutality, that Stalin was the head of a cult. He was not charismatic, he was intellectually inferior to those around him, and he remained in absolute power for 24 years (30 if you take it back to 1923 when he became too strong organisationally for the ill Lenin to remove), and his system lasted almost 40 years after he died. While his “cult of personality” was attacked, and the extreme power of the secret police was partially constrained, the system built with his cult remained.
Every cult is peculiar in its own way. The point of describing the Hanson group as a cult is that it is not a regular political party in any sense. This is partly the reason for the repeated defections etc. The group was set up as a personal fiefdom. It still runs that way after decades.
In other words, the point of the definition is organisational. It does not address the episodic nature of the support base, which depends a lot of context and media profile.
What Barnaby has brought them is not organisational capacity. He is not being allowed to change the group’s structure so that Hanson does not decide everything. He has brought them links to Rinehart and big money and some familiarity with the media.
As David Marr said last night, Hanson managed to run through the SA election without a single standard press-conference. If Dutton was afraid of journalists, she is petrified of them.
That has been the case for yonks. It won’t change. In the 2017 WA election she literally hid from the media, and her campaign was a total shambles, yet she still got 5%.
Diogenes says:
Tuesday, March 24, 2026 at 11:11 pm
I saw a study that showed that the political landscape is changing much faster worldwide than it used to. Social media, 24 hour news cycle, more polls, reduced attention span, the world moving faster etc etc were given as the reason.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Is it actually changing faster OR does it just seem to be changing faster because of social media, etc etc ?
98.6
The cycles are faster and there are less long term party monopolies.
98.6 at 11.44 pm
Early in the 21st Century Justice Michael Kirby, writing in a RW rag called Quadrant, in a review of a book by Tim Rowse on H.C. Coombs, referred to “the slow pace of change in the Australian democracy”. Here is the relevant passage, from Kirby’s website:
‘But it was his involvement with Aboriginal and other indigenous people that became his great concern towards the end. He took an important part in the public discussions of the Australian Law Reform Commission when it investigated Aboriginal customary laws. It was at that time that I first met him. It was clear that he had an intellectual and emotional commitment to rectifying the perceived wrongs, of conduct and neglect, that had bedevilled the relationship of the Australian “Settlement” with the indigenous people. Clearly, he felt that he had not done enough with his earlier opportunities. He displayed a great sense of impatience that somehow seemed out of place for a person who, better than most, knew the slow pace of change in the Australian democracy.’
To find the full review search Michael Kirby review Rowse and choose first item 12.55.
From a historian’s perspective, Kirby’s phrase needs no revision, while the impatience he detected in Coombs was, in the context of that slow pace of change, admirable.
This recent state election just shows how nationalised election campaigns are getting. It’s getting to the point now where there’s little to no difference between a federal party and a state party in people’s minds.
Humans are great at dismissing another POV as irrelevant but categorising it as unworthy or demeaning. It’s a way to avoid engaging in it and understanding it.
I have no time for One Nation but it’s best not to dismiss it. It’s really not a cult.
James O’Brien on the latest addition to Idiot’s Corner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfZBPCZH5P0
Diogenes at 12.12 am
I’m not trying to dismiss Hanson by calling her group a cult. Clearly the comparison with Stalin should have shown that. Their similarity is in how the organisation that venerates them was and is run. No other opinions are permitted in the organisation.
If the young Libs were energetic and ignorant, they might think about trying to take over the Hanson branches in Victoria (except they would be too young). They couldn’t do it, because there is no similar structure in the Hanson cult to what exists in the Libs.
Hanson precludes democracy. For that reason among others she’s very dangerous. The Libs did not see the danger to them, despite oodles of warnings (eg C. Barnett, linked above in ABC news story from 2019). J.W. Howard kept warning of electoral volatility, Mr X demonstrated it despite his ultimate flop. The Libs chose not to exclude Hanson.
Thomas Brian Mutter at 12.08 pm
“It’s getting to the point now where there’s little to no difference between a federal party and a state party in people’s minds.”
Not at all. You’ve confused news coverage with public perceptions. E.g. Tasmania in May 2025 voted strongly Labor (+ Wilkie) by preferences; yet in August Tas Labor failed.
There was another e.g. four years ago in SA. Compare the upper house votes for Labor in the SA election in 2022 and the federal election a couple of months later. There was a substantially lower vote for Labor in the Senate. It was not Don Farrell’s finest hour.
Dan Rather writes at his “Steady” Substack about the perils of the most powerful nation in the world being governed by a failed casino owner.
https://steady.substack.com/p/a-government-of-one
@Thomas
No, people definitely draw that distinction for Labor and the Libs as proven by years of election results, but it is not absolute. Unpopular Federal governments can drag down their state counterparts; on the flip side, I’m sure Federal Labor’s recent results in WA are at least somewhat due to their state counterparts convincing WA that Labor can be trusted to do a better job with the economy than the Libs.
For One Nation, Hanson campaigned in SA like she’s the state leader and will probably do so again in Victoria. She doesn’t have sufficient state parties in these states yet to have a state party and a state leader who run a campaign separate from her and have separate policies from the federal party.
Bloomberg claiming that not only Netanyahu, but also RUPERT MURDOCH urged Trump to attack Iran.
Here (subscription):
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-21/trump-s-iran-war-drive-exposes-limits-of-yes-sir-cabinet
And here (2nd hand YouTube report):
https://youtu.be/yh04dClFaTc?si=5U_7mhOjtc460vyN
Diogenes says:
Wednesday, March 25, 2026 at 12:01 am
98.6
The cycles are faster and there are less long term party monopolies.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Are we talking days, weeks, months or years ?
A comment from my @12:29 am post;
He moved $2 trillion in markets with a post Iran denied within 33 minutes. He got his airport security policy from a talk radio caller. He killed the shutdown deal from a golf cart in Florida. Dan Rather is right. This isn’t a government. It’s one man’s fever dream with nukes.
Trailer for The Iran War. A YouTube short using some familiar faces to play the main characters (eg. Liam Neeson plays Trump).
Quite good.
https://youtu.be/yh04dClFaTc?si=5U_7mhOjtc460vyN
Bill,
Maybe you meant this one?
Judi Dench as Starmer!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4kRf4FDPA5E
New thread.
Danish Election Result
Lpoks like an anti muslim immigration party could be kingmaker.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-25/denmark-election-results-social-democrats-bruised/106495180?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other