Peter Dutton concedes he has lost his seat of Dickson
www.abc.net.au
The leader of the Liberal Party, Peter Dutton, concedes he has lost his own seat of Dickson in Queensland. His loss leaves the Coalition without its leader in a defeat that represents a disaster for the party.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29061644

We’ve done it, we got rid of another soulless right wing politician!

Peter Dutton first made his party lose this election and now also lost his own seat much like Pierre Pullover

We’ve still got a government that green-lit new coal power plants in it’s last term, screwed over the Aboriginal community with a poorly run referendum, and still doesn’t give a shit about climate change, but baby steps hey.

  • dwazou@jlai.luEnglish
    05·
    24 hours ago

    I’m not Australian and I don’t know much about Australian politics.

    However, I know that Australian people drive some of the biggest cars in the world. Car companies just manufacture huge SUVs and sell them to the Australian, thinking “these dumb fucks will buy them”.

    That’s not good for the climate. That’s bad for the roads. That’s not even good for Australians themselves, because it’s very unsafe for pedestrians. I heard that Albanese encouraged mandatory rules for better fuel efficiency. Which is a good idea. I just don’t understand why the other bald guy says they are bad.

    In the 1990s and 2000s, the US Auto Industry successfully fought against every attempt to impose fuel efficiency rules. After US Auto manufacturers went bankrupt in 2008, President Obama bailed them out and forced them to save some fuel. Because outside North American, no one wanted to buy american cars anymore.

    During his first mandate, Trump rolled back all those Obama fuel-efficiency rules:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/us/politics/trump-obama-fuel-economy-standards.html

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/climate/cafe-emissions-rollback-oil-industry.html

    Lack of strong fuel efficiency rules is the main reason why American cars are so heavy and consume so much oil compared to European cars. The bald candidate is wrong to say fuel efficiency rules are bad.

    • JackFrostNCola@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      19 hours ago

      I dont know the actual justification behind it but i would say:

      1. The Liberal party here love protecting business interests and giving pretrochem companies huge incentives, tax breaks, etc to take our resources and they probably get hard for how much more fuel they can sell here.
      2. Australia has inexplicably bad fuel standards, as such car manufacturers dump their shittest engines here which run on this low grade fuel and every time we talk about reforming this the manufacturors run a scare campaign about how much extra cars will cost if they have to meet these standards and the Libs have been jumping on that.

      As to the big cars thing, we have typically had quite regular sized cars and our typical tradesperson vehicles (called “Ute’s” here, “trucks” in the USA) were significatly smaller than their american equivilants, but local manufacturing shut down and now we buy from whats available on the market. Also the laws around taxing work vehicles is worded in such a way that bigger cars get taxed differently and incentivises people buying these cars and slowly our car sizes are increasing and more and more giant ‘Yank Tanks’ are appearing on our roads. And couple this with car manufacturers slowly changing the publics idea of what a ‘family car’ is from a large sedan to a small suv to a full blown suv or 4x4 7 person tank.

      • merc@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        13 hours ago

        (called “Ute’s” here, “trucks” in the USA)

        Pickup trucks in the USA. “Truck” is a more generic term that covers just about everything from semi trailers (a.k.a. articulated lorry, heavy goods vehicle) to vans.