politics – dangermouse.net

Avoiding the worst of the rain

We got a bit of rain overnight, but it looks like the low pressure system bringing this is concentrated north of Sydney. Towns a couple of hundred kilometres north of us got almost 300 mm yesterday and there is widespread flooding. Today eased off a bit, but there’s more very heavy rain coming, and Sydney will catch the edge of it over the next few days.

Most of the day here was dry. The main exception was when I took Scully for a morning walk. Just a short 20-minute walk around the block. But halfway around the rain came down heavily, and I hadn’t expected it at all, so didn’t have an umbrella. We just had to get wet as we made our way home. Where I had to change my clothes and lay the wet ones out to dry.

In the morning I write my next ethics class, on the topic of “Perfection”. I have a good amount of questions and I think this could be another very interesting topic for the kids, like last week’s “Socialisation”. Then I took Scully for a lunchtime walk, and bought some Turkish bread and hummus to use for lunch.

Big news in Australia today was the break-up of the Coalition between the Liberal and National Parties. The Coalition, as a composite entity, has been the major conservative/right power in Australian politics for over 100 years, holding government more times than the progressive/left Labor Party. But the Coalition lost the last election two weeks ago dramatically, losing 13 seats in Parliament, handing the incumbent Labor Party a huge victory. The Coalition suffered from losing relevance to traditional inner city conservatives, promoting a nuclear power policy, and embracing some aspects of Donald Trump’s policies in the US. The Australian public rejected them soundly.

In the aftermath, the dominant Coalition partner Liberal Party replaced its leader Peter Dutton with Sussan Ley, who in the few days she’s been in charge moved away from right-wing policies and more towards the centre in an attempt to rebuild support. But this sat badly with the Nationals, who are further right. Sussan Ley has committed her Liberal Party to a net zero carbon emissions policy, which the Nationals have been fighting against (being interested in supporting the coal and petroleum gas mining industries), holding the prior Coalition back on this policy. Ley’s stance has so angered the Nationals that today they formally withdrew from the Coalition agreement.

This leaves Australia’s major right party, the Liberals, essentially incapable of winning government in the foreseeable future, as they relied on Nationals seats in rural areas to make up majority numbers in Parliament. So this is a major shake-up in the political landscape in Australia. We have up to three years to the next election, so things may change and it’s possible the Coalition will re-form if the parties can agree on a combined policy, but it will be interesting to see how things develop before the next election.

Getting a bit sick of all this rain

It’s pouring down as I type this. We’ve had showers every day for the past few weeks, and the forecast that I just saw for the next week is more rain, every day, with heavy falls up to 45 mm early next week. Our weather is broken and I want some new weather.

Also, the USA is broken, can we have a new one? I don’t want to go into any details, but I had an interaction today which almost broke my brain about how far gone the USA is under Trump. Reasonable people are actually fearing for their lives under this regime. It’s horrible, and terrifying, and exhausting. Ugh.

On the bright side… I managed to complete marking of all of my assigned student project reports for Data Engineering. This is the experimental planning report. In two weeks we get the final results report and their presentation videos to mark. And I’m happy to report that this year’s crop of students appears to be better at planning their experiments and writing their reports than last year’s. I was prepared to disappointed but I was pleasantly surprised.

More D&D and more election results

Today I continued writing up a log of the action from Friday night’s Dungeons & Dragons game. I finished it off, which is a nice achievement so soon after the game. Usually in the past I’ve neglected writing up the adventure until just before the next session, by which time I’ve forgotten a lot of the details and have to reconstruct events by questioning my players and trying to weave a coherent narrative out of their disparate recollections.

And this morning we had a much better picture of yesterday’s election results. The incumbent Labor Party have been returned with a greatly increased majority, in what several news outlets have called a “landslide” result. The conservative opposition has been decimated, losing several seats in the major cities, resulting in them having virtually no presence anywhere except rural seats. It was an unexpectedly strong repudiation of conservative Australian politics by the voters, and a welcome result for those fearing any potential Trump-like policies in this country.

This morning I did another 5k run, taking it a bit easier than yesterday. The weather has improved this weekend, with the week-long run of heavy showers finally giving way to sunny skies, but cool autumn temperatures.

My wife and I took advantage this afternoon by driving over tho Balmoral Beach to walk Scully along the beach front in the pleasant weather. In the way back we stopped off at a good-looking deli that my wife found online and checked out their products. It had a lot of European things. I ended up buying a chunk of Austrian cheese and a slice of apple strudel for dessert tonight.

The weather has definitely taken a turn away from summer and towards winter in the past couple of weeks. Leaves on some of the trees are changing colour and it definitely feels like autumn now. Although the previously forecast 26°C for mid-week has been increased to 27°C now!

D&D and Election Day!

Friday I had my usual ethics classes, and prepared for a night of Dungeons & Dragons with my friends. I had five of them over to my place and we played from 6pm to about 10:30.

In the last session they’d started to deal with the curse placed on them by the God of Swords: kill 9 people in 9 days with 9 different swords, or die! Now they had a lead from an old sage who wanted them to recover some magical artefacts from an ancient vault hidden in the hills a half day’s ride from the town they were in. He said there were rumours that the place was now overrun with snake people – suitable targets for despatching with swords if they got the chance.

They reached the hidden vault and found their way in via a ruined lookout tower, and discovered a large chamber almost filled with what looked like a black rectangular block of absolute darkness. They figured out it was solid and highly magical… and there was a giant horned skull resting on top of it. Needless to say there were plenty of shenanigans and some fighting against snake people and some cool magical things, and we all had a great time!

This morning I got up and collected the groceries from the supermarket. Normally I do this on Friday but for the third week in a row something was happening so I had to postpone to Saturday. I went for a 5k run, and I pushed myself and recorded a time of 27:02, which I’m very pleased with. I ran past a polling place, because…

Today is the federal election. We’d already voted back on Wednesday, so didn’t have to head out to a polling place today, which was nice. I read a story that for this election 47% of the electorate had already voted prior to today’s official election day. This is a record number of pre-poll votes. It’s good that we make it so easy for people to vote.

It’s now 2 and a bit hours after the close of polls in eastern Australia and in early counting it looks like our left-leaning Labor government is going to win with an increased majority. There’s a big swing away from the conservative Liberal Party, and it seems certain that their leader Peter Dutton will lose his own seat in Parliament. This is a big change from before Trump was sworn in as US President in January, when the conservatives were leading all the polls. Our swing back away from the conservatives hasn’t been as stark as in Canada at their election last week, but Trump definitely had an effect, causing Australians to react by also rejecting our own conservative party.

We shall see the full results in the coming days.

Election countdown: 5 days

Five days until the Australian election. But also our friends in Canada vote today. It’s a similar story in both countries, with both incumbents being left-leaning and before Trump returned to power in the USA polling behind their respective right-leaning oppositions. But Trump has turned around the fortunes in both countries, with voters in Canada and Australia shifting away from right-wing favour, and polls in both now predicting incumbent victories. But we shall see.

Today was busy, with three online ethics classes in the morning, followed by having a quick lunch at home before racing to the train to head into the university for my teaching stint there for Data Engineering. The students are into their four weeks of working on their assessment projects (after having the last two weeks off). So I need to patrol the room seeing what students are working on, answering questions, giving advice, and so on. I was surprised that some of the student groups hadn’t yet decided on the topic of their investigation, whereas some had almost finished writing their first report!

The weather was very rainy, and I got wet walking to the station to catch the train, despite using an umbrella, because of how heavy the rain was. This rainy weather is set to continue for at least the next week as well! When I got home this afternoon we had four umbrellas drying in the bathroom – even though I live with just my wife.

I made pizza for dinner. And then had two more evening ethics classes, to round off a very busy day.

Awful Australian politics

Maybe not what you’re thinking from the title. My wife has started watching the Netflix series The Residence. It’s set in the White House and there are various political characters, including one who is repeatedly referred to as the “First Lady of Australia”. It’s clear that the writers have no idea about how Australian politics works, because the spouse of the Prime Minister has no such title and no duties anything like the role of First Lady of the United States. Can’t they do even basic research to get these things right and not annoyingly wrong?

As an aside, our current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, isn’t married, being divorced from his first wife before being elected. He has a partner, and proposed marriage last year (while Prime Minister). Their wedding is expected to follow the imminent election, now just 11 days away. If he’s returned as Prime Minister, it will be the first time an Australian Prime Minister gets married while in office.

I suppose I have another story about politics. With the election very soon, the political ads are ramping up in all media. As has become usual, many of them are scare tactic ads aimed at making voters afraid of the other major party. And one of them which I heard again today is making the point that our Opposition leader wants to make Australia “more like America”. This is enough to scare Australian voters. “That guy wants to make Australia more like America” is an effective scare message to get people not to vote for that guy. And it’s working, because the Opposition is falling behind in the polls. That tells you something about our collective opinions on the US right now.

This morning my wife took Scully to work, so I had a morning free to go for a run, and took the chance to do another 5k. The weather was chilly, with intermittent heavy showers all day, but I managed to avoid them while running.

This afternoon I wrote up my lesson plan for this week’s ethics topic, which is Antarctica. There are plenty of questions about why people are interested in Antarctica, who (if anyone) should be allowed to go there, live there, own it, use mineral resources, etc, etc. I did the first class this evening and it went fairly well. It’s always tricky doing the first class of a new topic, and not knowing which questions the kids will find interesting or have strong opinions on.

Tonight we had one kid who was pretty gung-ho in favour of letting people mine Antarctica, and two who were more concerned with protecting its environment, so that was interesting!

Australian election campaign ongoing

We’re getting towards the pointy end of the current Australian federal election campaign. Election day is Saturday 3 May, so just over 2 weeks away. It was brought more strongly into my consciousness on Tuesday when we drove over to Rose Bay.

While driving along the road to get there, I noticed that in that area there were election candidate posters attached to every single streetlight pole along the road. And also posted on many buildings and fences. it was a little surprising because it’s very different to what I’ve been seeing in the area where I live. Here there are only the odd handful of signs on people’s home fences. I walk down a street with maybe 50 houses on it, and one of them has an election sign. And there are no signs posted on any public infrastructure at all. So to go to a different part of Sydney and be accosted with hundreds of signs was a bit weird.

My electorate, which was won by an independent MP at the last election, has been abolished for this election. Residents have all been assigned to one of the three neighbouring electorates in a redistribution due to geographic population changes. The old electorate was marginal, with the independent winning by 2.9%, but my new electorate is considered a safe independent seat, with the current independent MP having won the last election by more than 10%. So I guess this seat is not being as strongly fought as some others across Sydney, possibly leading to the noticeably lower level of posters around the place.

This is a very unusual election, in that one of the most pressing issues for Australian voters is foreign policy, which usually features way down the list of relevant issues. This is caused by Donald Trump and the disintegration of the USA. Voters are worried about the economic impact of foreign trade with the USA being disrupted by Trump’s policies/actions, and about the status of our military alliance. Like Canadian politics leading up to their imminent election (28 April), we’re looking to see which prospective Prime Minister will be stronger in dealing with the USA. In fact there was a debate between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition leader Peter Dutton last night, and in the ABC News article about it, the very first person mentioned in the article is… Donald Trump!

Another article on the election reports that Australian trust in the USA has fallen to very low levels, with a poll finding:

only 36 per cent of Australians expressed any degree of trust in the United States to act responsibly

And while we’re at it, I’m aware of three recent incidents where Australian travellers were stopped at the US border, detained for up to 36 hours, in one case in moved to a prison rather than just detained at the airport, and deported. Immigration lawyers are now warning Australians about the risks of travelling to the USA and advising anyone travelling there to use a burner phone, and print out bank statements and detailed itineraries to produce if demanded by US officials.

So while domestic issues such as housing affordability and inflation are on Australians’ minds heading into the election, foreign policy is playing an unusually large part this election.

Not much else to report today, it was a routine day of online classes and some time spent writing comics. I took a walk to pick up Scully from my wife’s work, as she took her in to work with her today. I got rained on along the way by a sudden shower. And I made pasta with a simple zucchini tomato sauce for dinner.

Completely forgot about yesterday’s post

Ooops! I intended to write a blog post yesterday, but I just completely forgot. It was a busy day. I had two ethics classes starting early at 8:00 am – an hour earlier than last week because of the daylight saving change on the weekend. This also meant that my 12:00 class—that I’d temporarily shunted to Tuesdays because it didn’t give me enough time to get into university for the Data Engineering lecture—could now be moved back to 11:00 on Monday. So I had that class too. Then I had one hour to take Scully to my wife’s work and hop on a train into the city and pick up some lunch on the way before the lecture.

This was the last lecture with new material, talking about complex systems and agent-based modelling. We have two weeks off now for the mid-semester vacation and then the Easter Monday public holiday, followed by four weeks of student project work tutorials.

When I got home, I made pizza for dinner and then had two more ethics classes in the evening, which chewed up the rest of the day.

Today we had some rain and cooler weather, which was nice. I wrote my new ethics class topic, on “Brands and Trademarks”. With some interesting questions like:

Should I be able to start a business called McDonald’s:
• that does shoe repair?
• that sells pizza?
• that sells burgers?
• if my surname is McDonald?
If I do start a shoe repair shop called McDonald’s, should I be allowed to advertise it with a red and yellow sign saying “McDonald’s”?

I also made some slides to show the kids with illustrative photos of businesses with modified names, and this took a while. So it took me longer to write this class than usual, and I didn’t get around to doing much else during the day.

Scully is finished her medication for her bloody poops last week, and seems to be fully recovered, so that’s good news. There was some other test the vet did which also came back negative. So we don’t really know what the problem was – probably some sort of gastro-intestinal infection I guess.

In other news, the Australian election campaign is progressing. Prime Minster Albanese is firming up in the opinion polls, while opposition leader Dutton is falling behind. At least part of this is the “Trump factor”, with Australian voters recoiling from conservative politics due to the destructive antics of Donald Trump in the USA. Dutton was initially a few weeks ago expressing a need for some Trump-like policies, such as reducing the size of the federal government, but this has backfired badly and he’s had to backpedal and change his tune. So if anything good can come from Trump, I’m hopeful that it makes Australian voters head for a more progressive choice, n the same way it appears to be doing in Canada.

Scully improving, economy not

Scully is doing better today, not having to poop five times like the past couple of days. Although she did wake me up before 6am for the first one of the day. Her blood test results came back negative for anything nasty, which is good. And she seems to be responding to the antibiotics and probiotic paste.

The other thing I want to comment on today is the insanity of the global tariffs that Donald Trump announced today that the US will impose on almost all other countries. The highlights (or lowlights), for posterity:

The weird magic numbers that they came up with on that chart for “Tariffs charged to the USA” are not actually tariffs in any sense of the word whatsoever. Many people have worked out where the numbers came from: They are the country’s trade deficit with the USA for 2024 divided by the value of US imports from that country.
Countries with a trade surplus with the US (such as Australia, whose calculation as above came out to a whopping -107%) are still getting slapped with a 10% tariff. For no apparent reason, even given Trump’s bizarre (and incorrect) notion that a trade deficit is a “bad thing”.
The list includes some sub-national entities, such as Norfolk Island, a part of Australia, which mysteriously got a contradictory 29% tariff despite Australia getting 10%.
Another part of Australia, the territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands, got listed separately, with a tariff of 10%, despite it being uninhabited and having no imports or exports.
They also announced a tariff on the British Indian Ocean Territory, whose only population is a joint US/UK military base. So effectively the US has announced a tariff on its own military forces.

There’s only so much bewildered headshaking one can do in response to this madness. And not only is it uneducated and random, it’s going to actively destroy the US economy, as well as having negative effects on everyone else. As one of my friends put it in a group chat today:

It’s a bit like when a bunch of countries [implemented] sanctions to punish Russia so other countries can’t trade with them without penalties, except the US is doing it to itself.

I just have no more words I can add to that.

Finding a new Path, and Working Carriages

Friday was online games night, and one of my friends was again running a Pathfinder roleplaying game for us. The previous session was a one-shot to test out the virtual tabletop and playing online, but last night was the beginning of an ongoing campaign. I had a fresh first level character, a halfling druid named Osric “Stormy” Mossfoot.

The general setup was that the PCs all came from separate areas around a village and were there for their own purposes. I was investigating a vague feeling that something wasn’t right with the forest. We met our fellow PCs by taking a common interest in assisting a distraught young woman who was lamenting breaking up with her boyfriend, after a night-time tryst in the forest, where they witnessed some mysterious motes of light rising from the forest floor. This seemed to have affected the young man, changing his personality and causing him to ignore the woman.

We investigated his house, which turned out to be the home of his parents, wealthy jewellers, who were almost alarmingly welcoming. They said he’d got up that morning and headed off east. The only building to the east was an abandoned church, which we poked around in enough to determine that the ground floor and cellar were both so dust choked that clearly nobody had been in either for years.

We convinced the young woman to accompany us into the forest and show us their trysting spot, ominously named “Nana’s Grave”. As we approached, we had to fight a few shambling zombie-like creatures, overgrown with vines. And as I used one of my druid spells, we witnessed motes of light rising from the ground! With the zombies defeated we approached nana’s grave itself, only to find a six-foot deep hole in front of the headstone. There were also a couple of other similar combats. The woman mentioned there was an abandoned cottage that belonged to Nana nearby, and we took a look there. There was nothing on the ground floor, but we found a trap door leading down to a dark cellar… And there we paused play for the evening until next session!

Early on Friday I picked up the groceries from the supermarket. Fresh figs were cheap, so I got a pack of those, and when I had some later they were really delicious. And I had four ethics classes during the day before the gaming.

Today the weather forecast was dismal, up to 90 mm of rain, with very heavy falls. I went for a 5k run anyway, in the steady rain around 9am, since I hadn’t done a run for two weeks because we were in New Zealand last weekend. It was cooler than other recent runs, so actually not that bad. Just very wet.

After a shower and changing into dry clothes, my wife and I drove over to Carriageworks Farmers Market, braving the rain with Scully. This market is fairly fancy, with a lot of stalls selling “gourmet” produce and foods. I got a trout and horseradish pie to eat for lunch, and a strawberry cheesecake babka as a sweet treat afterwards. We also bought some vegetables, including some special “Queen May” potatoes for roasting up for dinner tonight.

Along with the potatoes we roasted sweet potato, pumpkin, and some spiced chick peas. And just steamed some broccolini to go with it and provide some greens.

The rain eased off after lunch too, rather than intensifying as we expected. So we managed to take Scully for an evening walk without getting too wet – it was a very light sprinkle by then.

And in other news, the Prime Minister called the next Australian federal election yesterday. We go to the polling stations on 3 May.