Australian by-elections, 2018

[DL]

City of Sydney Councillor Dr Kerryn Phelps, former president of the Australian Medical Association and prominent pro-same sex marriage campaigner, has confirmed that she will be running in the Wentworth by-election.

For whihc party?

[DL]

Wentworth strikes me as the Australian equivalent of the kind if high income socially liberal, inner city, creative class type ridings in Canada the US and other countries that have started to totally reject rightwing parties as those parties have embraced social conservatism and xenophobia. I’m trying to think of what the Toronto equivalent of Wentworth would be. University-Rosedale? St. Paul’s? Either way they are riding that once upon a time could go Tory in a good year and now as the Canadian Tory Party And it’s Ontario branch have gone totally populist right, those ridings are now totally off the radar screen for the Tories and in the recent Ontario election they were dead last in each. Similarly the GOP is now totally rejected by voters in places like Beverly Hills and the upper east side of Manhattan

So how long before highly educated socially liberal Australians get with the program and reject the Coalition. Ow that it’s been taken over by religious conservative nut bars and climate change deniers?

[DL]

Come to Toronto and visit the riding of St. Paul’s. It’s the richest riding in Ontario and full of professionals and bankers and has a large Jewish population etc... in the June Ontario election it went NDP and elected a black lesbian who co-founded the local branch of Black Lives Matter. She narrowly beat the Liberal who was a very left leaning liberal, while the Tories were winning across the province they came in a distant third in St. Paul’s running a stock broker...

The old right/left cleavsges are shifting. Nowadays to be left wing means to be open to immigration and to support abortion rights and sams sex marriage and to want to be open to the world. To be rightwing now means to reject the idea that climate change exists and to press xenophobic hot buttons and to want to ditch trade agreements.

[DL]

I dont claim to be an expert on Australian politics but when you had a religious right climate change denying crackpot  like Abbott leading the Liberals it seemed to me that the Australian Liberal were going down the Trump/Brexit road...then there was a hiccup of relative sanity under Turnbull and now the party has been taken over by an evangelical Christian who hates all gay people...how much longer will the doctors and lawyers in Wentworth want to keep voting for something like that? We already saw in the UK how even under the leadership of someone as controversial as Jeremy Corbyn, Labour won a lot of very upscale London seats like Kensington etc... because the professional classes were so repulsed by Theresa May and her wanting Brexit and her attacks on immigrants.

[DL]

These old patterns explain a lot of voting behaviour..:until they don’t. It wasn’t that long ago that the Republicans were the party of the rich and the Democrats were the party of the white working class. In 1976 Marin County votes for Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter. Last year it went to Clinton over Trump by something like an 85% to 15% margin. In the UK never mind Kensington, Labour also won seats like Battersea which are full of rich young professionals who are very Remain. I might add that Corbyn’s own riding of Islaington is a very very high income riding full of professionals and academics who at one time likely would have voted Tory.

It’s probably just a matter of time before this happens in Australia as the Liberals go the way of the GOP and the Tories the UK and Canada and make themselves totally unattractive to anyone with a post secondary education.

[DL]

I was last in Sydney 18 years ago but to me Wentworth struck me as being a lot like Vancouver Point Grey... and it’s worth noting that when the Ontario Liberals totally collapsed it was as the NDP that won University Rosedale and St. Paul’s not the PCs. And in very very very very rich Beverly Hills people would vote for Bernie Sanders before they’d vote for a Republican

[DL]

We have been discussing Wentworth for a while now. Could someone give a more detailed description of the demographics and the makeup of Wentworth as in what neighborhoods it consists of which parts are very rich and which ones are not so rich etc... Austrialan electorates are bugger than Canadian ridings so they tend to be pretty diverse.

[DL]

I notice that Wentworth includes Paddington which is the “gay ghetto” of Sydney

[DL]

I notice that Wentworth includes Paddington which is the “gay ghetto” of Sydney