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!