Lots of nice throw away lines above, but no evidence presented, par for the course when you strike a right wing shill.
Debt is not a bad thing per se, I don't think any of us here would own our own houses if not for going into debt, debt which would have been multiples of our annual income. If you spend on infrastructure it is an investment. Furthermore, the recent debt the Victorian Government entered into was borrowed when interest rates were very low, and now inflation is eroding the debt. When do you propose governments borrow to build much needed infrastructure - when interest rates are high?
In any case, as many have pointed out, government debt is not the same as private debt (which is far more out of control in Australia than government debt, you want a debt problem, look at private debt in Australia). Governments don't need to pay off debt, they never have, they never will. Something about being sovereign does make governments fundamentally different.
But I particularly liked the throwaway line about how the ALP got less votes than the Libs, mainly because, nice throw away line that it is, it is also simply wrong.
2022 election first reference votes (House of Reps) were as follows:
Liberal: 3,502,713 or 23.89%
LNP Queensland: 1,172,515 or 8%
National: 528,442 or 3.6%
CLP NT: 29,664 or 0.2%
ALP: 4,776,030 or 32.58%
Now, it is a bit hard to unpack since the Tory side of politics is so split, but if you add Liberal and LNP Queensland together it is less than the ALP alone, and bear in mind that includes votes which would go to the Nationals if they were separate parties in Queensland. You can't count the National votes for the Libs they are not the same party. In any case, no party has won without preferences I suspect since the 1977 election (sorry, I was wrong, the last time a major party won more than 50% of the primary vote in a Federal Election was 1975, even that is a bit dubious since it was a coalition of the Libs and the Country Party), so to claim that winning on preference is a problem is simply rubbish.
I wouldn't say most countries don't have first past the post. In the USA they have first past the post in most states (Georgia as an exception where they do have run off elections). The UK does have first past the post and no run offs. France has run offs for President and I think members of their parliament. Preferential voting is quite rare. It is a bit all over the place, a fair number of countries have blended systems where some members of their lower house are from single member electorates and others are from a party list which is proportional rep. We have a blend too if you include the Senate.
DS
