What's wrong with a little mob rule?

Just when you thought raw Labor incompetence had pushed all swing voters (briefly) into the Liberal camp, the coalition still manages to fuck it up. This time, Ted and co have gone into popularist meltdown, directly appealing to mob mentality by allowing juries to determine sentences.

There isn't much for me to write on this subject, given that Captain Lefty has done all the work for me*. Even so, this isn't so much as shocking policy (which I'll get to) as it is what I call 'base populism.' That is, a political party will adopt a populist policy that appeals to a person's basest instincts; in this case, brutal vengeance. This is a clear sign that Vic Libs are as adrift now as they were ten years ago. Instead of designing a political platform to challenge Labor (paradoxically both easy and hard, given Labor's current incompetence, and that the political differences between the two parties are wafer-thin), Ballieu has gone for the easiest option of appealing to an angry mob.

And now for the policy itself: this is some serious FAIL. The types of Australians who make up juries (myself included) have very little idea of how sentences are determined. Certain parallels can be drawn to the Queensland Libnats and their idea of allowing volunteers to work with the mentally ill. That is, people who don't have the proper qualifications would be put in situations where you need proper qualifications in order to properly handle said situation.

Here, a 'race to the top' of ridiculously harsh sentences is inevitable. Judges are under pressure to increase sentences, lest they be branded as 'out of touch' and 'soft on crime' by the media barons that be. As Captain Lefty has pointed out, News Ltd readers have an exceptionally poor knowledge of what sentences actually constitute-as far as they are concerned, anything less than life imprisonment in an Indonesian jail is getting off scott free. And I'm willing to bet my fictional fighter plane that life imprisonment in the closest Australia has to an Indonesian jail is exactly what these uninformed juries would advocate for.

Jeez, Ballieu, I know that between John Hewson and Jeff Kennett, Liberals are terrific at losing unloseble elections (not that I'm complaining), but they've always done it by accident. There's no need to try to lose next years election; the factions will do that for you.

*Wordpress would be much less of a pain in the arse if clicking on a tag took you to a list of that blog's posts under that tag, not the entire-fucking-ty of wordpress itself.