Did you know there was more than one Fundies First Senator?

I didn't-probably because ol' Steve spends his every waking moment thinking of news ways to gain attention/make a total arse of himself.

The FF doesn't just have coverage on the federal level; there are two senators in the South Australia and one on the NSW Legislative Council. The NSW guy is the most interesting, as he was in the Christian Theocratic Party before a hilarious fallout with Fred Nile, and then moving the the slightly-less-overtly-bigoted-yet-still-ironically-named Family First.

True to form, if anybody told him that there were gays in families, his head would explode.

“Most of the people promoting same sex adoption speak about the right of gay and lesbian couples to have a child to satisfy their own instinct for parenting. Our point is totally different. The concern of Family First is for the right of a child to have the role modelling and contributions that are given throughout a child’s life by a mother and a father.”

Reality notwithstanding, of course.

And then there's his painfully ironic press release titled 'The damaging consequences of bullying into adult life' despite his clear endorsement of homophobia. There's also the mandatory 'fertilised cells are people too!' posts, and the "EXTREME GREENS EXTREME GREENS EXTREME GREENS!!1!!"

In SA, the work experience kid has been assigned to graphic design and layout, while Pastor Evans is just as reality-immune as Moyes. The fundie roots are exposed in this funderful newsletter:

On Family First’s insistence, we no longer have ‘de facto’ marriages in South Australia – with all non marriage relationships being placed in a lower category called ‘domestic partnerships’. Further, the bill was worded in such a way as to place an obstacle in the path of gay adoptions and artificial insemination (which are heavily promoted by the Australian Greens and are the gay lobby’s stated next objective).

The Greens: more pro-family than FF, despite the former beginning as a single-issue environmental party and the latter beginning as a 'pro-family' party. And finally, there's a Palinesque dig at at Senator's Hanson-Young's age:

Tony Bates is a senior executive with Adelaide’s G.M. Holden operations. Tony's main competition in the fight to gain a South Australian Senate seat for FAMILY FIRST will be the Australian Democrats' "human shield" Ruth Russell, and SA Greens' 25-year old law student Sarah Hanson-Young.

And yet this 25 year old beat your sorry butt and and took the seat.

Well, thankfully, that's it. Steve is hellbound this year, stripping Fundies First of its most prominent Senator. This will significantly reduce the FF's national presence and hopefully bring them to where they belong; a minor, fringe party, of which most people would be embarrassed to admit their support for.

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.