Let me return to my ppr blogging duties with a post on another foreign election, and look out for something on the whole mosque issue fairly soon:

As you may or may not be aware, the Commonwealth of Australia recently held a federal election. The election comes as part of a tumultuous year for Australian politics. (Now former) PM Kevin Rudd, who just a year ago looked untouchable and likely to easily win a second term for his Labor Party government, slid in the polls earlier this year and was ousted by an internal party coup, which resulted in bringing Julia Gillard to the premiership of the country. As a parliamentary state, Australia can replace its PM whenever s/he loses the support of the majority of members of the lower house of the legislature. Once Rudd's Labor Party turned on him, he was powerless to hold on.

Rudd's slump had followed a serious of political reversals for a man once heralded as turning the page of Australian politics and whose first election victory had been protected to leave the right wing in the wilderness for years to come. Most importantly he was forced to back down on almost all his major climate change proposals, a major issue in a country where most of the land is taken up by a big desert.

His biggest obstacle had been that his party lacked a functional majority in the Australian Senate. Early on the conservative opposition, known as the Coalition, an alliance of the National and Liberal parties (a conservative Liberal party is less of an oxymoron outside the US, where it is understood that liberals are much closer to conservatives than they are to socialists, but that is a story for another day...), had a moderate leader who cooperated with Rudd, believing that his party too had to turn the page. But that (to simplify) provoked an internal party uprising, and the installation of Tony Abbott as new opposition leader. Abbott charted a path of rejectionism, and despite a hefty majority of Australians backing most of Rudd's policy goals, Abbott was able to use the Senate to humiliate and weaken the PM.

In an effort to deal with that, Rudd then tried to compromise. But as the Democrats in DC have found, compromise with an unyielding opponent makes nothing better. Your opponent doesn't accept your compromises, and you alienate a lot of your supporters. And so Rudd found his political career torn out from under him.

Gillard at first soared in the polls, but soon floundered when she started taking an even more compromising take than Rudd. Polls showed rapidly rising support for the Green Party, an outlet for disenchanted Labor voters.

When the votes were counted, and Australia's Alternative Vote voting system (a kind of quasi proportional system) makes that a little longer than election junkies might like, Labor and the Coalition pulled even with 72 seats each. 2 small party members and 4 independents held the remaining seats and hence the balance of power.

After a tense period of negotiations, Labor+the one Green MP (like America's FPP voting system, AV discriminates against non-regional 3rd parties, and the Greens one just 1 seat with 11% of the vote) and 3 of the four independents, were able to stitch together an agreement to form a government.

As you may have picked up, there are some parallels with the US situation in there, so here's my takeaways from the story:

1. Never discount a desperate politician. Electoral defeat for an incumbent in any kind of upper-level position is normally the end of the line. For most politicians it means changing your career. Tony Abbott knew that he could afford to lose the government formation negotiations. He's badly bloodied the nose of a government once thought invincible and forced it into an unstable and weak governing arrangement. He's got a good shot at holding on till the next vote and winning there. Julia Gillard on the other hand, having made a huge gamble in ousting Rudd, knew that failure to seal the deal with the independents would have been the end for her. For the 49 year old first female PM of Australia, that was not an attractive option. And so she was likely more willing to fill the demands of the independents. In the US, the question in the final months till November will be: what desperate moves will Democratic politicians make to hold on to their careers?

2. Be careful making deals with people who want your seat. of the 4 Independents, 1, from Tasmania, made his preference for Labor clear early on. The other 3, were representing conservative rural seats. This meant that the National Party, the rural part of the conservative Coalition, whose influence has been corroded for years by the relentless urbanization of Australia, would love to have their seats. I suspect the Nationals dug in deep resisting a deal with the Independents that would have made it hard for National to play for their seats next time around. It mirrors the US situation, where the GOP leadership often seems uninterested in working too much with Blue Dogs, and the Dems struggle to forge ties with Moderate North Eastern Republicans. Because it's hard to build ties with a party that you know would really rather oust you and put their own man in your job.

3. It takes an ego to be an Independent. While not necessarily a bad thing, you have to have a robust self confidence to believe that you alone can do better than the political spectrum in representing an area. This played itself out in the negotiations as well. Another reason apart form 3 why the representatives of conservative rural areas would side with Labor, is that all 3 men are themselves ex-National Party men. The consequence of which is that all 3 have likely left lots of burned bridges behind them in the Coalition, and their egos made it difficult to negotiate with a party they'd spurned.

4. Don't jump until you know you have space to land. If there's one lesson you take from this, its that you shouldn't start making big compromises until you know the other side will even consider them. Kevin Rudd compromised away his career to an opposition that was never going to accept anything he came up with. Gillard made the same mistake. The Democrats here have made the same mistake. Peel back the nonsense filters of the creeping edifice that is US mainstream media, and remember what Obama has done. a Stimulus Bill that was a major compromise, spurned and demonized. a Healthcare Bill that was absent the major desired items of the Left (and was to the Right of the GOP's own proposal in the early 90s, which was of course spearheaded by many of the same people still in congress today who claimed Obamacare was the devil), spurned and demonized. Financial reform, compromised to the point of being full of holes, spurned and demonized. Every major initiative of the Obama administration has involved massive compromises and cavings in to a GOP that has made clear it has NO intention of actually accepting compromises. a GOP that has in no uncertain terms made clear their position: that all elections should produce Center-Right policy. That Policy of the Left is never okay. And that while Democratic obstruction of Right wing policy is tantamount of treason, the GOP's refusal to even countenance positions that in every single other developed country on the planet are FIRMLY right wing and are left-wing here only because any true left in the US has been dead for over 25 years is patriotism. The GOP position is one of keeping America unbalanced, as Bush left it. Even making it more so. That's why they've preventing judge appointments, and have essentially established the de facto rule that only two kinds of appointments for any role are acceptable. Right wing and Moderate. Liberal, let alone true left, are absolutely unacceptable ideologies for anyone working in the bureaucracy or the judiciary to have. We can have that prehistoric monster Scalia on the Supreme Court, but if Goodwin Liu gets on the 9th Circuit, then America is PRACTICALLY OVER.

But now we've gone too far from Australia, and I'd best stop.