Today is election day in Australia and Australians will be voting not for a person, but for a party. The two major parties are the Liberal National Party (LNP) and the Australian Labor* Party (ALP). Confession: though I knew they were "Liberal" (i.e., conservative) and "Labor" (i.e., liberal), I had to google what the acronyms stood for. Tony Abbott is the current face of the LNP and Julia Guillard is the current face of the ALP, though again, Australians are voting for a party, not a person. Despite Kevin '07's campaign.
Who will be the next/continuing Prime Minister? I'm just on the edge of my Australian seat!
*According to google, this really is the right spelling. Don't ask me why.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
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3 comments:
It's only for local government elections where we might get to vote for a person (i.e. the mayor), depending on which state one lives in. Otherwise it is in practice, unfortunately, voting for someone who represents their party to the electorate, rather than representing their electorate to the parliament.
Just in point of niggly fact; the NLP is actually a coalition of two parties - the Liberal Party and the National Party. They basically count as one entity these days, although there are some seats where Libs and Nats run against each other. But they do get very antsy if you call them just one party.
Garry - here in Qld the LNP is one party, but yes, elsewhere they are two distinct parties - the Liberal Party and the National Party. Considering that federally they always act as one party, I wonder why they don't just officially become one; maybe it's because on the state level elsewhere they like being two.
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