Posted on 06/20/2004 3:39:14 PM PDT by quidnunc
Are you Canadian? From the tone of your messages it strikes me a lot as New Zealand Herald columnists.
Heck, I don't think you guys can stomach a Roger Douglas or a party like this (the one that I support):
http://www.act.org.nz
That's why the Liberals seats in the big cities are safe. They should keep all of their Toronto and Montreal ridings. They're in danger everywhere else and its less a function of geography than one of values. As for Quebec, the way that money was funnelled into pro-federalist causes, with the kickbacks and fraud, certainly didn't help in making the case for keeping Canada together and the funny thing is Jean Chretien's legacy has given the separatists a squeaky clean image they didn't have even under Pierre Trudeau. Only Liberals could be that dumb and they're supposed to be Canada's natural governing party!
Maybe higher rates of urbanization versus suburbanization? City people tend to vote left.
Australia is also one of the most urbanized countries on Earth (the top 10 Australian cities occupy about 70% of Australian populations). Yet even in its big cities conservatives do remarkably well. Take Sydney for example. It has been commented by Australians and Canadians alike that Melbourne is remarkably similar to both Toronto and Montreal politically. Paddy McGuinness has written this on Sydney Morning Herald on 20 September 2001 on the comparison between NZ and Australia, using Melbourne and Sydney as examples (unfortunately the article is gone from the net):
... The differences between the populations of Australia and New Zealand are about as different as those between Sydney and Melbourne.
That comparison does point to an interesting difference. There is a harder edge, a tougher minded approach to many issues in Sydney compared with Melbourne. There you tend to get more of the politics of the warm inner glow, along with pretensions to intellectual, cultural and moral superiority. Typically, the Fabian Society - wishy-washy socialism for idealistic and ineffectual intellectuals - flourishes there while it never did in Sydney. There is a similar difference between Sydney and New Zealand. Wellington is rather like a Canberra recruited entirely from the ranks of Melbourne school teachers. Not surprisingly, the NZ economy is in trouble when such people are in government.
There are real differences cross-Tasman, of course. The ethnic origins have always been rather different, with Catholic Irish much more heavily represented in Australia. We had a higher intake of non-English-speaking-background European migrants over the past 50 years. And the Maoris (and, increasingly, Pacific Islanders) are a much more significant proportion of the population than are Aborigines (however defined) here.
The do-gooders in New Zealand are, as in Melbourne, much more determined to get things wrong so they will feel good inside than are the majority of Australians, so they have set up disastrous institutions like the Waitangi Tribunal which fritter money away on compensation for past wrongs in such a way as to make the present day situation even worse. They are still strongly affected by old-fashioned pacifism, so they think that they need not spend money on their own defence.
As you can see, Sydney is actually moderate conservative by urgan Canadian (or even American) standards. Australian friends tell me that the conservatives there (Liberals) routinely gobble up all electorate seats situated at Sydney's North Shore (that's about 1/2 of the whole Sydney) and they also get some seats at Melbourne. Add to it the ALP (main party on the left) is actually to the right of Canada's Liberal Party and it amazes me to see Canada's politics is like that.
Yep, I'm a Canadian. Who else would be so interested in the arcane and Byzantine workings of Canadian politics? ;)
A couple of Canadian provinces have elected leaders like Mr. Douglas (Ralph Klein in Alberta and Mike Harris in Ontario), but no-one nationally.
All of Canada's Prime Ministers for the past thirty years have come from Quebec, with the singular exception of Joe Clark and no one misses him.
To help me judge the urban-vs.-suburban hypothesis: Does Sydney have more driveable and spacious surburbs, and Melbourne more walkable and densely packed city neighbourhoods, or are they about the same that way?
The other difference between Canada/NZ and US/Australia might be that the frontier played a much larger role in both the mythology and fact of US/Australian national life. Fighting nature leads to a more independent strain of mind; maybe it's no coincidence that the most conservative parts of Canada, Alberta and the BC interior, were our frontiers.
Its no accident conservatives are despised as cowboys and non-conformists.
It parallels, in a way, the heavy preponderance of American Presidents from the South. I could spin half-baked theories about the similarities all day if I wanted to... but this time I'll spare you. ;)
with the singular exception of Joe Clark and no one misses him.
Have you forgotten John Turner and Kim Campbell so quickly? [smirk]
They served so short a time they never really left a mark.
I think you may have a point - Melbourne has the best public transportation system in the country and also the highest PT usage. I would hypothesize that its suburb distribution is more compact but Sydney isn't particularly spread out either.
IMHO another factor is that Sydney started out with convicts and "tougher" migrants while Melbourne was settled with free migrants and more "cultured" intellectual type of poeple. In other words, Sydney was founded with people intending to make money and a living, while for Melbourne's case it had more to do with administrations. Australia's most prestigious academies are there and the best high-brow culture performances are in Melbourne rather than Sydney. It has been said that Sydneysiders are obsessed with how much you earn, and Melbourians care about which schools you went to. It may affect the characters of the two cities accordingly.
But even with Melbourne's case, the city's politics is still a tint to the right of New Zealand.
There is an important political landscape difference with Australia. The country has six states: New South Wales (with Sydney as its capital and largest city) is the largest state and is like a more moderate version of Ontario, while Victoria (the state where Melbourne is) is the second largest and like another Ontario.
The third largest state Queensland is red-neck conservative - imagine an Alberta replacing BC as third largest. This is followed by Western Australia - another Alberta. The 5th state is south Australia - yet another conservative state on the Albertan model, and finally the smallest state Tasmania is leftist, but it is on the BC rather than Quebec scale. In other words, there is no Quebec, no Maritime provinces, and no Saskatchewan.
Add to it the national capital Canberra. It is an independent government territory and not part of NSW - which helps drive all the liberal bureaucrats away from influencing NSW's directions. The only remaining territory, Northern Territory, is moderate and insignificant.
The Senate is elected and all states has equal representations (12 senators each - the territories have 2 non-voting senators each). Unlike Canada, it has exercised real muscles to veto government bills and this also means Australian politics is guarranteed to be more conservative.
That's interesting about the Sydney-convict Melbourne-free difference. I know a lot of whites came to the US as indentured servants - one-half to two-thirds of immigrants to Colonial America, according to one source. I wonder if that has had any impact on American politics...
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