We have a few big advantages over you guys. Compulsory voting means any campaign has to be focused on actually getting people to vote for you, instead of just dissuading (or worse—actively using the law to prevent) people who would vote for your opponent to simply not vote.

Preferential voting for our House of Representatives and proportionalish voting for our Senate means we don’t have the spoiler effect so people can vote for their absolute favourite candidate without hurting their “lesser of two evils” preference between major parties.

These have huge moderating impacts on our overall political discourse. But honestly, if it weren’t for these factors, I don’t think we’d be too far off you. Our Liberal Party (originally a broad church including classical liberals and conservatives) has been taking over by the most extreme conservatives/reactionaries among them, and the Labor Party is milquetoast centrist at best, with more friendly policies in areas like education and healthcare, but lockstep with the Liberals on “national security” and erosions of civil liberties and privacy. They also don’t have the guts to enact policies you know they believe in when it comes to a progressive tax system—probably most famously, they’re supporting the former Liberal government’s “stage 3 tax cuts”, cutting income tax rates on the highest income brackets. So we’ve got rightward shifts of both our largest parties.

This is aided in no small part to Australia’s media landscape being so strongly defined by a certain infamous American media mogul. Far more even than his influence on the American market. In my home state of Queensland, every published physical newspaper is Murdoch, and the most popular newspapers in other states are his as well. And of course he has strong ties to the Liberal Party. The only significant competition is what used to be called Fairfax media, which is also Liberal-linked.

But again, our systems help protect us from the worst of this. At the last federal election we saw a huge surge for the leftist Greens party (going from 1 MP to 4), and the so-called “teal” independents (so-named because they would traditionally have been members of the blue-coloured Liberals, but have left the Liberals behind when it comes to caring for the environment as well as some other issues like women’s rights and corruption) multiplied from 2 incumbents to a total of 8 MPs. Ironically, this may have made the Liberal Party even worse, because the seats won by independents and Greens were previously held by some of the more moderate wing of the Liberal Party. But it does mean our Parliament ends up looking a lot more moderate than otherwise, and it rationalises our political debate somewhat.