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The Aussie Battler is an endearing term we Australian’s use to refer to the working class hero. Welp, today I learned that originally the term “Battler” referred to a sex worker, and I am absolutely living for it.

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Blatantly Partisan Party Review II: Aussie Battler Party

Prior reviews: none; this is a new party.

The Aussie Battler Party is a disreputable group that does not deserve your support. I want to emphasise that I do not make that statement only to those who share my politics, but to everyone. Fellow election blogger Cate Speaks reviewed them on the basis of their website content on 12 November. By the time I tweeted about them on 15 November (based on a read of their website the previous evening), the content had changed. It is now different again. In the space of a week, this party has had three different policy platforms and at the time of writing it has provided no explanation for the changes. The last post on their Facebook page is dated 12 November.

The original Aussie Battler platform included policies to house the homeless in shipping containers and to give kids a free mouthguard annually. By the time I tweeted about them, they had morphed into rabble-rousing far-right frothers with extremely punitive policies on crime and immigration, including a threat to return the families of migrants who committed a violent crime. To underscore how breathtakingly idiotic that policy is, an abusive husband and father could rather easily use it to intimidate his family into silence: “if you tell the cops that I beat your mum and touch your sister, we are all going back, including you, so zip it!” These policies got a suitably unflattering write-up in the Age.

Yesterday, 17 November, Cate drew attention to another change. The Aussie Battlers now have a pretty vague centrist platform that does not commit to much of anything. She is quite right to condemn this as a bait-and-switch. I would go further: it is duplicity born of rank incompetence. This is not the behaviour of a political party that deserves a shred of support even from those who might have endorsed any of the policies they have promoted at some juncture in the past week. I will accordingly give the Battlers my second-last preference, ahead only of the worst party in contention, the subject of a forthcoming review, the Australian Liberty Alliance.

By the way, notes on two candidates:

The lead candidate in Northern Metropolitan is Walter Mikac, whose wife and two daughters were murdered in the Port Arthur massacre, and who subsequently founded the Alannah and Madeline Foundation for children who are victims of violent crime. If you personally support Mikac and are a voter in Northern Metro, I urge you to preference him separately and higher than the other member of his party. I, however, question his association with the Aussie Battler Party, especially as he does not appear to have made any statement on the changing policy platform or the fact that their preferences tend to favour pro-gun parties despite his advocacy for gun control.

The lead candidate in Eastern Victoria is Vern Hughes, a serial candidate who seems to stand for a different party at each election. He started out on the far left and has since worked his way through a whole bunch of other minor groupings. It is no longer clear what on earth he stands for other than trying to gain office through whatever party will have him.

Website: https://www.aussiebattlerparty.com.au/