Albo as a young man.

Newly elected? He's kind of cute... or was?

Both!

It's terrifying - he's nine years younger than I am.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Albanese

But he's several years younger than me too.

I am glad he was elected and I hope we can flip our Congress like you guys flipped your government!

Congrats!

It's a good sign.

In the sovereign territory of the Aussie group.

Our politics are not nearly as polarised or vicious as yours in the US. Because of compulsory voting, there's no need for any of the parties to cheat, supress votes, disencourage voting and so on. I bring this up in GD every few years to the deafening response of, 'But we don't want everyone to vote because some are idiots'.

I say, don't knock it until you've tried it.

I have been an advocate for compulsory voting because I expect it to do away with problems you seem to not have in your compulsory voting country.

But we have a religion problem here, everything is turned into that which is protected in order to allegedly beat the system. Currently religion had been weaponized to promote the opposite of what religion proposes to be and uses money for rewards on earth while you wait to go to heaven, I guess. The almighty dollar is where the power lies so anything unrelated to ill gotten gains is squashed rather quickly. It will be the death of us.

A chicken and egg situation. To my eyes, your media, even the friendly variety like MSNBC are just so generally over the top nearly all of the time. Murdoch is a different animal; I believe he spread to the US because of a) Immense greed b) A receptive market for right wing ideas and c) the old Daily Mail maxim of 'telling the people everything has gone to hell and to stir them up'.

Media makes money out of conflict. There's no money in saying it's a nice day and everyone was nice to each other. So whether they will admit it or not, most media is agitating for conflict because it makes them money. I despair.