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The LNP sent me some pro-Greens marketing today (i.imgur.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Got this in the mail. Not sure why the LNP is telling me all the great policies the Greens stand for. You'd think they'd want to portray the Greens in a bad light.

Transcription:

A dark green letter, with "What do the Greens really stand for?" in large letters. Under that, three separate article headlines and sources:

Stop the Stage 3 Tax Cuts—www.greens.org.au, 16/01/23
Greens Back Defunding Police—The Daily Telegraph, June 2020
Abolish the Private Health Insurance Rebate—www.greens.org.au, 16/01/23

all 16 comments

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't threaten me with a good time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Haha, we posted the same thing at the same time. Good times all round.

[–] Mountaineer 7 points 1 year ago

1 and 3 are definitely vote winners imo.

[–] Tagger 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting, what are Aussie cops like then? Is it a similar situation to the US where people actually want them roving and replacing?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

They're not nearly as bad here as they seem to be in America, but they do cause a lot of harm, especially to minorities. Things like punching peaceful protestors, sedating and inappropriately touching an indigenous child, saying that a domestic violence victim is "too ugly to be raped", a widespread culture of casually racist joking, and strip searching children as young as 13.

And speaking for my own personal interactions with them, when you do find yourself a victim, they often don't actually seem to care about enforcing the law, even if you can provide them with clear-cut evidence of what was done and who did it. At least if the reason you were a victim has to do with being part of some form of vulnerable group.

But you're far less likely to hear about them actually killing someone who didn't even appear violent.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I honestly think the only reason we don’t see more violence from Australian police (read police shooting people) is because Australia doesn’t have a strong gun culture. But I could be wrong

[–] InvisibleShoe 5 points 1 year ago

They also can't just start working for the next county over if they get fired from their jobs and don't have the police union the US cops do. And since Australian police training is measured in years and not weeks, they have to actually worry about their employment here.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You forgot tasering 92 year old women in nursing homes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah I also left off the one I usually like to bring up, the Pinkenba Six.

There are a lot of cases of quite blatant police abuse, and even more cases of highly questionable practices in terms of the value what they're doing provides to community safety.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

And killing her.

[–] Tagger 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for your really thorough response. Really interesting to hear people's experiences in different places.

[–] ziltoid101 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Kinda afraid to ask but I never really understood the whole 'defund the police' thing. There's definitely problems, but I think a lot of the vitiriol directed at police comes from news reports and case studies rather than statistically evident trends. Happy to be proven wrong, but I feel like there's an outcry for every police misstep because it always gets a lot of clicks as a headline - not saying there shouldn't be an outcry, but it might bias ourselves, because we seldom hear about the times where they don't misstep and actually succeed in preventing/addressing crime.

Anyway, police should do better, but defunding a public service doesn't really seem that progressive to me, and I don't think defunding them is going to help them do better.