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Good morning and welcome to the Daily Os. It's Friday, the seventh of June. I'm Sam, I'm Lucy. It seems like everyone in the world except Australians are voting national elections this year. Over the past couple of weeks, South Africa, India and Mexico have all gone to the polls and
shaken things up. TDAS fact checker Lucy Tassel joins me on the podcast today to recap the year in elections so far, and let's have a look at what's coming up before we get there, Lucy, what is making headlines this morning?
An Israeli air strike on a United Nations school in central Gaza killed at least twenty seven people. According to the Hamas Media Office. The school was being used to house displaced people when it was attacked, with dozens injured. The Hammas Media office described the st as a horrific massacre. The Israeli Defense Forces said the attack targeted a Hummas compound inside the school, which hermasterdizes.
The National Anti Corruption Commission has announced it won't take further measures against individuals involved in the illegal Robodet scheme. Robodebt was an unlawful automated debt collection system designs to recover funds from welfare recipients. A Royal commission into the scheme referred six public officials to the anti corruption body.
In a statement, the NAAC said the conduct of the officials had already been quote fully explored in the Royal commission and found it unlikely that it would find significant new evidence if it launched its own investigation.
Mexico has recorded the first human case of the H five N to avian influenza or bird flu strain in a patient who died. The World Health Organization has confirmed the death. A fifty nine year old was hospitalized in April after several weeks of symptoms. Testing after his death indicated he was infected with bird flu. The source of the infection is unknown, but the virus has been spreading through poultry in the country. The WHO said the man had multiple underlying medical conditions.
And some Friday good news for you, Doctors have made a breakthrough discovery in their understanding of inflammatory bowel diseases, which includes Crohn's disease. Researchers in the UK found a boosted gene containing a type of DNA with increased protein that causes inflammation and tissue damage in patients with IBD. This discovery means researchers will hopefully be able to develop targeted treatment to deactivate the specific gene without negative side effects and ease IBD symptoms.
Over two billion people are going to vote in elections this year, making it the biggest year for democracy basically ever. Right, just this week on TDA we wrote about India's election, Mexico's election, South Africa's election, and I think each of these elections points to like an interesting trend that we're seeing across all the different votes this year. I think there's kind of a sense of the changing of the guard in my opinion.
I mean, if you take that two billion number, that's kind of like, you know, one in three and a half people voting in the elect that is massive. South Africa is particularly interesting for that new trend you've identified, right, that's right, So what happened there? There was just last week or the week before, So what's happened?
Yeah, So last week South Africans went to the polls for new members of their parliament. They hold these elections every five years, and just sixty percent of eligible voters actually voted. They don't have mandatory votes like we do in Australia. And this ended up being a really historic election because it's the first time since aparthe'd ended thirty years ago that the African National Congress, which we'll call the ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela, lost its majority.
Whenever a party loses power after that many decades, it's a big move and it certainly shakes things up in the country. For those of us who aren't as familiar with apartheid, that term you mentioned before, and why the ANC has become so powerful, give me a sense of how he got here.
Yeah, So, throughout much of the twentieth century, South Africa separated people based on race under a.
Policy, a set of laws called apartheid.
The government passed laws limiting non white people's movements, education, jobs, pay, marriage, you know, all kind of civil very much pretty much everything, yes, and I should say limited it or banned outright, all of these things. And the ANC were instrumental in bringing
about the end of apartheid. They opposed it literally from day one, initially with nonviolent protests including marches and deliberate violations of the rules, so black South Africans going to whites only places and spaces and refusing to carry these movement passes, and many ANC leaders, including Nelson Mandela famously,
of course, were arrested and jailed. After many decades of protest and upheaval, including the highly publicized release of Nelson Mandela from prison after almost thirty years, the ANC won the country's first modern elections in nineteen ninety four, that's what we consider the end of apartheid, and they secured a massive sixty three percent of the votes. That's just
like an unheard of majority. If a party in Australia got sixty three percent of the votes, there would be like dancing in the streets like that just never happens. And after that year's election, Mandela became the country's president.
So we go from nineteen ninety four this massive wave of support for the ANC inspirational president in Nelson Mandela. Thirty years later, the ANC has been falling to much lower numbers. What's changed.
One of the big issues is the ANC's leader and the past president hoping to become the president again. Cyril Ramafosa he's a moderately controversial figure. I'd say he's faced several criminal allegations, including tax evasion, which he's denied all wrongdoing for In twenty twenty two, Parliament tried to impeach him, so that.
They've heard that word before.
Yes, remove him from office, and that failed. Critics of Ramafosa have said that he's actually not decisive enough, that he hasn't provided solutions to these really big kind of society shaking issues that are present in South Africa and that have really kind of only worsened over the years. At his last campaign rally, reutter Is reported he said he would do better. It's not the most compelling campaign's logo, like please just give me one more chance, like very social media.
Yeah, it's like, well you've.
Had thirty years, so you can understand why there's kind of.
Being a shift and what issues are South Africans facing at the moment.
So the World Bank, which is a global financial body aimed at limiting poverty, says South Africa has quote one of the highest and most persistent inequality rates in the world. Unemployment is at thirty three percent. In Australia it's at four percent. Crime rates are really high. The latest police data that we have shows there was an average of one murder every twenty minutes in the last three months
of last year. And there's been an energy crisis that's seen to planned power adages called load shedding, become more frequent. That's impacting businesses, impacting infrastructure, and certainly just impacting people's abilities.
To just live their lives.
To boil the kettle after eight pm is something like a complaint that I see quite a lot online, the way that it's really impacting people's lives. And all of these issues really came up in the campaign.
And so obviously people express their disappointment with the current president at the polls. It's now a little bit of flux right in terms of who actually is in government.
What happens now, well, so South African voters elect the parliament's MPs and then the MPs decide the president, very much like our system, where you're not voting for Anthony Albanizi, you're voting for your local member who then continues to support the Prime minister and whoever gets a majority of the votes of the MP's wins, So that's a the whole parliament that's really the difference between Australia and South Africa.
Since the A ANDC has previously had an outright majority more than fifty percent of seats, they've always had the power to choose the president. But this year, because they've only got about forty percent of the votes, Ramafosa is going to have to negotiate with other parties if he wants to stay on. And that's really all we know for now. It's all really pending.
That's a really interesting one and I think that that idea of these long term leaders perhaps struggling more than they thought they would at the polls in twenty twenty four isn't unique to South Africa. We've also seen the similar situation with Narendra Modi in India.
Right, that's right.
Modi is heading for a third term in much better shape than Ramafosa is, but his party, the BJP, had a big swing against them, and that actually went against some pretty strong predictions, including I saw on Twitter this morning one kind of election pollster actually crying on TV because he'd got it wrong, really wrong. The BJP, so Mody's party is part of a coalition called the National Democratic Alliance Together. That alliance won enough seats to govern.
They got two ninety that's enough to govern the five d and forty three seat lower House. But at the last election, the BJP by themselves, not in the alliance, got over three hundred seats. So it's a big swing against the government in India.
So it's a win, but not a win that can really be kind of stoked with.
Well, yes, although Mody certainly has been pretty stoked publicly. I mean, how could you not. He said, this is a victory. He said, this is a feat of democracy. Other South Asian leaders have congratulated him. He's still in power, but his position is a lot shakier than it was the last time Indians.
Went to the election.
That turn of frase feet of democracy is interesting because they are actually the largest democracy.
Right yes, the largest country and the largest democracy. Almost a billion people voted.
Over six We think of the paper I do.
And I think of the they have actually like these electronic voting machines. According to Indian law, a polling center must be within two kilometers of every home, so if you live I mean, when you think about the geographic sweep of India, elect from beaches to mountains, like the Himalayas at the top. Like it's a huge geographic sweep and there's people all throughout. It's not like Australia where there's huge parts of the country that are unpopulated. That's
not true for India. So election officials have done things like fly out in helicopters to reach people with these machines. They've climbed mountains with these machines. They've like crossed rivers. It's like a huge undertaking. So that's partly why the voting takes place over six weeks.
That's a pretty amazing image in your mind right now of kind of literally carrying democracy across the country trying to make sure that everybody has its say exactly. That's really interesting. It's also now likely going to be the world's biggest ever democratic election, so so not going to forget this. So we've gone through South Africa, then we've gone to India, both of which have happened in the last couple of weeks, and now we're going to go
to Central America. And Mexico's also held a history making election, right that's.
Right, Mexico has its first female president, climate scientist and former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Shinbaum has become Mexico's first female president, and her opponent, Sochi Galvez, is also a woman.
It's the first.
Time that a woman has won an election in Mexico, the US, or Canada.
So it's a huge moment for North America.
And where's Shine bound come from.
So she's from this leftist party called Marina, which is the same as the outgoing president, whose name is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Well, thank you.
I've been doing duo lingo Spanish lately.
He's known by his initials Amlo AMLUL, which is.
Probably a lot easier.
Under that constitution in Mexico, presidents only get one six year term, so he's out Shinebaum's in. But it's the same party carrying over.
That's pretty interesting. You just get your one shot at it. You get a nice long term to do what you want to do, and then.
One I'm done.
The next Yeah. Something that's come up a lot in what I've read about the Mexican election is the violence and the street violence. Has that been a big feature of the campaign.
Yes. Over thirty candidates are believed to have been murdered ahead of this year's polls.
That is striking.
It's striking.
So that's according to Mexican organization Vote between Bullets, and this election has been described as the country's bloodiest ever. And at the same time, a woman has become president in a woman woman race, at the same time as there's really high rates of violence and killings of women in Mexico. According to data cited by the United Nations, ten women are killed every day by intimate partners and.
Family members in Mexico.
So it really kind of remains to be seen what Claudia Scheinbaumer can do about this.
So she's clearly inheriting a complex situation in that vein what does she promised to do.
So she's promised to expand on her predecessor's policies, so his social welfare program, expanding them to be a universal pension for the elderly and a program that pays young people for apprenticeships, and that's one of the things that she's trying to do to divert people out of violence and out of like cartels. Basically interesting, and she's also pledged to invest over two hundred and thirty eight billion pesos, So that's Australian twenty billion dollars in renewable energy by
twenty thirty. Obviously, being a climate scientist, that would be her focus, but critics have questioned whether she can kind of steer Mexico in that direction, steer her party away from its fossil fuel past.
So we've had three major elections on three different continents in two weeks, and that kind of pace doesn't stop for the rest of twenty twenty four.
That's it.
What's the rest of the year looking like?
Well, I can tell you what's happening right now, which is that the European Parliament is holding their elections over these couple of days.
As in this weekend. Okay, wow, So that is that a consonant wide election. That's right.
In some ways, it's quite similar to like a national election. Basically, people go to the polling booths and they vote for who they want to represent them, but this time at a continental level. The European Parliament passes laws that affect everyone who's in the European Union, and it also chooses a president to oversee its activities and to represent the EU at things like the G twenty or the G seven.
And the other thing to know is that EU countries elect MPs based on the size of their population, so Germans get to elect up to ninety six MPs in the European Parliament, Malta gets six.
And the UK used to be a part of all of this, but they brexit it and now they're heading for only their second election in the post brexit era.
Yes, and that, oh, I'm so excited by that.
Also exciting, and I haven't been able to get buy in in the office for my excitement for the UK election. But it's going to be interest.
It's going to be so interesting. It's looking like a landslide. In nineteen ninety seven, the UK Labor Party had a massive landslide. They were led by Tony Blair and it was kind of thought like, will we ever reach these heights again. It's looking like the predictions are that this year Labor is going to come back to power after fourteen years of Conservative government and win even more seats
than they did in nineteen ninety seven. One prediction is that they are going to win the second biggest majority in UK parliament history.
Wow, so a big reaction against the Tories.
Yes.
Current Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been campaigning in his signature Adidas Sambas. But the polls are suggesting that Opposition leader Kirstarma is going to kind of take control when they go to the polls in July.
So we're now, like I think, about two weeks into this UK campaign. Give me a sense of the types of things being promised by the two major parties.
The biggest story I would say is that Rishi Sunac has promised if the Conservatives the Tories are re elected, to institute mandatory national service for young people. So that's options to either serve in the military or volunteer in the community, but either way you have to do.
Something really interesting one mm hmm.
And Kiir Starmer wants to increase the pension and he wants to introduce more oversight on government spending, kind of put in something like the Parliamentary Budget Office that we have in Australia to make sure that UK citizens are getting value for tax payer money, is what he said.
So kind of a government integrity angle there exactly.
And just one last thing I'd like to say about the UK election that is so interesting to me is that it's kind of a battle of social class. Social class is so important in the UK, it's really embedded in the fabric of the country or countries. Conservative leader Rishi Sunak grew up middle class with parents who immigrated to the UK.
But then he attended a school that has its own.
Wikipedi year page with a list of over a thousand notable people who attended this school going back to the fourteenth century.
Sure it was very proper, yes, exactly.
And when he became Prime Minister in twenty twenty two, a clip circulated of him filmed for TV as a young man saying that he didn't have any working class friends. On the other hand, Keirs Starmer grew up working class. He won entry to a private school by passing an examine, then he got a scholarship, and his deputy leader, Angela Rayner, grew up in public housing and had her first child
at sixteen. You really couldn't see two more different leaders on paper, and so which is really interested to see how it all plays out.
I've heard one other interesting thing that struck me about the UK election. So there's this guy Nigel Faraj who then is a leader of the third biggest party in the country, and that's called Reform. We put him on Instagram this week because he had a milkshake thrown in his face. He's what you'd call the far right. He is kind of He left the Tories because he wanted more right wing policies than they were offering.
He was very pro Brexit. He was kind of the face of the Leave campaign.
Interesting and so the suggestion from a couple of experts I've read is that this national service policy is kind of a way for Rishi Sunak to tap into the older generation of conservative voters who want to make sure the kids do their hard work and serve their country, who might be tempted to vote for Nigel Farage. And it goes into this really interesting trend of these kind of splintering movements where if they'd stuck together as a party, they might win their majority or at least not lose
by as much. But because they're now splintering out, it kind of fragments the vote as well.
Yes, we're seeing that in a lot of places and it's going to be really interesting to track that kind of movement across the rest of this year's elections.
There's also an Australian link to the reform Nigel Farage's reform Party Holly Valance. Holly Valance is the pinup girl for the Reform Party, so she's going to have an active role in the election. She of course was famous in Australia for appearing on Neighbors. So there you go. I mean, we're going to talk about the UK election more. I hope we've convinced everyone listening that this is actually very interesting, so interesting. So we've got a bit of time.
We'll make sure that you come back on the pod to give us more of the insights into what big topics are coming out, but also then break down the results. So stay tuned everybody. Lucy, thanks for joining us, Thanks for having me Sam, And that is all we've got time for this week on the Daily Os. We'll be back again on Monday morning. Have a fantastic weekend and if you're in a part of the country that celebrates
a long weekend, enjoy that extra day. Will be in your ears on Monday morning, though, because the news never sleeps, have a great weekend.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Calcottin woman from Gadigol Country.
The Daily Os acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gatighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.