But in this country our electoral system keeps the wackos contained
does it ? As an Australian i'd call this take woefully misguided. We elect an endless litany of wackos and nut jobs.
For example, many pundits are suggesting an ONP electoral win and we have our wackos in Government including the LNP.
Remember those asshats holding a lump of coal and laughing about the outcome for the Pacific Islands? we elected one of them as Prime Minister, the same one that then shit in France's pocket, like Trump is doing to his "friends"
Our talk on immigration is as tough as the US BUT its across ALP, LNO and ONP so most voters are obviously Ok with it, we place refugees in off shore detention centres, many commiting suicide, like the much maligned Alligator Alcatraz in the US. The ALP has literally said they are going to hunt down visa overstayers, like ICE do in the US now. Our phones can be searched anywhere, Americans are in horror about phone searched at the border that's just a small sample.
the only difference is the size of the stage, ours is insignificant in the world and no one pays any attention, (including apparently Australians) to our endless hate and stupidity.
As to our electoral system, calling bullshit on that, the US has primaries where they vote on candidates and have some say, we have precisely zero choice in that respect. The US has the state base electoral college, that supposed to be there stop big states bullying smaller states by having more representatives ie more people = more votes (aka democracy), we have something similar with our senate having the same number of senators for each state, Tassie (with less population then the the Gold Coast) having the same number of senators as NSW. They do have issues over donor contributions (PACs etc) but so do we, who do you think is bank rolling the ONP? The Greens have long warned of this (and climate change) and been ignored by voters.
We are not good, we're a petro state hell bent on destroying the planet with our greed and most everything we do makes Australia and the world a worse place.