Final word for now about the election. There was much discussion with friends on Saturday about the perils of who to put last — particularly in the Senate, where every man and his dog was in the race, including parties nobody had ever heard of before. Do you put the racists last? Or the nutbags? (Nutbag racists are pretty much a shoe-in.) Or the Fundamentalists?
Inspection of the group voting tickets shows Socialist Equality Party didn’t preference Socialist Alliance. SPLITTERS!
And who are the Liberty and Democracy Party, anyway? For me that was answered by the Chaser, who noted that one of the LDP candidates was Lisa Milat, the sister-in-law of convicted serial Ivan Milat. The Chaser showed incredible footage of an ACA interview where she called for less gun control, and apparently didn’t know what euthanasia is. If I’m reading the results correctly, the she personally got no votes at all, though the LDP in the ACT got 402 — around a fifth of what each of the socialist groups got.
The aforementioned Neil Henry Smith got 307 votes, the least of any candidate in his seat.
So anyway, while the senate could take some time to sort out, the change from Coalition to Labor brought back memories of the last time it happened, in 1983. I was too young to vote back then, but my mum was overjoyed when Hawke won. And she decided to take down that amusing poster she had that said “God giveth and the government taketh away.”
I was pretty miffed about the last Federal election result, so I’m pretty pleased this time round. Now, if the ALP can just be reminded that funding public transport is in their policy platform (but alas not in their actual policies)…
3 replies on “Final word for now”
CBC actually did cover the election in Australia with a fairly large story “Labour wins Australian election”. They also carried a video of Pauline Hanson (that nutter!) in action. Scary that some people vote for her and those ideals. Yeah, good luck in getting the elected officials to keep their ideals and words they’ve promised, and make them a reality. Annoying when they don’t!
I’ve protected myself against the inevitable disappointment of broken election promises (although it *was* nice to hear about the almost instant ratification of Kyoto) in two ways:
(1) I always remember Malcolm Fraser telling us, when he was Prime Minister, in practically plain English, that election promises (no matter who was making them) were all rubbish! I thought that was a refreshing (possibly dangerous) lapse into honesty …
(2) Our household just bought the complete boxed set of DVD’s of “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister”. Astonishingly (appallingly?) relevant despite the passage of 25 years.
;-)
I was mortified in the polls!
Flicking through who to vote for, looking for those i either vaguely recognised or actually knew, and without any form of self control, i let out a huge highly unfeminine guffaw when i read ‘what women want’ and felt like asking ‘is this a voting sheet or a dvd rental list?’
Not good!