A Meaningless Title

- Labor held on to Deakin, with a small swing towards it in the two-party prefered vote. Interestingly, looking at the numbers, on first preferences both ALP and Liberals had a swing against them, Labor just picked up the Green second preferences. I think that sums up the whole election a little bit - nobody liked either major party.

- Wilson Tuckey has lost his seat! Never thought I'd be glad to see the Nationals win something.

- DLP wins a Victorian senate seat? I guess they picked up Family First's preferences. Annoyingly, checking the numbers, on first preferences they were barely ahead of the Sex Party...

At the polling station, Phil Barresi and the Liberals seem to be continuing his policy of bombarding the electorate with advertising; two large banners, a handful of posters and three people handing out how-to-vote cards, utterly drowning out the much more subdued Green and Labor advertisements.

(For that matter, I was still getting automated phone messages from the Barresi campaign at five PM last night. God, I hope he doesn’t win back this seat.)

No sign of Family First whatsoever; I guess whatever momentum they once had has finally died.

Did manage to convince my mother to vote for the Sex Party; their opposition to internet censorship persuaded her to give them a shot. Hope they do well; it’s an issue that didn’t get much discussion during the campaign.

Then again, not much of anything got discussed during the campaign, with both parties adopting small target strategies and the Greens marginalized by the media.

Not sure if I’m even going to bother watching the results come in.

God, I hate living in a marginal seat sometimes - keep getting automated phone calls leaving pre-recorded political messages. Will be very glad when the election is over.

Senate Group Voting tickets for the Federal Election are up.

No real surprises this time around; Labor’s directing preferences to the Greens, so we shouldn’t see a repeat of the idiotic deal that gave Family First a senate seat.

On the subject of Family First, they’re preferencing the Greens dead last. Personally, I’d have thought the Sex Party or the Secular Party would be their ultimate enemy, but apparently they’re that determined to keep the Greens out.

Amusingly, the Greens are preferencing (Communications Minister) Stephen Conroy after all the other Labor candidates. So’s the Sex Party. Probably not enough to make him lose his seat, unfortunately.

In the lower house, looks like my seat’s got a wealth of choices, with seven candidates on the ballot, including an independent – who, amusingly, uses Livejournal for his campaign website. (keen4politics )

So, prediction*: Labor’s stuffed. There’s no way they’ll claw back enough ground before the election to recover.

In hindsight, dumping Rudd was a mistake – it effectively killed their incumbency advantage, fostered a narrative of a government in collapse, and all in order to quietly silence the mining tax issue, something which probably wasn’t going to win or lose the election on its own. If anything, it might have helped Labor – it would have forced them to defend a policy and their record, rather than their current strategy of fleeing at the slightest hint of controversy. And Gillard can’t present herself as a clean break from the past when she was deputy leader under Rudd the whole time.

(Nor should she try – Labor went to this election with a sound economic record, something it seems completely incapable of capitalising on.)

Of course, in hindsight, Labor should have kept pushing for emissions trading, with Rudd calling an election over that issue ages ago. Climate change is the one area where Labor was making an effort to clearly distinguish itself from the Libs, and it’s one of Abbott’s big weak points. Unfortunately, first Rudd put the whole issue in the political too-hard basket, and now Gillard’s making only the most token effort to keep the idea alive. Sooner or later Labor will have to realise it’s at its strongest when it stands for something… they needed a big issue to campaign on, like they did with Workchoices in 2007.

*sigh*

Trying to put a positive spin on things – the Green vote remains level, so any government will probably have to negotiate with them to get anything done… the image of Abbott negotiating with the Greens and Xenophon is almost amusing enough that I can stomach the idea of him as PM…


*I do tend to be hillariously wrong when making predictions, and hopefully this will be one of those times.

I realise governments would generally prefer there be no public debate of their policies before they become fait accompli, but generally they're not as blatent as this.

But hey, the opposition will be sure to pick up on this and take the governement to task, right? It won't just be buried again and forgotten...

*sigh*

Well, I guess it was nice to be vaguely optimistic about the government for a few days. Lets see, Labor's position is now functionally indistingushable from Howards, and the Liberals are now moving further to the right to compensate.

You know, sooner or later Labor's going to have to realise they can't outflank Abbott when it comes to 'border protection'. Let's hope they work it out before this race to the bottom goes any further... *sigh*

Julia Gillard Prime Minister after Labor Leadership Challenge

What the hell? Seriously, what the hell?

You know, this is why I don’t do political analysis. My opinion had always been that the ‘leadership questions’ were purely a media-driven phenomena, and I wasn’t even considering that Rudd wouldn’t be leading the party to the next election. I guess one must admire Federal Labor’s ability to keep this under their hats until it was a fait accompli…

Anyway, Gillard. Not convinced she’s going to be as big a break from Rudd’s policies as some people seem to be assuming – I think her leftishness has always been overstated. On the plus side, this does give Labor a fresh and popular face –and an excuse to move away from some of its less popular policies without losing face.

Regarding Rudd; well, my opinion of him is basically the same as most people’s – very impressed with him initially, and then a stream of disappointments. On immigration, he seemed determined to engage in a fruitless race to the bottom with the opposition. Emissions trading was abandoned. Aboriginal issues are being handled largely the same as they were under Howard. The internet filter remained on the table. There’s very little positive you can point to and say “That was Rudd’s work” – and he suffered from the Obama syndrome of making very nice speeches that don’t actually mean anything when analysed. When it came to actually defending specific policies – eg, the mining tax – he seemed unable to actually communicate his position.

On the other hand, I do think he would have won the election nonetheless – Abott remains deeply unpopular, and while Labor was losing votes, they were mainly flowing to the Greens. Gillard probably will mean Labor will hold onto a few seats they would have lost otherwise. Whether she will actually govern differently than Rudd, though… well, I’m sceptical.

As for “Australia’s first woman Prime Minister” – eh, I’m going to save the celebrations until she wins the election. It is kinda fun that we’ve now got a female monarch, a female governor-general and a female head of government at the same time… Has Canada or New Zealand ever had that?

EDIT: And, you know what? After glancing at a few sites, I think I'm going to avoid all online discussion of Gillard for a while. *sigh*

So, general consensus is that Rudd won yesterday’s health care debate, owing almost entirely to the fact that Abbott didn’t actually have a policy to debate. One really has to wonder why he agreed to the debate in the first place when he’s openly admitting the Opposition doesn’t have a health policy at the moment. As it is, the ‘debate’ ended up largely a question and answer session on Rudd’s policy with Abbott left with nothing to contribute than the occasional rather childish insult.

Meanwhile, the US has actually made its first tenuous steps towards something that could possibly be considered an adequate health system. A lot of comentators seem to be treating the failure of any Republican representative to support the bill as the death-knell of the Republican party. (Of course, a few weeks ago, the failure to pass the bill was being treated by many of the same observers as the death-knell of the Obama administration.) I’m not convinced – it might cost them some votes in the short term, but the level of party unity the Republicans have can only be an asset in the long term, and from a policy point of view, their refusal to compromise gives ultimate power to the conservative wing of the Democratic party, moving the moderate position further right.