The coming Oz election thread ...

Oh no! I hope this isn't an omen of what we are in for here in the States. Good Grief!

How on earth do you keep up with all the parties and their stances? I looked at the voting results chart nimh posted and was blown away. Now, reading how confusing the voting is with all the choices that have to be filled in, it is mind boggling that any sense can be made of the vote. I think it might be more suseptible to corruption that our new, electronic machines, some of which are produced by a company in bed with the Bush administration.

My sympathies to all you aussies. Sigh.

How on earth could we have put this scheming, mendacious little man and his miserable claque back in office for another three years? Worse, how could we have brought them to the very brink of absolute control of the nation's entire parliamentary process and authority?

Very easily, as things turned out, to the cost of the rest of us and our national self-respect.

For almost nine years this Government, incompetent in most everything except mediocrity, debauched its word and the people's trust, along with voters' gullibility, their ignorance, their taxes and, in the end, their greedy self-interest.

It deceived and dissembled about joining us with Washington's military adventurism in Iraq, and it went on deceiving and dissembling, irrespective of the heightened threat to our national interest, to keep our minuscule presence there purely for the political pleasure of George Bush and his cronies.

Then when we reached the one time every three years of a people's audit, 4.6 in every 10 of us turned round and said, thank you, gimme the money and flog us for another three years. Most times, despite the thick and the avaricious and those who feel it's just all beyond them, we get it right as a nation.

Not this time. This time we've really buggered things. A politically immoral man who, by any civilised measure, disqualified himself from public life, has been given a pat on the back and even more power. This time the people's will has got it dreadfully wrong.

Now we all have to pay for the comfortable idiocy of the manipulated minority. And it is a minority: the 46 per cent who voted for the Coalition, or 4.6 in every 10. The other 5.4, in the main, wanted something better, and were denied by a lowest common denominator system in which all the spoils go to a degraded 50 per cent plus one.

I thought we had more brains, more self-respect. I was wrong in thinking enough voters "just might" see through the confidence trickery of John Howard, master illusionist and toad of a human being. I apologise for nothing.

Oh no! I hope this isn't an omen of what we are in for here in the States. Good Grief!
... My sympathies to all you aussies. Sigh.

Short letters to the editor from The Australian.

Isn't this exciting? Waiting to find out which were the "core" promises.
Blair Hunt
Finch Hatton, Qld

The election was not decided by the interest rate. It was decided by the self-interest rate.
Ian Wanless
Lyneham, ACT

I thought democracy was meant to stop me from feeling voiceless, powerless and disillusioned.
Mick Elliott
Randwick, NSW

Alan Ramsey must expect to be sacked during the 'reform' of the media cross-ownership laws -he is NOT a happy man...........

Quote:

How on earth could we have put this scheming, mendacious little man and his miserable claque back in office for another three years? Worse, how could we have brought them to the very brink of absolute control of the nation's entire parliamentary process and authority?

Very easily, as things turned out, to the cost of the rest of us and our national self-respect.

For almost nine years this Government, incompetent in most everything except mediocrity, debauched its word and the people's trust, along with voters' gullibility, their ignorance, their taxes and, in the end, their greedy self-interest.

It deceived and dissembled about joining us with Washington's military adventurism in Iraq, and it went on deceiving and dissembling, irrespective of the heightened threat to our national interest, to keep our minuscule presence there purely for the political pleasure of George Bush and his cronies.

Then when we reached the one time every three years of a people's audit, 4.6 in every 10 of us turned round and said, thank you, gimme the money and flog us for another three years. Most times, despite the thick and the avaricious and those who feel it's just all beyond them, we get it right as a nation.

Not this time. This time we've really buggered things. A politically immoral man who, by any civilised measure, disqualified himself from public life, has been given a pat on the back and even more power. This time the people's will has got it dreadfully wrong.

Now we all have to pay for the comfortable idiocy of the manipulated minority. And it is a minority: the 46 per cent who voted for the Coalition, or 4.6 in every 10. The other 5.4, in the main, wanted something better, and were denied by a lowest common denominator system in which all the spoils go to a degraded 50 per cent plus one.

I thought we had more brains, more self-respect. I was wrong in thinking enough voters "just might" see through the confidence trickery of John Howard, master illusionist and toad of a human being. I apologise for nothing.

incompetent in most everything except mediocrity
scheming, mendacious little man
A politically immoral man
toad of a human being

How on earth could we have put this scheming, mendacious little man and his miserable claque back in office for another three years? Worse, how could we have brought them to the very brink of absolute control of the nation's entire parliamentary process and authority?

it allows the possibility for new parties to become major, if they can get enough support.

Out to lunch with Australia's chattering classes
David Marr
MATP
541 words
1 October 2004
The Australian
Copyright 2004 News Ltd. All Rights Reserved

In the Overland lecture, Fairfax/ABC staffer David Marr laments that his dinner party conversations don't set the national agenda

WE were at it again the other night: a bunch of journalists, old friends and colleagues, eating, drinking and thrashing out the problems of the country. Over the years we've argued our way through the rise and fall of half a dozen governments, the collapse of the house of Fairfax and the passing of three or four regimes at the ABC. We've been at it through booms and busts. The ideological sharp edges have all been rubbed away. There are no Pollyannas left. None of us expects too much would change if the government changed in late 2004.

Around the table the other night, I was struck by the gap that's grown between the stories we're telling each other and the stories we're telling the public; between our talk and our work. Journalists spend their lives swapping stories that never see the light of day. But I'm talking about something else: the gap that's opened up between our take on these times and the pallid version presented in the media.

Much of the time the newspapers and networks we work for seem to be reporting another country and another government -- like our own, but not the Australia and the Howard Government it's our business to know. Creating this gap between private and public argument has been a major achievement of the Howard years. Newspapers and television have not been censored or bludgeoned. This is not Singapore: the Government is not wielding defamation laws against its critics. Yet the media is rattled...

Both sides of politics claim whatever galvanised Australia in the Tampa crisis can't be called racism because it was so pervasive, so popular. Manipulating race for electoral advantage is a hallmark of [John] Howard's Government but he insists on the right to cut down native title and turn back boats filled with Muslim refugees without this being named for what it is, without being accused of prejudice or bigotry, without being knocked off course by ... phony charges of racism.

And the press, itself scared of facing the xenophobia of this country, lets Howard get away with it. It's textbook political correctness: the demand that Australia's pervasive racism be shown democratic respect by leaving it unnamed.

Media proprietors read the same opinion polls as politicians. The same focus groups are telling newspapers what they want to read and political parties who they'll vote for. The popularity of what Howard did in the Tampa crisis explains, in part, the widespread failure of the media to grasp what was really going on here and cover these events the way they deserved.

There were honourable exceptions to this failure -- I particularly exempt The Australian and the ABC -- but to be working inside a newspaper [The Sydney Morning Herald] as this shameful episode in the country's history unfolded is to know the power of the media's willed indifference to issues of pure principle when these collide with overwhelming popular support.