Maintain your rage and enthusiasm through the campaign for the election now to be held and until polling day.
- Edward Gough Whitlam, 11 November 1975
I probably haven't been as deflated about a federal election result since Gough was kicked out of office and then beaten in a landslide 29 years ago. I was too young to vote then. I made my federal election debut in 1977 and the result wasn't much closer. 1980 was a lost cause summed up in two words, "Bill" and "Hayden". 1983 was a fantastic occasion, Bob Hawke taking the Labor Party to victory and Malcolm Fraser losing control of his lower lip during his concession speech. 1984, 1987, 1990 were victories, close, but still won by Hawke. 1993 looked doomed to be the end of the Labor reign, until John Hewson tried to explain GST to Mike Willesee:
U.S.: Detained al-Qaeda Suspects ?Disappeared?
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/10/12/usint9463.htm
At least 11 al-Qaeda suspects have ?disappeared? in U.S. custody, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. U.S. officials are holding the detainees in undisclosed locations, where some have reportedly been tortured.
The Australian Electoral Commission's excellent Virtual Tally Room website has a breakdown of the voting figures for Saturday's election, not just electorate by electorate, but polling booth by polling booth. I'm not going through them all - there's several thousand across the country - but I've gone searching for some interesting demographics in my electorate of Grayndler and surrounds. A good benchmark to pursue is the level of the Greens' vote. Grayndler and Sydney, covering the suburbs to the immediate south and south-west of the inner city, have historically been two of the left-wing heartlands of Australia.
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.
This nation stands on the threshold of a new era of great achievement.
- John Howard, victory acceptance speech, 9.10.04
It is 3145 days since the Liberal and National parties were elected to government. Looks like we will have them for at least another thousand.
The best thing that can be said about the Labor Party's performance in the House of Representatives is that they did not lose any major talent. Those Labor MHR's who appear to be on the way out are: Michelle O'Byrne (Bass), Con Sciacca (Bonner), Sid Sidebottom (Braddon), Sharryn Jackson (Hasluck), Jann McFarlane (Stirling), Kim Wilkie (Swan), Martyn Evans (Wakefield). Sciacca was a junior minister in the Keating days.
October 10, 4:15 pm.
http://www.empirenotes.org/#10oct041
October 10, 4:15 pm. Two of the 15 Afghan presidential candidates (Karzai was the 16th) who said they wouldn't recognize the election results backed off of that position and said they would accept the findings of an independent commission set up to evaluate it (Mohammed Mohaqiq, the Hazara candidate, and Masooda Jalal, the only female candidate, were the two). And, in fact, such a commission will ...
I have just learned of the passing of Australia's greatest ever all-rounder, Keith Ross Miller. AAP has a brief report that Miller, who was 84, died this morning at a nursing home on Mornington Peninsula, Victoria.
He was one of my real cricketing heroes, indeed one of my favourite Australians of all time.
October 9, 11:05 pm.
http://www.empirenotes.org/#09oct041
October 9, 11:05 pm. Apparently, insult is now being added to the injury that is the Afghan presidential election. After all that's been done (some of it encapsulated here, here, and here), now we find that some of the voters's thumbs were marked, not with indelible ink, but with easy-erase ink. This is significant because, of course, the 10.5 million voter registration cards included huge number ...
