I'm calling a Labor Party victory now.

Yee-ha!

It's not ready to call yet. Labor is getting closer to winning the election, but not yet. I still think John Howard is gone. Malcolm Turnbull appears safe. Peter Costello was looking shaky in Higgins for a short while. The incredibly bad Danna Vale has made it home in Hughes. I think Bob Baldwin has retained Paterson, but I know from past elections that this electorate can take days to decide.

The overall election is still in the balance, but at 7.30pm I'm going to call Bennelong as a win for Maxine McKew.

GOODBYE JOHNNY HOWARD!!!

Polls have closed in NSW, ACT, Victoria, Tasmania. Sky News are calling a Labor win on the strength of their exit polling already. The AEC tells us that 0.00% of the vote has been counted, with 150 seats still in doubt.

My prediction for the final seat count: ALP 82, L/NP 66, Independent 2.

Today I voted in my twelfth House of Representatives election. For the first time, I have not given my first preference to a Labor candidate.

As in 2004, I'm laying my voting cards on the table in full. In the House of Representatives seat of Grayndler:

When you're on a crappy idea, stick to it. (And I'm not just talking about the insistence on uploading videos in the wrong aspect ratio.)

Update 28 September 2009: This video, apparently, is now "private". Personal keepsake of John and Jeanette, perhaps?

The day of Howard's End is upon us, and of all the election-related videos, serious and otherwise, that I have featured over the last 728 years of the campaign, two stand out: Chairman Kev is one, the other is my Grand Final Election Youtube Do Dia.

Presenting the music video of "It's Time to Go For Growth" by the Axis of Awesome.

That noted Texan vote-rigger, Lyndon Baines Johnson, utilised a notorious thirty-second ad in the 1964 presidential election which more-or-less stated that a vote for Barry Goldwater was a vote for nuclear holocaust. (And this just months after that other great fictional event, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.)

The Greens have adapted the LBJ masterpiece to convey the threat of climate change. Watch the Greens' 2007 Australian election ad, followed by the US Democrats' 1964 original.

When the facts are examined against the panicked rhetoric of Howard, I suggest there is only one conclusion to which you can come: it is time for him and his Government, with all their misrepresentations of the truth, to be gone.

- Bob Hawke, The Age, 21.11.07

The former Prime Minister's opinion piece on John Howard can be read in full in today's edition of The Age.

I'm unashamedly going in hard in my support for The Greens over the next few days. Firstly, the concept of the balance of power explained through animation. Secondly, footage from an anti-pulp mill rally in Hobart. And thirdly, one of The Greens' thirty-second ads featuring Dr Bob and Dr Bob.