I'm not going to make any apologies for spruiking the Greens' candidates for the Senate all over Australia, not just in New South Wales. Scott Ludlam, top of the Greens senate ticket in WA, has made a half-hour animated video called "Climate of Hope". It's on Youtube in three parts, and I'll slip it in as an extra election Youtube selection for today.

Political debates really serve little purpose. They do, sometimes, distort the vote depending on who performs best. It all started with Kennedy v Nixon, which arguably won the 1960 Presidential election for JFK (though some would credit Mayor Daley of Chicago and his team of vote-riggers). But look at America now. The "presidential" debates have gotten way out of control. We've had squllions of debates with squillions of Republican and Democrat hopefuls this year, the year before the presidential election.

So we are told that 70% of the Rudd inner cabinet would be former union officials.

Well d'oh! Even if the stats were true, and not blatantly distorted, it is the Australian Labor Party.

But then I guess the other side think that political parties only have a name to look pretty. Otherwise you would have liberals in the Liberal Party.

What you do have in the Liberal Party is a lot of lawyers. Solicitors, barristers, corporate lawyers, small-time suburban solicitors (guess who that is), QCs, you name it.

Four videos today. Saeed Khan is the Greens candidate for my local electorate of Grayndler, he did a video in August as part of the kick-off of his election campaign. On, then, to the Leaders: Rudd switching off a video of a Liberal ad saying "oh come on Howard", followed by Howard switching off a video of Rudd switching off a video of a Liberal ad and saying "grow up" to Rudd.

As at 17 October 2007.

Grayndler - I'm a fan of Anthony Albanese as I have previously documented on this blog, indeed it was one of my entries that led to his photo appearing on the Times Online cricket blog last year. Having said that, it is likely that I will vote for Saeed Khan of the Greens and give Albanese second preference.

All of my blog entries on the 2007 Federal Election can now be reached directly from www.rickeyre.com/blog/auselection2007. Please note the Y2K compliance :-)

The URL for the RSS feed is www.rickeyre.com/blog/taxonomy/term/734/0/feed.

I'll be adding a series of position statements on my voting intentions, recommendations and policy analyses in the coming weeks - complete with variations noted if I should change my mind!

According to the Newspoll published in today's The Australian, 49% of respondents said that the Coalition (Liberal/Nats, not The Willing) would best handle national security, while 26% said the Labor Party. (And 25% either uncommitted, or with another choice.)

I really can't understand for the life of me how anyone could argue that the Libs have demonstrated competence in handling national security.

Consider their record:

Three more items today's collection of Federal Election Youtubes.

The Democrats may well be on the brink of oblivion at this election. Of their four remaining senators, two (Lyn Allison and Andrew Bartlett) are standing for re-election, while the other two (Natasha Stott-Despoja and Andrew Murray) are retiring. It would be a huge shame if Senator Bartlett is lost to federal politics. Meanwhile, the current leader of the party, Lyn Allison, is getting on with the job of issuing policies and making videos, even if no one is paying attention. Here she is campaigning for better support for carers.

Family First's Senator Steve Fielding is not up for re-election this time, but having fluked his way into the senate in 2004 on preferences, he is now trying to get more of his stablemates up. In this video, showing the temerity to seek a second senator in Victoria, he attempts to take on both the Nationals and the Greens on home turf.

And finally, John Howard shows, on Monday night's A Current Affair, how he keeps interest rates so low - he gets them wrong!

Can anyone explain to me why the Treasurer's office is issuing a press release for an announcement which is nothing more than a Liberal Party election policy?

More proof that John Howard Simply Doesn't Get It comes with this insistence on releasing Youtube videos at 5am. Does he think the Intertubes Generation will just be rolling in from the nightclubs and logging on at that hour?

No, a more plausible reason is that 5am is a good time to issue video press releases in time for the brekky TV shows, not to mention his radio buddies such as Neil Mitchell and Belford Parrott. And Youtube, of course, is a free medium for videos less than ten minutes long.