For a while now I have resisted commenting on the lead-up to the federal election here in Oz because of previous bad experiences. The last federal election, phil and I were whiling away the evening in a little motel at phillip island. Phil was doing some input for a Victorian Council of Churches weekend down there. We had to duck out of the morning sessions to go and vote - likely to be the only time in the world I will vote at (or even visit) Rhyll. We begged off the dinner early in order to watch the returns come in. Gloomy about the post-Tampa prospects of Howard being ousted, we bought a bottle of vino and settled in for a night of swearing at the television and alarming the motel managers with the language coming from the unit occupied by the “priest” and his wife.

And now it is all on again. The contenders are shaping up for the battle, the newspolls are casting their predictions. And if you have been turned off the idea of tuning into the ABC for commentary for fear that they will be too caught up in external monitoring of bias, then signposts is the place for your unadulterated and skewed commentary.

The players

First we have the older statesman of the competition, the man of steel himself, John Howard. If you go and see the picture of John at that link, you can see why he has embarked on a campaign to deprive schools of federal funding if they don’t fly the Australian flag - he has taken the theory behind the website and applied it to the education system. You can keep up with Our John’s most intimate thoughts in his very own blog.

In the red corner is the cool young hipster, Marky Mark Latham. Former head-kicker and famous for the quotable quote and for breaking the arm of a taxi driver, Marky Mark toppled the former leader of the opposition earlier this year or late last year (who can keep track, really?). Mark is about 2cm to the left of Howard on the political spectrum, making for a battle of nuances and spin. Oh, but he is like fifty years younger than John-John, who we all know despite his power-walking will never stumble his way through (yet another) term. You can check out Marky-Mark’s blog as well.

the story so far

So far, the whispering is rife about the possibilities for an election day. This has led to a flurry of meaningless policy activity. In addition to the flag brouhaha, we have seen a call for a junk food ban during children’s programming, a cash bonus for people who give birth after July 1 and a host of other piffle which demonstrates how our politicians are keyed into the really importan issues for our country at the moment.

More later, but for now, keep watching the skies!!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2004 at 10:51 am by dan and is filed under campaign 2004. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.