So John Howard looks like he will romp home again. Where the hell did Labor go wrong? The pre-election polls were so close, yet this is an absolute riot for the Liberals.

Thoughts and opinions from the Aussies?

At least the Greens are doing well, they're getting something like 10% of the vote in my seat (Kooyong). They've definitely taken over from the Democrats as the number 3 party in Australia.

invalidly.

Voting was horrible. At the primary school, there was a huge massive line so we ditched that and went to the secondary school. Lucky there was hardly anyone there. But as it seems god doesn't love me enough to give me a swift speedy process. So I was stuck behind some poor fool who didn't remember where he lived so they spent a hefty amount of time trying to find his name, until he remembered where and was told that he was not part of the district and was given the absent vote.

I'm really disappointed with some of my fellow Australians. Even after all the lies John Howard and the Liberal party told us, people are still voting for them. All my friends are going to really struggle with the HECS increase. It's a bloody disgrace.

What he said. I'm too depressed to add anything that the swear filter won't take out anyway. Oh, what the hell....

****ing *****.

People over 60 shouldn't be allowed to vote, they're the most self-serving and easily bribed demographic there is.

Oh well, if Russell Ingall wins Bathurst tommorrow as well I'll probably have to shoot myself.

What's the difference between Labor and Liberal party views?

Kind of off topic: When is the latest the British elections are going to be held and who's the Conservative leader?

My mum is over 60, so change that to over 70 and I might agree with you :p
Anyways, I thought all old people voted Liberal and that was that.



My friend's sister was the Green's candidate for a Melbourne seat, so he got roped into handing out how-to-vote flyers all day. He said there was a queue of about 50 people waiting to get in and vote at 8am. How weird is that? Some people sure are keen. Personally I just strolled down at 4pm after doing everything else I wanted to do today first.



Liberal are right-wing, Labor are left.

Dammit. How does Howard keep *winning*? He lies, he sends people off to war on lies, lies about children and boats, locks children up in prison in the middle of a desert, makes Attila the Hun look like a left-winger, allies with the "Family First" party, essentially exists to make life easier for the rich and harder for the poor, and people KEEP VOTING FOR HIM!

ARRGH!

And I guess we can kiss any chance of some sort of independence from the US goodbye, too. Just when I was looking forward to having a government that looked out for Australia, too.

The economy is strong, and Labor didnt do enough to win the election. Although the Liberals certainly did do enough to lose it... I dont get it either.

Spork: Well, what's considered left wing and right wing in your country?

Labor is bascially the same as the UK Labour party, white Liberals are the Conservatives.

Annette Ellis maintained her seat in my area.

yawn.

I'd be lying if i said I wasn't looking forward to a change in government.

This thread makes me happy.

Oh god, I just realised something. They got back with a swing....so they no longer need to do deals to get things through Senate.

In short, the libs can do whatever...the ****...they want.

EDIT - I stand corrected....the "family first" party holds the key vote in the senate now, that may even be worse.

I think I read somewhere that Family First are against the full sale of Telstra so the Libs won't be selling it off anytime soon. I hope.

There are still 6 Senate seats undecided, and if the Coalition wins 1 (or more) of them they get a majority in both houses.

Thanks, Wookie, for taking such pleasure in the dissatisfaction expressed by Australians towards our own government.

Family First might be against selling Telstra, but they're apparently for burning lesbians at the stake.

(http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/05/1096941604206.html)

Nice to see that discriminating against people "isn't being unfair", too. I'm not a family either. Am I going to be discriminated against? Probably. Because they're a bunch of whackos.

That's my current local member, hearing about that made me a little more comfortable at least on a local level. I may not agree with him on a lot of issues, but he's a decent person.

EDIT: hahaha the end of that article is hilarious.....they won't swap preferences with a lesbian or even a man that simply supports gay marriage....but they'll swap them with a man who cheated on his wife whilst she was pregnant with twins. That's fan-****ing-tastic. Family 'first' my ***.

Hopefully they'll be around about as long as One Nation...

If there was a god, the Greens would have the balance of power in the Senate.

Heh, now you know how the Americans who arent voting Bush feel.

I saw the news on CNN that Howard won. I think it was a Halliburton conspiracy to keep the troops in Iraq.

You're welcome. It might help if you explained some of these things that you previously posted but you really had me at "war based on lies". Now I don't know but I suspect you're talking about the tired old "WMD lies" deal. If that's so, we just had a big name report here that supports much of the reasoning we went to war. Not that we needed it.

Don't take it personally. Australia has been a great ally of the US, even more so than the UK over the years and I'm happy that your "anti-US guy" (and the one that Kerry sent his sister over there to campaign for) didn't win. Amazing that Kerry would have wanted a guy to win that would pull out of Iraq. So much for building coallitions...

There is a difference between being a good ally and a misleading maligning brown noser, Wookie06.

Okay, so why not explain the rhetoric. Reading a bunch of whining doesn't make the point. Besides, I assume that Howard actually received more votes than the opposition therefore the people posting complaints here aren't representative of most of the Australian population.

More people didnt vote for Howard than did, if that is what you mean. Although he did get more votes than anyone else.

So claiming that things exist when they don't isn't a lie now?

I wonder if my bank will let my overdraft slide if I tell them I've got money in the account. I mean, after all, a friend of mine told me that there may, possibly be money somewhere in the banking system.




Though you've gotta love the fact that Wookie is defending a party and a Prime Minister when he (by his own admission) knows nothing about the issues (other than "SUPPORT BUSH OR ELSE!").

Actually I'm not supporting a party or prime minister. I'm gloating. There's a big difference.

Thanks Spork. You guys have more than two parties, I take it.

Also, Niall, the recent report here backs up Bush's rationale for going to Iraq. There were no lies unless, of course, you can cite any.

Get back to us when you have a clue what you're talking about. "Anti-US guy", jesus christ.

Yahoo Serious.

I don't know much about Aussie politics, but from what I hear a lot of it is to blame on a really poor campaign by whatever party is against Howard.

If you ask me Aussie campaigns in general all seem fairly half-hearted.
It's like liberal thinks it can win anyway, so it doesn't try, and the rest agree, so they don't try either.
Things are beginning to change though.
Say what you want about Pauline Hanson, she was a crazy outback lass that came outta nowhere and got closer to being voted in then any of the big-wigs expected. So at least she shook things up.

Labour did put in an atrocious campaign. They didn't even bring up anything that could be used against Howard, instead when Howard lied that interest rates would rise under Latham, merely said "no, they won't! Look, economists agree!" which was a pretty conclusive rebuttal, but there was so much unmined territory. They didn't mention the children-overboard thing, or the detention centre thing, or pretty much anything else to differentiate themselves from Howard.

I'd say the vast majority of people that voted for Howard didn't do so because they love him, but rather because Australians have a severe tendency not to vote out incumbent Prime Ministers, and since we don't have a term limit like the US, they stay around for ages. Also, they couldn't see much different between Howard and Latham (a fair enough viewpoint), so just went "the devil I know".

Both Labour and Liberal have been "small-issue" parties since Paul Keating was booted out of office, and it's pissing me off. It would be nice if one of the parties could tell us where we're gonna be in ten years, or how they're gonna try and fix certain problems, rather than focusing on issues that mean nothing to most of us, such as freeway tolls (for one specific freeway) and logging (in one specific state).

I don't mind being an ally of the USA, I just mind that Howard is a boot-licking toady. Obviously our and the US's interests will not coincide all the time. It would seem Howard is still waiting for that spine donor.

Incidentally, I'm more than happy to answer questions posed by foreign Massassians about our political system.

Wookie: Yeah, we have more than 2 parties (as do you) but the different is we have a preferential, rather than a "first party past the post" system. So voting for the greens, say, isn't "throwing your vote away" because they don't have to get over half the vote to do anything; even a party with 10% of the vote can get a few senators. And even if the greens don't get anything, your vote can "flow on" to another party, such as Labour.

There are quirks, though. Parties get to assign preferences, so unless you indicate your own when voting (which requires numbering about 65 boxes), your preferences get assigned according to the party you vote for's preferences. Thus Family First, who got maybe 2% of the vote, are probably getting a senator, because they made preference deals with other parties.

For Americans who as lost as I am, Wikipedia has great explanations. Regardless of the unfortunate results, preferential voting is still cooler than the entire American political system.

Labor targetted the wrong poeple with thier campaigning, I have concluded. Medicare Gold - who gives a stuff? Certainly not old people who have voted Liberal since Menzies.

They should have been after the young vote. People like us who are pissed off at Howard and dont just vote Liberal because we always have. Latham sorta touched on this with his 'Taking the pressure off families' slogan, but he didnt go nearly far enough. The new-family vote was always going to be impossible to get while interest rates are low and the economy is relatively strong.

I say bring back the porn star. She may not have known a thing about politics, but at least she was interesting :p

Here's an article I saw: http://webdiary.smh.com.au/archives/margo_kingston/000321.html
This Howard guy sounds worse than Bush. Some of the accusations I've heard about Howard:
Racism, Xenophobia, Human Rights abuses, lying, lack of personality

Anyone want to expand on these?

Giant eyebrows.

Economic competence.

Won't go on Rove Live.

Howard really isn't a racist. What he is is very very cunning and intelligent, he knows there is a strong xenophobic streak in many australians and he knows just how to push those buttons when needed.

A great example of that was the 2001 election which, despite the large stack of important issues, boiled down to border security issues involving refugees....which by any standard are miniscule issues for our country when you look at the numbers...BUT he masterfully played on fears of Australia being overrun by 'them' and somehow it became the #1 issue. The big problem with Labor in THAT particular election was that they bought into Howard's nonsense and tried to beat him at his own game, which is insane as he is so good at it.

For anyone looking for more information on that 2001 election and border issues involved, read 'Dark Victory'...a book later written by two journalists. It's really quite shocking, not just in terms of how on earth they got away with the whole "children overboard" scandal, but also just how clever Howard was in setting it all up so that even when it finally came public how badly the govt misled the people, he was in a position (at least until recently) to blame it all on his defense minister (who, surprise surprise, didn't go for re-election in 2001) and various underlings.

Don't get me wrong above where I talk about how smart Howard is, it's certainly not a good kind of smart and history isn't going to be kind to him. He is a brilliant politician, but a devastating leader who acheives his goals by dividing not uniting.

Labor (and the Democrats for that matter) deserve a lot of blame for not providing a solid opposition to him, but Howard went through the trenches in the 80's and early 90's battling for top spot in the Liberals and he learnt from his mistakes. Comparing Howard to Bush is not in anyway fair, because to be honest Howard is a lot more cunning and he doesn't rely on his subordinates anywhere near as heavily.

He is a man of limited vision though, it ends at his own personal ambition. When Howard went to the U.S, a couple of years ago and gave a speech in the Congress there, barely more than half the seats were filled and most of the congressmen sent their aides in their stead anyway.....yet Howard afterwards called it the pinnacle of his political career. That really just floored me. How the can the 'pinnacle' of his 28 year political career be addressing a largely indifferent and absent congress of another country? This is not a slight against the U.S., I'd be shocked if he gave a speech in ANY country and said that. What about his long struggle getting the GST instituted? Does a speech outweigh that in his mind? That more than anything clearly pointed out just how little vision the man has.

What would you think of Clinton or Bush if they had addressed, say, the British Parliament and then said something like that? It screams misplaced priorities.