When the election was initially called a couple of weeks back I had a great idea for this blog. My idea was to do a running commentary on the weekly events in the spirit of South Park, who devoted an entire show to democracy and PETA: concluding that most elections are a choice between a giant douche (foam baseball bat) and a shit sandwich (enough said). It was decided that Julia due to her height could be the giant douche while Tony’s muscular frame was more suited to the shit sandwich (NB: both are as bad as each other so do not read anything into the choice of roles for either leader).
Unfortunately, I have been so under-whelmed by this election campaign that I haven’t had the urge to write anything and am feeling even less inclined to actually cast my vote. In fact, the only reason I will chase up my voting options is so that I can avoid a fine from the electoral commission. Moreover, this is a sharp contrast to 2007 when I proudly wore my Kevin 07 t-shirt much to the annoyance of my workmates in a blue ribbon liberal seat and felt passionately about changing our government.
What has changed since then? For one, I lost my opportunity to vote out Kevin Rudd myself. Yes, I didn’t think he did a good job and was hoping that I could let him know on polling day myself. Instead, Julia has chosen to deprive me of my right to vote out the Prime Minister (yes Julia, we chose him NOT you as PM) and so I would like to deprive her of her right to lead the dysfunctional Labor Party. Moreover, the Liberal Party decided to remove the thinking man’s politician, and my local member, Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the opposition. I remember announcing to my Redlands history class that day that the Liberal Party was now dead to me with Abbott as leader and reading back on my blogs even wrote one about him called “Stupidity”. Has my opinion of the Mad Monk changed: not really, he is still an idiot with minimal policy ideas and if I see him running around one more time I will scream.
So a week to go and to say I am disillusioned would be a gross understatement. The actual campaign has perhaps been even worse that Julia’s attempts to revive the corpse of the Labor Party with quick fixes that make Abbott look like a policy intellectual: scrap the ETS, decapitate the mining tax and re-badge the Pacific Solution. Then during the campaign itself it has been a plethora of small target announcement aimed at marginal seats (unfortunately I am not in one but at least the race for the senate in the ACT is interesting) with appearances from a fake Julia and a caged Abbott.
However, like Stan in South Park, I must vote or face exile (a fine in my case). So what issues most influence me?
1. Julia is a backstabbing puppet who will be shafted as quickly as KRudd was when she goes badly in the polls
2. Tony has changed his mind on so many issues that he is a blank canvas to Julia’s puppet and essentially shows a lack of leadership
3. National Broadband: Julia’s plan is clearly too expensive and leaves us still too far behind other countries but Abbott’s plan is not clearly explained and produces speeds that are too slow
4. Education: both parties want to pay teachers for better performance with Abbott’s plan sounding more sensible than Julia’s and Labor’s track record on delivering the Education Revolution (revolutionary in its failure to do anything despite massive fanfare) being dismal
5. Immigration: both parties are racing to the bottom and Julia’s nose dive to sympathize with racist, moronic, idiotic, Western suburbs voters (what’s to fear? Most of the immigrants don’t take your jobs) made me ashamed to have voted Labor
So all up I will vote Malcolm Turnbull in not because he’s Liberal but because he actually brings some intelligence to the table (see his debate with Maxine McKewen for evidence). As for the overall winner: we’re screwed either way – a dysfunctional, incompetent Labor Party or an ultra-conservative, idiotic Liberal Party.
Congratulations Australia: we have officially had the worst electoral campaign in history!
