Tag: politics

Categories
Australia Politics

I’m Not A Tech Head

So in the end this most predictable of federal elections played out just about the way everyone said it would.

I know I live in a bubble of latte-sipping inner city hipsters, and this is a big old country with lots of odd people in it, but at times the election seemed to be taking place in a parallel universe. There was a bit at the start where they just talked about boat people over and over, with both major parties trying to outdo each other in a race to the bottom to see who could have the most inhumane policies. I continue to find it odd that this is such a big topic for debate, when I can’t imagine it directly affects many people’s daily lives in this country (not to mention the fact that many more asylum seekers arrive by plane than boat every day…) Unless people actually think that boat people are responsible for Sydney traffic congestion? I mean that would be just ridiculous, wouldn’t it?

[Also, as a point of interest, I find it rather odd that no one ever really talks about how our new glorious leader arrived in Australia. Clue: it wasn’t by plane. He wasn’t seeking asylum, of course, but still you’d think someone might have pointed out the irony by now…]

At least the new government have a six one no point plan to deal with it though…

And there was a lot of talk about “cost of living” pressures, and the economy. It doesn’t seem to matter that Australia currently has one of the strongest economies in the world, that it avoided a recession when everything went pear shaped in the rest of developed world, kept its AAA credit rating and that the whole cost of living thing is only really a problem if you’re prepared to ignore all the, um, facts. But then what place do facts have in politics, when you can tell people what they want to hear instead?

So despite all the gaffes, the creepy daughter thing, the “sex appeal” comments, Rupert has got what he wanted.

For anyone who doesn’t know our new glorious leader, he’s a ten minute introduction that tells you just about everything you need to know, including the utterly bizarre footage of that time he just sort of nodded for 30 seconds in an interview like a buffering You Tube video (a sign of what to expect from the shiny new Liberal NBN I suppose…)

Categories
Australia Politics Uncategorized

Civic Duty

I just scraped in. Tomorrow I become an Australian citizen and — thanks to the special provisions that allow new citizens to provisionally enrol to vote — on Saturday I’ll get to exercise my civic duty in the 2013 Australian Federal Election.

I’m taking this seriously, even if I might just be in it for the sausages.

I’ve studied the advice from Dennis the Election Koala, I’ve read the only real guide to the election that anyone could ever need, and listened to the months and months of empty rhetoric, lies, half truths, and outright bullsh*t.

So tonight I fired up belowtheline.org.au/editor/melbourne and had my first crack at putting together my ballot paper.

Back home it’s just an X in a box and you’re done, but with preferential voting here in Australia you have to put them all in order. Yes. All of them.

The House of Representatives is reasonably straightforward, because there’s only 16 to choose from, but the Senate vote is for the whole of Victoria. That’s a whopping 97 candidates to put in order. (I mean you *could* vote “above the line” and let someone else choose for you, but where’s the fun in that?)

Some tough decisions to make, though. Given that I fundamentally disagree with the entire platforms of well over half of the senate ballot paper, how am I supposed to decide which ones are least worst? Family First, One Nation, Rise Up Australia… how do I decide which of these utterly objectionable groups goes last last, and which goes least last?

[Rise Up Australia did provide the most obviously ironic candidate, so maybe they should get points for that. This would be the ultra-nationalist, staunchly anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism party; their candidate for the House of Reps in Melbourne? Joyce Mei Lin Khoo]

Well anyway. I have made my choices, unless I change my mind again, I’ll be the one numbering 113 boxes on Saturday morning…

4th September 2013: Geez That's A Lot Of Boxes

Categories
Australia Media Politics

Oh Look, The Alliance of Australian Retailers Got Hacked…

When I saw this ad on the TV earlier this evening, my first thought was that the “Alliance of Australian Retailers” (seen here campaigning against the Australian Labor government’s proposed introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes) would almost certainly turn out to be a front for some tobacco company…

…and of course it is, as The Age confirms (BAT, Philip Morris and Imperial, to be precise).

But then I went to their website, to read that “this campaign has ended”.

Really? That’s odd, I thought, given that I had just seen their ad on TV (and I spotted a massive billboard promoting their message just yesterday).

Even stranger, for a campaign supported by three tobacco companies, was the “What We Stand For” page, because apparently they stand for:

# Emphysema
# Coronary artery disease
# Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary disease
# Bladder and kidney cancer
# Stomach cancer
# Bronchitis
# Peripheral artery disease
# Acute myeloid leukemia
# Colorectal cancer
# Abdominal aortic aneurysm
# Kidney cancer
# Liver cancer
# Prostate cancer
# Pancreatic cancer
# Erectile dysfunction in men
# Pneumonia
# Cataracts
# Periodontitis
# Cervical cancer

Very true. But I wasn’t expecting quite that level of honesty from the tobacco giants… Were they planning a new direction of truth in advertising, I wondered?

Elsewhere the site told me that:

You can find links here to information about why smoking is bad, common smoking myths, and why Tobacco companies love to pose as Associations

I wondered if someone had set up a fake website to counteract the campaign, but, as the whois database confirms, www.australianretailers.com.au is indeed registered to the lobbying organisation behind the campaign (“The Civic Group”, a 10 employee company without much of a website of their own).

And then, as soon as I’d finished writing my post they were back on message, with the site reverting to the version I’d found in Google’s cache.

How very odd. I guess someone hacked into their website and made a few subtle changes. I wonder who was behind that little bit of internet japery (and how long it was live…)

Categories
Australia Politics

So This Guy Basically Runs Australia Now

I love a bit of politics, me. And normally I love elections. Give me a bit of round-the-clock, through-the-night, staying-with-it-till-the-results-are-in Dimbleby and I just can’t get enough of that coverage. I’ve stayed up through the night to watch the US elections unfolding before, and I happily had the BBC coverage running in the background at work as the results came in in the UK back in May.

But something about my first Aussie election left me a bit cold. Maybe it’s because although I’m a Permanent Resident here, live here, work here and pay my taxes, my lack of Aussie citizenship denies me the right to have a say in who gets to run the place (bit unfair, that, I reckon, given that Sal got to vote in the UK when we lived there, by virtue of having been born in the Commonwealth).

Or maybe it’s because the narrow range of issues that dominated the campaign seemed like issues so far removed from my own life, and the race to the bottom by two parties eager to tell the electorate what they thought they wanted to hear left me not really agreeing with either side (but just hoping whatever happened that the winner wasn’t going to be the budgie smuggling mad monk they call Tony Abbott…)

There was much discussion, for example, of “Boat People”, the unpleasant catch all term for refugees travelling overland to seek asylum in Australia. You wouldn’t know it from the predominant political narrative, but the places they arrive in Australia are really very, very far away from where most of the population of Australia lives and there are really very few of them–far, far less than the numbers of “plane people” who migrate here each year like I did, or the number of “womb people” who add to the population on a daily basis (although neither group rated a mention in this campaign for some reason). My own view (that all nations have a moral responsibility to be treating asylum seekers with dignity, rather than locking them up in offshore processing centres and treating them like criminals) unfortunately wasn’t one that was shared by either of the main parties, who competed between each other to tell this nation of immigrants how tough they’d be on these unfortunate new arrivals.

So I couldn’t get excited about this election at all. That was until it all changed on Saturday when things suddenly got interesting. Proving once again that this place just can’t help taking its cultural cues from the old dart, the voters of Australia, like their counterparts back in the UK, basically voted for no one.

Well, probably. As I understand it this thing is so close that it could be weeks before all the votes are counted, but what we do know is that no one won.

And since neither party will get the magic 76 seats it needs to form a majority government, they’ll need to sign up the 3 nutjob independent MPs and one greens MP (who unseated the Labor incumbent here in Melbourne) who have suddenly been thrust into the spotlight as kingmakers…

So, in essence, this guy now runs Australia:

Bob’s on the job. We live in interesting times indeed…