Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

UPDATE NOVEMBER 30: When Brendan got elected, I thought the Hornet/F1-11 scandal could bring him down. I wonder if Labor will pursue this? See New Defence Minister questions jet fighter purchase and Labor promises air combat review. As I said in this piece, there should be a judicial inquiry into this scandal. But would Labor be game? I don't think so.

How time flies when one is having fun – almost a year since we thought we’d heard the last of Tale the First of The Chronicles of Nadir. Malcolm B Duncan, channelling the late lamented Tom Lewis, tells what really happened after the book finished.

There has been a complete clash between the Liberals' worldview and that of key members of the electorate living in the larger world. In the wake of this a new identity and modification of ideology may be essential for the Liberals to regain credibility and relevance. To stay in denial is to stay clinging to alienation from the electorate. But can they do this?

Australians, finally able to rejoice at the demise of the hated federal Government of John Howard, can count themselves lucky that the Queensland Labor Government's undemocratic local government amalgamations program enacted at the behest of the Property Council of Australia did not fatally undermine Federal Labor's election campaign in Queensland.

The election is decided. The event is over. The Rudd Revolution will hit the ground running, we hear. “For all Australians”, he tells us. Will it be a change of substance to bring equal rights and social justice? Or is it just a 'cupcake revolution'?

John Valder's 2007 election result comment

Hi Margo, now that Maxine has claimed Bennelong, I can pay my tribute to her. Wayne Swan said on the election night that when Maxine decided to challenge Howard, it lifted and energised the whole Party. How true, how true, it certainly energised me.

Hello. Queensland swung hardest. My State. A long time ago I lived in Dawson, next door to the National Party MP, Mr Ray Braithwaite. I rode my horse on journeys with Ray's son. It's gone Labor. Queenslanders believe in a fair go. Yep, my much maligned state said no to Howard, and yes to something fairer.

The question resolves down to this: can Labor peel off one or two Liberal or National Senators to vote with them on each significant issue? That nice Mr Joyce is an obvious candidate, at least on WorkChoices, and on each issue there are others who can be identified as having sympathetic views.

McEwen now called as won by Libs, LaTrobe probably there soon, while Corangamite and Flynn join the doubtfuls.

As you see, tomorrow will bring me that smile that I have been keeping since that night. Because the timing is right now for the old cycle to be broken and ended as our country has learned much. And a song for you.

Election update from the ANU's Democratic Audit of Australia

Rejoice in performing your democratic duty.  Rejoice in people from all sides gathering at polling booths and treating each other with great civility.  Rejoice in a system that works, a system that we can be proud of.

Wipe eyes, and wipe away the sticky haze of what seems the longest and most tedious election campaign on record. Roll over, pick ear wax, but don’t eat it. Wonder if on Sunday morning, big burly criminal types will knock on my door, roaring ‘We’re baaaaaaaaaaack!’, and take me away.

Time for some personal predictions from Webdiarists. What's the majority going to be, for which side, plus any predictions for specific seats? To someone like me who lived through the 1997 UK campaign, this has all the feel of that, including the mixed polls in the last few days, so I'll go with the Newspoll state-by-state 100 Labor, 48 Coalition, 2 other. Over to you

The whole thing is a storm in a teacup. Nobody is suggesting that any of these candidates would be ineligible on election day, or on the day they took up their seats if they should win. This is what the constitutional provision is trying to prevent, and it has succeeded. The actual argument is about minutiae.

The main reason for the rise of democracy and social-welfare with its old age pensions, public hospitals, public housing, and universal education after the Great Depression of the 1930s was that the beneficiaries of the robber-baron culture which had dominated until then were aware that if people were kept sufficiently miserable, they would turn to communism and socialism. (Naomi Klein)

"if you look at the specifics of say the Haneef case, the truth is I don't think any us on our side of politics know precisely what's gone on there. Other than something smells. And that's why I'm dead serious, whether we win the election or whether we don’t, that there should be a full judicial inquiry into that matter so we can get to the bottom of what went wrong. It's quite important because that then informs the future debate about the nature of our laws, the implementation of our laws by the relevant agencies, and let's have all those facts on the table. They are not currently on the table. And that's the problem." Kevin Rudd

Let me translate for you the psychological message that the Liberals have been spreading to save a marginal seat.  "Be afraid of the Muslims.  They support terrorism.  Labor supports the Muslim supporters of terrorism.  To protect yourself, vote Liberal"

The same opinion polls which predict that John Howard will lose the election on 24 November also consistently show that Australians still perceive his Government to be competent at handling Australia's defence, or at least more capable than the Labor Opposition. How valid is that perception?

Both scientific method and the law teach one to be skeptical and base one’s conclusions on evidence. Steeped in both, I remain a climate change skeptic in the sense that, save for the effect of CFCs on the ozone layer, I can see no convincing evidence for human induced effects on the climate. By the same token, I remain agnostic on the issue: if there is evidence, I should like to see it.

"This is not a Tasmania I any longer recognise, this is Bjelke Petersens Queensland, and it is time we took our Tasmania back—back from the lies, from the intimidation, from the threats, from the character assassinations and blacklisting. Because its our Tasmania, not one company’s fiefdom. We have suffered for too many years them turning Tasmanian against Tasmanian, seeking to make us forget that what joins us is always greater than what divides us, that forest worker and conservationist, union man and greenie woman, southerner and northerner, Liberal and Labor and Green all share a great love for our island and for our people." Richard Flanagan, author

The Australian Press Council, which regulates media in Australia, condemned the original article as 'irresponsible journalism'. But the Murdoch journalist who wrote the article showed it went much further than that when he admitted to the Council that the source of the propaganda had been the Liberal Party itself! His newspaper had enabled the Liberals to 'launder' their own libellous concoctions and to disguise their source. As dirty tricks go, this has got to be one of the most cunning.

Simply put both major political parties are years behind where the technology already is. Their ‘policies’ are already obsolete.If the plant being built in California was duplicated here it would move the debate on renewable energy sources forward by ten years and it would set the benchmark by which all future electricitygeneration projects would be measured, and render the argument over nuclear power plants irrelevant.

What Latham fails to point out is that if the Australian people fail on 24 November to take advantage of the opportunity before them to throw from office the worst Government by far that this country has had since federation, then a very dangerous precedent will have been set. In covering up this basic reality, Latham is, himself, undermining the very democracy he claims he wants to see rejuvenated.

What can be more condescending than the demand that someone reveal his or her judgment in thirty seconds or less? To appear before TV viewers as 'typical' (and therefore average and not too exceptional!). What greater insult than to imply that reporters can reduce the public psyche to a set of questions and answers in which the assumption is already made that the TV presenter is the clever one!

Video by PF Journey