It was informal what won it

Now, to the serious business:

The stewards have returned from the counting room with the declaration of the 2010 Australian Federal Election.

At the first whiff of election fever your humble correspondent immediately withdrew from public commentary, stocked up on tinned foods and a rather excellent and inexpensive scotch in a shack up in the mountains and stood by and observed what unfolded.

Now the result is, officially, in. Writs have been returned.

I writ for a living, so writs are dear to me.

The numbers are irrefutable. It was the informal vote that saved Ms Gillard’s posterior.

Jumping 1.6 percent from the last election it was only outdone by The Greens, who received a swing of just a smidge under four percent.

For the record, the party of The Pretender Abbott, the Liberal Party, received a swing of 0.76.

If Abbott had of been able to engage a quarter of the voters who voted informal he would be Prime Minister right now.

It’s swinga and roundabouts though, as thye seat of Macquarie had an inverse result to this received wisdom. There the AL would have won if they had of held the voters that were motivated by bthe rather successful Your Rights AtWEork camaign in the mountains end of that seat in 2007.

A booth-by-booth measure of Blue Mountains shows the informal vote (and Green vote) up from Lapstone to Mount Victoria: if 1,041 of the 5,067 voters who voted informal in Macquarie the result is an ALP victory. But if is a big word, and not a big part of the vocabulary of the modern political operator.

Such is life

Meanwhile, we are looking at interesting times.


This business about the crossbenchers is yet bto run its course. Back to the mountains I go...

Julia Gillard is to the left…of Attila the Hun

m blcahb vlkbak v

Great piece at En Passant

Spot on this stuff. Gillard, like her factional soul mate Mar'n Ferguson, act solely in the interests of the big end of town and devil take the hindmost. They would do the H.R. Nicholls Society proud. Ferguson was in the Sydney Morning Herald saying we needed more immigration or, shock horror, wages might go up! Can't have that old chap, think of what it would do with dividends! Send a bad signal to the market and all that.

The structural problem is the luvvies in the union movement share Gillard's understanding the reality for most Australians, i.e. none. Most union officials and Julia have never had a real job in their lives (and no, being a lawyer is not a real job). Gillard's laws slash take home pay for aged care and hospitality staff (real jobs) - the ACTU's response? They run a campaign against Tony Abbott. Cde Burrow is about to swan off to Brussels and is so star struck by Gillard that the union movement has reverted to type: acting like a beaten dog that keeps coming back for more treatment from its "master", in this case the ALP. 

Meanwhile the rest of us that live in the real world are left to our own devices in order to survive.

Electoral politics is a joke. We live in a corporate and technocratic totalitarianism that is so seamless that most people cannot even think outside it. Orwell would marvel at how cleverly it all works to enrich so few.

And it will continue to be such, especially when most media commentary is such a craven repetition of the status quo see Kohler, Grattan, Oakes, et al - useless, the lot of them). 

My advice? Take to strong drink.

WorkChoices Is Dead; Long Live WorkChoices

In what is looming to be a tactical victory for the Rudd Government, with accidental benefits for working Australians, Kevin Rudd has made dismantling WorkChoices a "priority". The announcement came out of Yesterday's (December 18) Cabinet meeting, where the reality of the Your Rights At Work campaign must have been laid bare for even the technocrats to understand. The Liberals are, of course, all over the place on the issue. Wets like Chris Pyne are glad to see the back of it, while Joe Hockey has declared it "dead" -meanwhile The Dead Rev, Kevin Andrews, has sprung out of his coffin to declare that it's all the way with WorkChoices still. "[Is] what we believed was for the good of Australia is no longer the case," was The Dead Kevs rhetorical question, to which this blogger poses the rhetorical answer "was WorkChoices good for any country?". The answer, of course, being no. The wrong Kevin will discover that the people have spoken if he only refers to a copy of any newspaper dated on or after November 25. It's a brilliant bit of work by Rudd & Coy. The Libs will either be wedged and forever known as the party that backs paying 16 year olds $3 an hour, or they roll over and let his, admittedly limited, roll-back go through the senate. The Libs best bet is to refer it to a senate committee in the hope that some sections of the union movement use that as an opportunity to embarrass Rudd and Coy. and expose just how many problems for working people they are leaving on the statute books. The crux of the issue is that there is a great deal of WorkChoices that will remain - the prohibition on union right of entry being the most glaring one - while many other areas; such as unfair dismissal laws, prohibited award content and the Gestapo-like Building and Construction Commission; will receive a partial, limited and delayed roll-back, if at all. We won't be going back to the lifestyle our parents enjoyed. So the inexorable trudge towards a third world lifestyle continues apace. In twenty five years of employment I've had one paid vacation, and this will become the norm for my generation and those that come after. It's pretty obvious we're going backwards. While the Liberal Party wanted to kill organised labour it appears the modern ALP is happy to watch us die by the death of a thousand prohibitive sub-clauses. Wouldn't it be great if the unions got together and formed a party to act in the interests of working people? Oh, I see we've already tried that. Well, plan B anyone?

"When we said we'd rip up WorkChoices, what we really meant was..."

On the Monday prior to the recent election John Howard said he was happy for the 2007 poll to be a referendum on WorkChoices. It was good that he was happy, because that is exactly what it had become by then anyway. The Your Rights At Work campaign showed that community campaigns do work; if the community is engaged. Just over 12,500 people across NSW got involved in the campaign. These were people, separate from the ALP, who came from all walks of life - many who had never been involved in a political campaign in their lives - who took the fight for rights at work to the streets, shopping centres, train stations, festivals and community events of our nation. If you weren't engaged at some stage by the Your Rights At Work campaign you simply weren't living in Australia for the last 18 months. It was a brand that was everywhere. And what carried that brand? Ordinary people. And many of these people had borne the brunt of WorkChoices - they'd had their incomes slashed, been sacked unfairly, had their rosters go all over the place and been bullied and intimidated by employers that took Howard's laws as a green light for bastadry. If you want examples I have heaps and am happy to share them. Which is what makes Julia Gillard's statements about not being in a rush and being "careful and measured" so sickening. Those same employers will read this gutlessness as a further green light to continue to treat human beings like shovels to be picked up and put down when needed. We are seeing this already, most notably with Telstra. What part of the phrase 'rip up WorkChoices' doesn't the Rudd-Gillard government understand?

• A credible survey has shown that WorkChoices was the reason why 5.6 percent of voters shifted their vote to the ALP
• It is highly unlikely that Kevin Rudd would be Prime Minister now if it wasn't for the Your Rights At Work campaign.
• Neither Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard or any other ALP politician has mentioned the Your Rights At Work campaign in any report since the election, let alone thank and acknowledge both the people and the community campaign that worked incredibly hard put them where they are today.

This is, of course, being aided and abetted by the ignorant ostriches in our pathetic media, who must live in some parallel universe where the Your Rights At Work campaign never happened. The Your Rights At Work campaign WILL continue. We are not going away just so that Krudd and Gillard can schmooze the Australian business community - the community we live in comes first.