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...

I was an angry young man

[I found this essay while going through some handwritten papers and notes I am transferring onto the computer. It was written in probably the second half of 1999, when I was planning on leaving Canberra. It is surprising how much of this still stacks up. It is reproduced here warts and all.]

I am thinking of moving back to Melbourne and, wide-awake, I know I will end up in cheap housing in Depreston or Unfairfield where the defeated citizens of the Northern Suburbs pack sullenly into cheerless conductorless trams. Less is more these days.

The stoic Edwardian indignant cheerfulness, larrikin Catholic charm and Mediterranean swagger of those chaotic streets has been boarded up and replaced by a lobotomised suburbanness with a stark, obsessive, authentic passionless new that only an architect could be pleased with. The streets are teeming with TV programmed drones full of predictable obsequious rebellion that is no insurrection at all – they bought it, off the rack. They trade passion for labels – and labels of labels.

Lamentations are futile. Melbourne, a huddle of windswept memories, is littered with its own unburied dead. The Fitzroy Club Hotel is now a dialasyis [sic] centre.

The pernicious fascism of opinion whines against the sad view we could all use in a fleeting vision of what constructs us. No one wants to know more than the façade reveals. No one wants anything to be behind it. What point of sacrifice when the fields of battle at Arden Street, Glenferrie, Victoria Park, Lakeside, Junction Oval and Brunswick Street are little pathetic venues for the second rate, A [sic] place for weeds to grow? A place for myths to dissolve and several generations of passion to evaporate. The past may as well not have happened.

But it did happen.

Hungry men in hewn army coats dyed black. Their hair lank from worry, neglect and the weather huddled by the Yarra and the Maribyrnong. Fat whores and tribes of children. Angry bicycles. Sad horses that has always been old, like the men bent over the reins. Perplexed immigrants looking both ways quickly without taking a step. The way Ice Cream melts.

It is more than melancholic nostalgia. It is rude defiance of collective effort. John Batman and William Faulkner didn’t lay every brick. Anonymous and underpaid millions created this space, and if we mask their ills it only cheapens their good.

It is not that that time (the past) will ever be again – it is the stupendous denial that it ever was. How can a person reflect on the travails of their predecessors and then profit using the same mentality of past tyrants!

By identifying bastadry it is then no solution to go off and be a bastard yourself. My name has no station in Melbourne, no place. I never grew up there, none of my family did. I witnessed it as a stranger witnesses a fatality – with ineffectual [sic] remorse. I loved Melbourne from afar. She is dying from the disease that took away my own town, Sydney – the disease of greed.

Sydney is now a shiny laquered [sic] over cesspool. A swamp of indignity – with no respect for anything that is permanent. It eats it’s [sic] own excrement for want of anything better to do. Melbourne has become little better.

Now I live in exile and always will. It matters little where I go so out of respect for their faltering memory I have sat down amidst my most ancient of ancestors within my grasp. And they have little to offer for their place has been swept under the tide of the supreme insidiousness of what laughably passes as the nations [sic] capital. A place that all too well shows the braggart hollowness of this failed European outpost.

Their intentions are so shallow they may as well build their monuments of plaster + cardboard as no policy favours anything beyond one lifespan – and life is short.

It is hard to find goodness when things subjective have been flailed by the whip of post-modernism. So goodness be buggered, I will throw my lot in with the art of paying attention.

It very well may be that I will go to Melbourne to learn how to make a quid out of writing bullshit. Or I might just as well go and live in Bermagui or Adaminaby or some such place and wait to die – fixing my mind on such simple and obnoxious pleasures as watching the seasons change, accepting mortality, remembering and learning of the past, and…paying attention.

I have already learnt that there is no capacity to human foolishness – a million tales in a thousand languages have already told us this. I will now leave the fools to admire the emporer’s [sic] new clothes. I have nothing to offer profit, except my dead body – and they won’t get that for a whiles yet. In the meantime those flint eyed pultroon’s [sic] with their commerce and real estate can KISS MY ARSE. I will spite the living by remembering the dead, a club we will all join sooner or later.

Applied Appliance Applications

I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer. 
- Brendan Behan

Most of the effective technology in use today is that which can be employed without necessarily understanding how it works.

F'rinstance, how many would understand the inner workings of radio, the internal cumbustion engine that drives their car or even the computer with which they are reading this?

Yet political technologies - the technology of making and changing public decisions - require a sound understanding of how they work before they can be used.

Political technologies? Put simply, it is the technique of organising a group of people to achieve a commonly desired outcome.

At the dawn of the second decade of the twenty-first century this technology (or 'the craft of politics' if you prefer) is a rare skill.

Governments and political parties of all hues rely strongly on the disorganised community. It allows then to govern by executive fiat; internally within their parties and at a cabinet level within government.

The community - the household community - is increasingly disempowered as decisions are made that are either illiberal or directly act against the interests of the household sector. A cursory glance overthe history of electricity privatisation in NSW shows this.

Social organisation needs to work in such a way that people can organise without necessarily understanding how they do so.

This already happens to some degree. It's called society. The problem is that it is ineffective in the face of the organised demands of an increasingly authoritarian state.

So, how can politics be applied in a way that gives people control over decisions that affect them, without them necessarily understanding how those decisions are made?


How we informally organise needs to be examined. How can political structures be built that do not require an understanding of how they work to be effective?


Such structures would radically alter how society is organised. Would it simply be mob-facism by another name?


The great beauty of Liberal Democracy is the protection it provides for the dissident. Democracy is not the rule of the majority - that is populism - it is the right to dissent.


Liberal Democracy increasingly looks like the 'Democracy' of Greece and Rome. A system that benefits an elite few and is made to work by an army of slaves. For now the 'slaves' have the vote, but given that elections have degenerated into little more than beauty contests where issues seldom see the light of day (or if they do, they are ignored by the political elite that benefit from them), this 'right' held by the slaves is viewed by many as an imposition rather than a benefit. As the Anarchists say of the democratic political class: voting only encourages them.


In the face of such cynicism demand for the innovation of a user friendly politics may appear to be wanting. This is probably true, but as Lord Bowden once attributed to Douglas Hartree:

"...in his opinion, all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being built — one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. No one else, he said, would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them."

 So, who knows what the future will bring? It is doubtful if it will be party political.


What would a society that applied such an innovative political technology look like?


The various incompatible values of humanity would need to be accommodated, as well as the ancient Siddarthian conundra, and the age old economic question.

Currently we are drifting into various flavours of totalitarianism, with little practical solace for the professed dissident, apart from being able to hold a belief. Outside of this the dissident is held as a crank or a nutjob, as effective and more insidious (if more comfortable) version than being locked away in a gulag or concentration camp. Totalitarianism has got smart.


Most political debate in this country is predicated on who can tell the better lie. No doubt the progenitors of these debates believe what they are saying or doing to various degrees, but that they are fundamentally untrue is a demonstrable (if more complicated than a sound bite will allow) fact.


Rather than lies that work we need to accommodate various competing and, at times, incompatible (or, dare I say it, inconvenient) truths. Not to build a global hegemony, world government or hand power over to some manifestation of conspiracy fantasy, but to make sure we get enough to eat and keep warm when we are old.

If you can't beat 'em

...join 'em. Despite being very cynical about the worth of a citizen journalism, my even greater cynicism about my chances of getting published in this lifetime have led me to join the blogocracy. http://distressedasset.blogspot.com/ I am concerned about where this Rudd business might lead, and whether or not he will act in our immediate best interests. I'm also considering giving a running commentary on the usefulness, or otherwise, in giving a fat rat's clacker about Anyone who says they are here to govern for all Australians has a very charitable view about Piers Ackerman and Ivan Milat. It's also a good opportunity to resurrect that great Friday evening tradition - the Tool Of The Week. Enjoy it - for what it's worth - and pop back as often as you're up for an entertaining inventory of the inspiring cesspool that is Australian politics.