The dying days of the Fourth Reich: it's the 2007 AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL ELECTION

Worm is put into battery in anticipation of the next debate between foreign ministers Alexander Downer and Robert McClelland.

Worm is put into battery in anticipation of the next debate between foreign ministers Alexander Downer and Robert McClelland.

DAT'S GOOD EATIN'

That's great that Swan did well. (even though he's a little bit of a knobhead)
Thanx for the sweet sweet liveblog action Almy!

It kept my mind off the physical pain for a couple of hours :)

Swan didn't flub once in the whole 90 minutes, and Costello didn't land a punch on him in the whole 90 minutes.

The explicit reason Costello wanted this debate was to show up who he perceived to be a weak shadow treasurer. It didn't work.

Thanks, dear Autumn - that was fab
Also, did anyone see Howard on 7:30 Report last night. He seemed particularly feeble. A shame it wasn't on commercial TV so all the knobs who vote for him could have seen him coming apart at the seams.

It's not big or clever, but I had fun doing it...

http://home.iprimus.com.au/jrsmorrison/Images/PoliticalWit.gif

Please feel free to email that on to like-minded Howard-hating persons, by the way.

Are you the trumpet player from Hey Hey It's Saturday?

No. Weirdly enough, you are not the first person to ask.

Howard on last night's 7.30 Report was pointless. He started with "let's talk about the future" and went on about the past for THE WHOLE INTERVIEW. Kerry even tried to pull him back by saying "you're talking about the past again". Made no difference.

JM that gif amused me greatly. But as moley will tell you, i have an odd sense of dad-humour.

Adam, yer cracking me the hell up here. Good to have you back on deck.

I must tell Nick off for blanking you the other day btw ;P

You're so kind. Don't worry about Nick, I only really met him twonce.

xxxxxxxxxxxxpost That gif is fantastic.

Wow, Rudd was a bit crap on 7.30 Report tonight.

I just realised there isn't a single Liberal Party poster anywhere in my suburb. I love living in a suburb full of university-educated trendy lefties and lesbians.

dear adam: I love your worms

dear everyone: thank you for this thread while I am not around to see the carnage myself

Hell I am around and I'm not paying attention.

Trayce, the typical Australian voter haw haw haw.

When Turnbull falls out of line, Howard puts him in a box. When Costello falls out of line, Howard capitulates to divert attention. Yet despite the mess that today was, Abbott is still doing media, still putting his foot in his mouth (view tonight's Lateline for more) and looking worse by the minute. I suspect Howard's routine punishment for Abbott is to pull his ears every time he does something stupid.

My older brother went to the same school as Abbot (a few years after though, he didn't know Abbot). Run by a cabal of ultra rightwing strap-wielding sadistic Jesuit priests. The sort of Catholic schoold where boys were made to kneel down and pray for victory before rugby matches. According to my brother, either you rebel, or...

...take it up the arse?

That too, probably.

Seriously, of the people in my brother's year, half of them turned out like Abbott, and the other half are former drug addicts or dead. (I'm exaggerating, but it's a bit like that.)

Tony Abbot = LOLERS

Just saw this comment in response to George Megalogenis's column in (shudder) The Australian:

It simply isn’t possible that the Coalition has no influence or control of inflation and the ALP does. Either both parties have some control of inflation, in which case Howard has to take some responsibility for tomorrow’s likely 6th rate rise in 3 years - or neither party is responsible for inflation, in which case the ALP poses no risk to interest rates. Howard can’t have it both ways.

Most sensible thing I've heard in weeks, and eminently digestible. Rudd could use exactly this paragraph to gain enormous purchase.

His backflip yesterday was staggering. Suddenly worsening inflation is beyond his control. Um, sorry?? So downward pressure is all your doing but upward pressure is out of your hands? Yet upward pressure under the ALP represents bad management? Idiot.

My older brother went to the same school as Abbot (a few years after though, he didn't know Abbot). Run by a cabal of ultra rightwing strap-wielding sadistic Jesuit priests. The sort of Catholic schoold where boys were made to kneel down and pray for victory before rugby matches. According to my brother, either you rebel, or...

-- Zelda Zonk, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 23:45 (5 days ago) Bookmark Link

I am also an old boy of this school

But I am much younger than Abb0tt.

It's a lot more liberal these days, of course.

I've just started reading Megalogenis's book 'Faultlines' at the moment on the recommendation of a colleague.

I'm getting worried that Howard spending $3bn on south-east Sydney's roads that would be better spent on public transport infrastructure will mean that all the Campbelltown bogans will forget about their mortgages and vote for him again. Thoughts?

Probably.

Agreed that all this road spending only adds to the very climate change issue he and Rudd are trying to neutralise. Roads fill up, they don't ease shit. Meanwhile Melbourne and Sydney have disintegrating public transport systems that are not getting nearly enough attention, not to mention the distinct lack of train lines.

:(

Yeah I was looking at that graphic in today's Age about what each party is promising to spend money on in Melb on roads... and all I could think was "wait, what about train lines and more trams fuckers?". Geez.

Fuck your Melbourne train lines. Adelaide is still on DIESEL for fuck's sake and nobody is willing to put up the money to convert it to at least 1920s technology. Also: more trams even if I have to read a million letters in The Advertiser from bogans about having to wait FIVE MINUTES at the intersection of North Terrace and King William Street.

Rudd scores total points with his "hey, I've mentioned plans to housing affordability...and the other guy hasn't..." line, btw.

Newspoll shows coalition gain of one point, world ends.

Interest rate rise and ALP advertising blitz about to kick in.

"Is Mr Rudd going to walk behind you and copy your walk as well?" one of the men asked Mr Howard.

"He won't be able to keep up with you, bro," another added.

u_____________u

As if ^that's not going to be on the news tonight too.

I think it's too late for that to hurt Rudd now.

I just realised, that Newspoll was taken between Friday and Sunday, which is when Garrett's fuck-up was the ONLY focus of political news. So probably a slightly false reading.

i hope so. i wonder if labor need to make more of coalition's sophistry, help voters be offended rather than swayed by it. it's so hard to know whether people see it as just that, or not. attacking garrett for not being as smarmy and calculating and disingenuous as they are should be something that backfires on them, rather than helping them.

Definitely. Most Australians have nothing against Garrett, even if they don't agree with his activism. Attacking him is rather like stabbing a teddy bear.

I still don't even get why the Garrett thing is news. As though, if it was Labor's HORRIBLE SECRET PLAN, he'd casually tell it to some right-wing radio fuckwit. First time I've ever respected Richard Wilkins when he came out and said it was obviously just a joke the way he heard it.

Why does no one in the media understand "margin of error"?

I guess most people here are aware of this, but Ross Gittins has been providing consistently excellent coverage for The Age/SMH for the past couple of months. He's very left-leaning but he's not afraid to point out when Labor are being morons. Most importantly he actually knows about the things he is talk about, which is pretty rare for a commentator.
Yesterday's column on John Howard's class warfare I thought was pretty fantastic. Other OTM columns:

Why affordability allowances are crap and don't work
Rudd = Howard Jnr
Howard's focus on economic growth is dumb and won't do anything anyway (Gittins has a great series of columns where every couple of weeks he will point out that John Howard has no influence over interest rates bar the inflationary impacts of his tax cuts, and that the Reserve Bank couldn't give a shit what he thinks)
Tax cuts are shit and don't help Howard's battlers anyway (see also here

Downer , our FUCKING FOREIGN MINISTER, calls Rudd a 'show-off' for speaking Chinese to Chinese people in China

Nearly everything I hate about Howard's cabinet is distilled right there.

Downer is an overgrown spoilt brat, the kind of petulant, whinging little shit who would bleat 'It's not fair!!!!!' and go running to teacher every time he gave another kid too much lip and got a thick ear for it.

Was it really just 13 years ago that more than half the Liberal Party though this man was a potential Prime Minister?

otm, i find him the worst of the lot. one election i saw him being interviewed at home with his family and he had a teenage son who was exactly like him, a simpering smug plate-faced prig with the exact same namby-pamby voice as his father, it was horrifying. junior said modestly that he thought he might like to go into politics as well. i was imagining tellys being smashed all over australia.

Ross Gittins is one of the better commentators but I find the Rudd=like Howard meme to be extremely unpenetrating, based on very basic analysis. Really, it's just what opposition leaders DO. John Howard in 1996 basically promised to be like Paul Keating with less touchy-feely social justice bullshit (obviously that stuff was v. important but the average voter disagreed).

If anything, if you want a Labor leader who was exactly like Howard, look no further than Mark Latham, whom the left WUVVED.

Rudd's good for a bloke from Nambour.

Really, it's just what opposition leaders DO.

Then once they get in they just change it all?

Howard did. In the 1996 campaign he pretended to not be a ranting fucking racist anymore.

LOL Forever at Don Dunstan building a freeway through the Downer Family Mansion, btw.

Back in 1970, but still.