Posted on 11/23/2007 10:55:46 PM PST by naturalman1975
In about minutes, polling booths across the eastern side of Australia will close, and counting will begin in the 2007 Australian election. I - and anybody else - who wants to become involved - will be posting in this thread updates based on Australian TV concerning the count.
From the Electoral Commission
At 8:51:48 PM
Coalition 41.
Labor 68.
Independent 2.
Unknown. 39.
I could well be wrong, often am, but I don’t see a victory for the left to any degree that wont be subsumed by the more radicalized elements of the left.
Same tends to hold here as well. Victory tends to be a radicalizing event for parties that exist on radicalized ideology.
It certainly hasn’t been the kind of meltdown a lot of the media had predicted.
Sad to say it’s a blood bath. A loss of 20+ seats including the sitting Prime Minister’s seat is a massacre.
Bugger.
What do you think caused it?
Work Choices (labour laws) and the fact that the Coalition has been in for nearly 12 years.
12 years is a long time.
From the Electoral Commission
At 9:17:25 PM
Coalition 42.
Labor 70.
Independent 2.
Unknown. 34.
Kyoto whatsit gonna be in y’alls future now? Heard one leftard troll say something about AWB investigation now that Libs out of power. What’s AWB about?
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB119559454855599663.html
Howard’s End
By TOM SWITZER
November 21, 2007
cant get the link to come up. I’ll google AWB and see what shows up.
Rudd will seek the ratification of Kyoto as soon as he can.
The AWB is the Australian Wheat Board. In 2005, it was revealed that the AWB had paid bribes to Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq in order to gain wheat contracts there.
Some people would like to claim that the government was involved, but there’s no real evidence of that.
The wheat deal. Now I got it.
Bad time to go leftist with all that’s out and about these days, but I guess there’s never really a good time for it.
I’m really just more nervous about our own upcoming tussle now too.
Maxine McKew (former ABC journalist who ran against Howard for Labor in Bennelong) is speaking. Looks really pleased with herself - she is currently ahead in Bennelong.
“This has been an amazing night. A wonderful night for Labor. A fabulous, I hope transforming moment for the country. Now something may have happened in the last twenty minutes, but when I last looked at the figures, Bennelong was on a knife edge. The result is not clear, but what a wonderful campaign this has been.”
Nothing really interesting here. I thought she might be about claim she’d won, which would be premature, but she seems to know the numbers aren’t clear yet.
From the Electoral Commission
At 9:27:55 PM
Coalition 49.
Labor 69.
Independent 2.
Unknown. 30.
AWB is the Australian Wheat Board. It got into a scandal, because it was revealed - after the invasion - that they had been doing under the table deals to sell Aust wheat to Iraq in Sadaam’s time.
The US, responding to its own lobby groups, asked Howard to make an enquiry, which he did, and the Labor opposition talked it up a lot as a big scandal. But it is not really something which affects many Australians, day to day.
The AWB issue is one of the things which really divides rural and city areas. In regional Australia, farmers were very angry at the enquiry, and said that the AWB was just doing international trade, and it was unfair, most unfair, after all the support we gave the US in Iraq, that we were being dragged through the mud. And they said Howard should ask for an enquiry into the US and the French firms, and see if he would get it.
City Australians saw it more as the AWB was in the wrong.
There is not much more mileage to get out of it, so I don’t think there will be any more enquiry.
I remember when it was in the news. I didn’t recognize it by the initials, but once it got mentioned it cleared up.
Iirc, at the time, it was being conflated and mishmashed with the French/UN perfidy on the oil for food abomination.
From the Electoral Commission
At 9:33:55 PM
Coalition 49.
Labor 71.
Independent 2.
Unknown. 28.
It’s not about AWB, it’s about “what caused it” :
SYDNEY — British Conservative Enoch Powell once famously observed: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure.” Well, here’s an Australian version of the same idea: “In the end, politics will get you. Politics will always get a politician. A politician can no more rise above and beyond politics than a doctor can rise above and beyond medicine. In the end, it reaches and it grabs you. You can’t walk free.”
That was Peter Costello, Australia’s long-serving finance minister and John Howard’s long-suffering heir apparent. He was recalling the political demise of John Hewson, the conservative Liberal party leader and presumptive prime minister, who lost the “unloseable election” of 1993 to Paul Keating, the much-despised Labor prime minister. Mr. Costello might have been talking about his leader today. For Mr. Howard’s career is ending in failure, if ever one did, and there is no way now that he can “walk free.”
That’s right. The 12-year-old government of John Winston Howard — Australia’s second longest serving prime minister and patron saint of conservatives in the Antipodes — faces political annihilation this Saturday. So much so that the 68-year-old Houdini of politics down under is in danger of losing the very seat he has held for nearly 35 years. It was not supposed to end like this.
..... < snip >
That was back then — March 2006. The public’s admiration and respect for him has today turned into boredom or, in some cases, outright hostility. Words such as “sad,” “petty,” “arrogant,” “desperate,” “tired” and “out-of-touch” are freely used to describe him. Economic growth is now so strong that the nation’s central bank keeps hiking interest rates, aggravating many swing voters who are mortgaged to the hilt. In conservative circles, there is much sighing and shaking of heads.
If ever there were a political conundrum, this is it. Australia is the envy of the industrialized world. Unemployment, at 4.2%, is at historic lows; commodity exports are booming; and Aussies are fat and happy. Pace Tony Blair’s 1997 campaign theme, things can hardly get better. And yet Aussies are about to throw out a colossus. Why?
Well, blame the Powell-Costello theory of the inevitability of let-down. If political heavyweights — from Woodrow Wilson to Margaret Thatcher — could not survive the epidemic of disappointment that has raged through the profession for decades, why should the Australian Prime Minister escape their fate? Of course, Mr. Howard has had plenty of chances to cut off his political life at a happy juncture. For instance, when it was revealed last year that he, in late 1994, did a deal to hand the party leadership to Mr. Costello after a term and a half of his prime ministership, he was as stubborn as a mule. Like Tony Blair at the peak of his powers, Mr. Howard refused to pass the torch to his patient and loyal deputy. And like Mr. Blair, he missed a grand opportunity to go out on top.
That was back then — March 2006. The public’s admiration and respect for him has today turned into boredom or, in some cases, outright hostility. Words such as “sad,” “petty,” “arrogant,” “desperate,” “tired” and “out-of-touch” are freely used to describe him. Economic growth is now so strong that the nation’s central bank keeps hiking interest rates, aggravating many swing voters who are mortgaged to the hilt. In conservative circles, there is much sighing and shaking of heads.
If ever there were a political conundrum, this is it. Australia is the envy of the industrialized world. Unemployment, at 4.2%, is at historic lows; commodity exports are booming; and Aussies are fat and happy. Pace Tony Blair’s 1997 campaign theme, things can hardly get better. And yet Aussies are about to throw out a colossus. Why?
Well, blame the Powell-Costello theory of the inevitability of let-down. If political heavyweights — from Woodrow Wilson to Margaret Thatcher — could not survive the epidemic of disappointment that has raged through the profession for decades, why should the Australian Prime Minister escape their fate? Of course, Mr. Howard has had plenty of chances to cut off his political life at a happy juncture. For instance, when it was revealed last year that he, in late 1994, did a deal to hand the party leadership to Mr. Costello after a term and a half of his prime ministership, he was as stubborn as a mule. Like Tony Blair at the peak of his powers, Mr. Howard refused to pass the torch to his patient and loyal deputy. And like Mr. Blair, he missed a grand opportunity to go out on top.
And yet Mr. Howard, after seeing off four Labor leaders, succumbed to hubris and underestimated his new opponent Kevin Rudd. The 50-year-old Labor leader is a nerdy Mandarin-speaking former diplomat in boxy spectacles who reminds colleagues of the smart arse chap at school who always knew the answers to the teacher’s questions, and would delight in telling his classmates so. Yet he has nevertheless appealed to Middle Australia precisely by mimicking Mr. Howard’s agenda, even styling himself an “economic conservative” and copycatting the Prime Minister (just as David Cameron did to Mr. Blair) on virtually everything from his support for big income tax cuts to his opposition to gay marriage. This is hardly surprising, for the most notable political success stories of recent times have been of center-left politicians moving to the right.
.....
Basically, Rudd “pulled a Clinton” of 1992. Hillary will be doing the same focus-pocus here after she wins nomination. The left will know it’s baloney and will vote for her, but she’ll try to get some of the middle class that was disenchanted with Republicans in 2006, and is ready to “get fooled again” by Clintons and Democrats... And so, round and round it goes...
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