Last December Tony Abbott won a ballot to wrest the leadership of the Liberal Party from Malcolm Turnbull. The margin was one vote - his own.
Seven months later he came within two House of Representatives votes of wresting the national leadership from Julia Gillard - this time his own vote did not quite get him there.
Mr Rabbit ran for our highest office on a platform of abandoning plans to bring high-speed broadband to nearly everyone in Australia, his view being "what's wrong with telegrams?"
He also promised to "stop the boats" - turn away the small number of refugees who manage to reach our shores, and push them back out into the high seas in their sinking boats. He proposed too a "royal telephone," so he could make informed, on the spot decisions on people at risk in the Indian Ocean, from his office in Canberra.
On the basis of these visionary policies, the Australian electorate - whose wisdom must never ever be called into account - put the action figure with the penguin walk within a saunter of The Lodge.
How did he achieve that, really? Were we dreaming, having a collective nightmare, or were we all placed under some kind of delusional mass hypnosis?
The answer is below. And remember, pictures don't lie - except sometimes, when they do.
I would say that everyone was mighty keen to avoid a new ballot because the Australian people ended up voting for, most notably, one Jackass, one Twitterbug, two clandestine Gilliardites and a bunch of tealeaves rather than give an outright mandate to two parties who had thrown a bunch of crap at them. The talking Rabbit and the incumbent skin-of-their-teethed their way through it.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that he's not in power almost makes me believe in god. Not quite, but the universe can certainly be merciful. The shadow cabinet have something in common with that of Dr Caligari - and Abbott is Caligari himself.
ReplyDelete'Francis discovers that "Caligari" is actually the director of the local insane asylum, and, with the help of his colleagues, discovers that he is obsessed with the story of a monk called Caligari, who, in 1093, visited towns in northern Italy [and]used a somnambulist to murder people as a traveling act. After being confronted with the dead Cesare, Caligari reveals his mania and is imprisoned in his asylum.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cabinet_of_Dr._Caligari
It's simply AMAZING - what took Australia so long to decided one PM???
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid, just like Japan, it proves again and again that the bureaucracy and bureaucrats are very much in tact!!
Yuka, it's the perfection of preferential voting - the notion that if your first choice is knocked out of the race, your preferred choice - whichever you numbered higher, (ie closer to #1) of the top two leading candidates' votes in that seat - will be counted as one vote on that pile, one vote per person, all across Australia. I love our system. It's much fairer than most. Your vote is always counted, as long as you number all the boxes properly. I think we'll have a better government for this hung parliament. Our media needs a good hosing down though. It's all snipe, whinge, vomit up the media releases and 'clever' quotes of the loser. Where is the investigative journalism?
ReplyDeleteWhat is most disgusting is that Abbott has now given Turbull a brief to 'demolish' the Govt's national broadband network. And Turnbull is saying any broadband network should start in the cities and roll out from there. Excuse me! It's regional Australia which is in most need of it, and FAST.
ReplyDelete