1. In my opinion, the Ruddstoration probably worked. Labor was thumped, but not as badly as months’ worth of opinion polls showed. Abbott came into office on a smaller win that John Howard in 1996. The feared wipe-out in Rugby League land (western Sydney and the suburbs of Brisbane) did not eventuate. That said, it is still the biggest win by any party since that year.
2. The vicious infighting in the government and the unity and discipline of the Coalition team were the obvious factors. Little more needs to be said on this point. The entire six years of Labour government have been a textbook example in how not to do politics.
3. Dissatisfaction with both major parties manifested itself in a minor party vote of 20%. As journalist and writer George Megalogenis observed on the ABC this morning, this will be the kookiest Senate in memory. We really need to look at reforming the Senate’s labrynthine voting system. I’m all for minor party representation, but the Senate ballot paper here in Victoria had something like 92 candidates. It was three feet long, unless you had 20/30 vision you needed a magnifying glass (supplied by the electoral commission) to find the candidate that you wanted to vote for, and it was an engineering exercise to stuff the bloody thing into the ballot-box (I got an ‘I voted’ sticker for my efforts). It looks like preference flows may have delivered the Sports Party a senate seat in Western Australia even though they only got two thousand primary votes (I had never heard of them previously) and the Australian Motoring Enthusiasts may have won a seat here in Victoria (ditto).
(from the Herald Sun)
4. On the subject of minor parties, when eccentric Queensland billionaire Clive Palmer announced that he was forming his own political party most of us dismissed it as another one of his stunts (I thought the new Titanic was a better idea myself, and even it was pretty out-there). Over five percent of Australia’s voters, however, disagreed with me, and the Palmer United Party (or PUP) seems to have picked up two Senate seats. And its founder is very close to victory in the Queensland House of Representatives seat of Fairfax. This leads me to wonder – did anyone involved in this exercise actually think this through? In the midst of running one of Australia’s largest group of companies, is Palmer really going to be able to serve as an MP? PUP may have looked like a good place to park a protest vote, and Palmer had the money to launch a storm of advertising in the last week of the campaign, but has our democracy really reached the point where people simply want to cut out all of the middlemen in the political process and simply have single-issue celebrity-driven corporate parties represent them in Parliament? I suspect that PUP won’t last, but it bothered me that Palmer’s drive for bigger and better projects and his vast fortune could lead to a change in the composition of the Parliament. The Coalition is safe in the House, but PUP may hold the balance of power in the Senate. What demands will they make? Plus, as a Liberal Party supporter, I’m annoyed that he seems to have hoovered up the anti-Labor vote in Queensland. As much as I love my home state, the way that it keeps giving oxygen to political oddballs does annoy me sometimes. Or, as George Megalogenis put it, having sent us one narcissist in the form of Kevin Rudd and then helped to remove him, the good people of Queensland have decided to send us another.
5. Why do Australian politicians give such poor election night speeches? Are they just too tired and emotional to put it together? Rudd gave this wild, triumphant speech that made it sound like he'd won. Abbott kept in campaign mode, sinking the boot into the defeated government. Clichés abounded, but as usual moreso with Rudd, who can't keep off them.
