An election is coming on

Australia is heading for a National Election on 21 August.  I suspect I will be putting up a few posts about goings-on in the campaign.

This could be quite interesting.

• The previously elected Prime Minister has been booted out by his own party, and replaced by Julia Gillard who seems to be doing rather well in his place.  
• The Leader of the Opposition - one Tony Abbott aka the Mad Monk - is not the sort of person from whom one would buy a used car.  Nor even a new car, still in its wrapper.  However the average punter in the street may be able to be persuaded by the Murdoch Press (see Dennis Potter's comment) to ignore more backflips than a season of Cirque du Soleil.  
• The mantle of third party is now held by the Greens: a party widely seen as "for the environment" but who spat the dummy on the Emissions Trading Scheme in the hope they could get something better.  This is slightly more stupid than them announcing a plank of withdrawing Australian troops from Afghanistan (but that comment reflects the importance I attach to the ETS - in terms of world affairs the Afghanistan decision is more important, and even more stupid)!

All politics is local, so at this point I will say that I will be helping out the ALP candidate in this campaign (which given my record in supporting politicians is possibly the kiss of death).  We have three candidates that I am aware of at the moment.


Australian Labour Party:  the candidate is the sitting member Mike Kelly.  I have met him a few times (including at the previous election, while I was handing out how-to-vote cards for the Greens) and he is a really pleasant guy.  He's also very hard working and damn smart.  Onya Mike.

The Greens:  the candidate is Catherine Moore who should get elected if stamina is the metric.  She has stood for just about everything at every level of Government and has succeeded in getting elected as a Palerang Councillor.  It is probably symptomatic that when I first clicked on the link to her website as linked the immediate message was to vote for a Greens Senate Candidate (and Bob Brown's image is far more prominent that Catherine's)!   I'd say she has Buckley's.  

The Liberals:  The candidate is one David Gazard who seems to be presenting himself as a nice family guy living in the Burra (NSW - not the copper mining town in South Australia).  Just the sort of garbage one would expect from a Lliberal PR staffer and A/g director of the ACT Liberals - even though he lives outside the ACT!  It will be really good to see this guy go down, both for this seat in particular and because it should deal with the Mad Monk also!

Game on guys!