There are not enough 'progressive' voters in this country to form a government. This is not a fact that will go away no matter how much the the 'progressive' voters call those who vote against them things like 'brainless, spineless, selfish, blinkered'.
Chances are there will never be enough 'progressive' voters to form a government under our present system. These 'progressive' voters do not have very many children, and they are also losing control of the education system, so they are not maintaining their numbers. The only way 'progressive' voters could form a government would be if compulsory preferential voting was scrapped and we went to a hyper-American system where only the most extremist fanatics bothered to vote.
We recently moved out of Laurie Ferguson's seat of Reid, one of the safest Labor seats in the country. This is one of those seats where there was a swing of about 3% to the coalition in the weekend's election. Reid is one of those seats where people have to keep voting Labor in order for there ever to be another government that is to Phillip Adams' liking.
*Hardly anyone in Reid reads Phillip Adams. Hardly anyone in Reid reads the Sydney Morning Herald. My letters to the editor and your letters to the editor will not be read by the voters of Reid.
*A 'mean and tricky' government, in the experience of many of the people of Reid, would mean having to bribe an official to have your telephone installed, or having your neighbour dragged off by the secret police in the middle of the night. Little Johnny does not rate on the 'mean and tricky' scale.
*People in Reid care about the environment as long as it will not cost jobs. Tasmanian old growth forests and the Kyoto Protocol do not rate there.
*Most of the anti-war posters I saw at the station when I got on the train in the morning had been torn down by the evening. The people in Reid were not solidly against the war. Being anti-war does not rate there.
*At my son's public school, he was one of the few children in the 'non-religious' segment in Tuesday morning scripture classes. I'm sure a lot of the others in that group were actually from some religion, since most of them were of east asian ancestry, and there was no buddhist scripture teacher. My guess is that very few six year olds in Reid are not nominally religious. Being socially conservative is probably a safe bet in Reid.
*People in Reid care about interest rates, and about jobs, only because they are not DINKs with a shitload of money. They are not any more or less selfish than voters in Greenway. The economy definitely rates in Reid.
I don't know why the coalition couldn't win Reid. It is just Labor's good luck that people there habitually vote for them. The federal Labor party is certainly not doing much to hold on to it.
4 comments:
"There are not enough 'progressive' voters in this country to form a government."
Demonstrably true.
"This is not a fact that will go away no matter how much the the 'progressive' voters call those who vote against them things like 'brainless, spineless, selfish, blinkered'."
Do I sound 'progressive' to you? I am honestly baffled by the short-sightedness of environmental, health and education policies in this country (and many other industrialised western nations with the capacity to do something about the messes they've gotten themselves in). It just seems to lack common sense to me.
As for the 'b,s,s,b' shot, please allow me at least a modicum of bitterness. Conservative voters offended by my unwarranted vitriol may feel free to console themselves that I will spend at least the next fourteen months (until JWH beats Hawkie's knock) gnashing my teeth at Australia's wilful embrace of mediocrity, yet again.
Dave
PS: And, really, this is nothing compared to how upset I'm going to be in four weeks, when the Least Qualified Human Being Imaginable is returned for another shot at riding us all into the Apocalypse.
Don't you think you're being a bit hard on John Kerry? He does have actual war experience, which ought to qualify him to lead the world to Armageddon. And I did present pretty convincing evidence that he is a devil worshipper...
Aw, stuff. That comment of mine wasn't funny at all. And you did write 'returned'. Damn.
I am prepared to be gracious in, well, whatever. But come on - leave aside for a second the single-issue-voter thing you have going, and tell me: is there any reason whatsoever to support the notion that The Incumbent is capable of doing the job at all, let alone with distinction?
Because to me he looks like a genuinely dull-witted man with no decision-making abilities, no economic or foreign policy credentials and a collection of almost random beliefs that he is more prepared to espouse than live by.
Kerry at least sometimes manages to resemble a statesman. The only time Bush has managed the same is for the two to three weeks following 9/11, and even then he was outshone by far by Rudy Giuliani.
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