Regrets, I have a few

We're moving house next week-end so Beloved and I voted this Saturday.

Curiously, this isn't one of the 30 grounds for eligibility for a pre-poll vote. Having to work, travelling interstate and being more than 8 kilometres from a polling place for the whole day all are but being a gibbering wreck because your worldly possessions are hiding in boxes so you can't make a cup of tea without dismantling a cardboard tower all confusingly labelled "kitchen" that has somehow been wedeged between the bedroom door and the disassembled bed frame is no excuse.

I know from past experience that there's no way I couild cast a valid House of Reps vote in such a mental state, much less vote below the line for the Senate (and I have to vote below the line. No way those big party party preference deals are going to detract from me exercising my democratic right to put Pauline last).

So off we went to the local community centre, fictitious story about planning to drive to Brisbane on Friday prepared in case anyone asked.

But they didn't. Phew, wouldn't want to be caught LYING to an Commonwealth Official, would I? There might even be a $50 fine for that.

It was pretty painless actually. There was hardly anyone waiting which was just as well because Winnie was grizzling and it took ages for me to get up to number 79 on the Senate ballot. And we met the mother of one of the candidates who seemed quite nice. They even had long enough string on the pencils in the cardboard booths for me to write with my left hand without contorting and looking like I was trying to cheat from the person on the right.

But it's hard to believe we now have to wait a whole WEEK for the result. A whole week to wonder if I did the right thing...

And now GetUp has this quiz to help you make up your mind by matching your opinions with candidates' policies. Of course, based on this, I should have chosen someone else. Do you think they'd let me go again?

Poor semicolons

Between the Christmas catalogues from every shop in the city, real estate ads and the electioneering guff, the letterbox has been pretty full lately. Luckily, junk mail is of tremendous interest to small babies. The pictures are bright. The pages make a delightful crackling sound when scrunched and one of Winnie's great joys in life is tearing pages into bits small enough to fit into her mouth.

I don't like her actually EATING this stuff though. I mean should I bother sterilising her bottles if I let her eat chemically treated wood fibre covered with glossy inks?

I'm also fairly sure I don't like the idea of her ingesting some of the political messages either, especially the poorly phrased and designed brochure that arrived today containing the following crimes against punctuation:


"IF LABOR WINS

....

The Liberals won't be there to stop unions going into small business and dictating economic policy; costing jobs.

....

With no checks and balances, in a cosy and risky relationshop between the Labor States and Labor Federally; small bausinesses, our strong $1.1 trillion economy , and the families dependent on its stability, WILL suffer."

It's the semicolons I feel sorry for. It's not their fault but they reakly do look dumb up there.

Karl Marx and H.G.Wells

Lately, when I should have been reading tips on baby-wrangling or cleaning the oven, I've been struggling with The World of William Clissold by H.G. Wells.

This was a infuriatingly uneven treatise on how H.G. would like to redesign the world dressed up as a novel with a curmudgeonly protagonist perfectly balanced by the chips on both his shoulders. (Incidentally, I've never understood that expression. My parents used it a lot, confusingly, often when we were having chips for tea. I remember at least once them telling my big brother to "get the chip off his shoulder" in response to some ordinarily petulant statement like "Mary's got more than me" or "why do I have to turn the telly off to have tea?" and we'd both look for the chip we thought had somehow leapt off his plate.)

I'm not just guessing that these are H.G.'s views: he has a overly defensive foreword where he protests far too much that this is FICTION and just because most of his views are consistent with Mr Clissold's doesn't make the book any less of a NOVEL. And Wikipedia says so too, so there.

Basically, William Clissold is a rich scientifically-trained industrialist who doesn't like the way the world is run and wants to rearrange everything so that men like him are put in charge of a world government because they'd manage everything far better than the current crop of politicians. This was set in 1925 so he was upset by the Great War and the Bolshevik revolution and the failure of the League of Nations to achieve anything like a meaningful World Governmnent.

So far so dull. But there were some cute whimsical things in between the megalomania. Mr Clissold was very keen on socalism which he thought had been dreadfully distorted by Karl Marx's idea of history as class struggle (although he spends about 200 pages crticising the landed gentry for mistrusting not just the working classes but clever men like himself).

He thought Marx should have smoked less and taken more exercise, preferably cricket although he acknowledged that this would have been difficult given the length of the Marxian beard, even in an age of great beards.

This made me wonder what the Cricket World Cup would look like now if Marx had started a trend of cricket-playing amongst Communists. After all, Iron Curtain countries would have had a very long time to develop professional state-based training regimes. There's no reason why they would have stopped playing once the walls came down. In any case, I don't think Australia would be doing that well if they had to face China, Russia or Cuba in the Baggy Green. And what would that do to our national identity?

And another thing

This is a dodgy photo of page 4 of today's Sydney Morning Herald. It's a full page ad about how great APEC is going to be.

That would have cost a lot.

The fine print says "With your assistance, we [the "Australian Government"?] can successfully showcase Sydney to the world."

Which is a bit of an Irish way of telling us to stay home, out of everyone's way.

Um-ah

Daniel Johns just told the Triple J breakfast show that he thanked Bono on his latest record because he said he liked the demo tapes for it. Jay and the Doctor asked whether Daniel was there when Bono listened to them so he felt constrained to say the tapes were good and Daniel said that yeah, he was. On a really "bizarre day", he said he visited Bono at the house he was staying at in Sydney and he, his wife Natalie Imbruglia, Bono and PETER GARRETT all lay round on a bed smoking joints listening to these tapes.

Daniel is so sweet and frank sometimes...

But it's just as well Parliament isn't sitting or poor old Peter Garrett would be hassled mercilessly about whether or no he inhaled.

Absolutely, positively the last thing I'll say about the most boring election ever

So last night my Beloved and I sat down to watch The West Wing episodes that had been broadcast on Saturday night. We'd planned ahead enough to realise that the ABC was making the unusual choice of showing three hours of election coverage and THEN two thirds of its usual Saturday night programming. The Bill wasn't on but they did show part 112 of this strange documentary where a man is travelling round the world complaining about the locals making it hard for him to see their national treasures and when he does see them he gushes in an unwatchably embarrassing fashion.

I don't know if this means that New South Wales will be behind the rest of the country in the Sun Hill soap opera but worse things may have happened in the world.

According to the program guide, The West Wing was meant to start at 11:15. We set the recorder with half an hour of padding at the end just in case something went wrong.

And last night we discovered that we'd missed the last ten minutes - just when Alan Alda had a choice between giving Jimmy Smits back the briefcase containing possibly incendiary information or using it to blackmail his way into the White House. Thanks ABC. Almost as bad as something Channel Nine would do.

I simply cannot believe that there was THAT much to say about the election that they had to go forty minutes over time when it seemed to be all over by 7:01. Or the previous week.

Dyslexia

I realised after my last post that Carmel Tebbutt only has one kid - or at least that she actually said she wanted to spend more time with her six-year-old son.

She may in fact have other kids she doesn't like so much.

I blame the mistake on eyestrain from spending all day squinting at the election laws.

Most boring election ever

Well that was just as dull as I expected it to be. The only thing that surprised me was that to vote for the Legislative Council below the line I only had to fill in 15 boxes to fill 21 vacancies.

Now, I know 95 per cent of people vote above the line and the below the line votes are supposed to go from regional centres to the State Electoral Commission headquarters to be counted but only asking for 15 preferences to fill 21 spots makes me think it's all a terrible trick and my vote really went into a giant shredder.

Just to be on the safe side, I kept filling in squares until I didn't care any more - somewhere around the 35 mark.

Oh yeah, there were probably closer to 200 candidates than 50. I um have better thing to do than to count that high.

In other news, Carmel Tebbutt is leaving the ministry so she can see her kids occasionally. This makes me a bit sad because it's not as if there are that many sensible-sounding ministers here, much less that many women in Cabinet.

Yawn

There's going to be an election in New South Wales on Saturday. I live in a safe seat so it doesn't matter whether I vote for the incumbent member or not. This meant that the only thing I could be interested in about the election is the vote for the upper house.

Last time (the first time I've voted here) I earnestly took the option to number all the boxes below the line rather than just each group. I did my research. I knew who about three quarters of the 60 candidates were and I knew how I felt about them.

This time, strangely enough, I can't even bring myself to care about that even though there are fewer candidates. As well as the major and minor parties, there are five groups without a name as well as one "ungrouped" group. I know one of the nameless groups is fighting against climate change. They probably would get a reasonably low number and a chance of my vote under normal circumstances but they were too slack to get registered as a party in time. This doesn't augur well for their professionalism. I mean, there are fixed parliamentary terms here. They've had four years to get organised - and ads in today's paper claiming they never wanted to be a party anyway just irritate me because they're not true. Twits.

I know people always choose nice sounding names so the cuddly horseriding party are just as likely to be religious fundamentalists as gun nuts and it'll take me too much effort to research this so I'm not voting for them. Besides, the only horses I get close enough to touch these days have teenage police officers sitting on them as they try to control the way I cross roads after leaving sporting events.

And our Dawn Fraser is running. How sweet. I wonder how many votes she'll get because people know her name.

We have to be somewhere at 9 on Saturday so I'm going to get to a polling booth at 8:50. I mightn't even have time to number the boxes from 1 to some number over 50 I can't be bothered remembering. In fact, it's delightful to read that I only have to go up to 15 (but for 21 seats??? I don't understand.)

But for the first time since I started to vote, I can't be persuaded that it'll make any difference whatsoever to anything important.