The winner of this election isn’t the Coalition as originally anticipated (though I did indeed second guess Labor).
The winner of this election definitely isn’t the Labor party. They didn’t win the election, they might have got voted in, but they most certainly didn’t win.
The winners of the election are the Unions who spent up big to protect their own financial interests, by putting pressure and scare campaigns in front of voters on WorkChoices.
The majority seemingly fooled into believing that the unions are somehow doing some good for the country.
From my earlier years working, I’ve never gone into Unions. It never made sense. Pay out money for trying to protect conditions in a job that I more than likely could have easily moved on from anyway.
But none the less, scare campaigns work.
I must admit however, the Labor party did indeed come close to winning, because they had my support on and off for parts of the election. It was a close call on the winner throughout the night, and I did predict a close call for many areas, including Dobell, where it was close for a large percentage of the vote.
Howard was definitely graceful under defeat (by the unions). If anything, the election could have been made that much more closer with Howard already retired, and Costello in his place, so that the campaign effect of “Fresh Thinking” by the Labor party was quickly pushed aside so that Costello could also claim fresh thinking.
Howard’s own Bennelong seat remains a close call (though he seemed to already accept it as lost), Howard has a 0.8 percentage to gain to keep the seat of Bennelong. And that seems possible if you ask me. Around 300 postal votes and it all of a sudden will bring it into 0.1 percent of a win or lose.
Howard would really be shafted if he were to lose both the PM job and his seat in the one election.
On a related note however, Rudd won’t acheive much in the next three years, due to the diversity build up in the senate which will cause many of the items for them to pass to come under stranglehold, due to opposing views from many different members of the senate.
The election is indeed resulting in close calls that will almost certainly reflect the true state of the government, in that any decision might just narrowly make it through, or narrowly get rejected by those involved.
This will add inevitable delays, and cause the perception to many voters that he is indeed doing “nothing”.
What will happen on the other side? Costello takes the lead, he becomes leader of the opposition. We then see the arguments between Swan and Costello blow out continuously, and we see little in the way of progress on much of anything.
The next 3 years in my opinion will simply be a more ‘argumentative’ government, not really reaching many of the goals that others might oppose.
Moving off that topic, and onto other election related news:
1. A journalist slapped a labor candidate at a polling station.
2. A woman drove towards a reporter.
3. Chasers decided to take a jab at the leaflet incident.
4. Chasers decided to enter the Liberals quarters, dressed as a union member.
Interesting stuff to say the least.
This election is definitely more prominent then the 2004 election, for a number of reasons, but most notably due to the fact the campaign as become more about the future, and the views of each party, than what has been a “our government is better” type argument.
I think that, and Howard’s decision to sit in at the election cost the Liberals, and the campaigning from Labor and Unions, all mounted to a close call, but pushed Labor on top of the pile, narrowly.
The Labor party were not preferred by me, because the FTTN plans they have are severely undercosted, at $4.7 billion, they will either need to seperate Telstra and then do a deal with the network body, or admit that the $4.7 billion doesn’t get them much closer to the regional areas at all.
The cost of the network is forecast at $20 billion without infrastructure, so you can guess at $4.7 billion, the funds are targetted at one who has infrastructure already in place.
And besides that, the plans commit Australian’s to higher access prices unnecessarily, due to Telstra’s own ROI levels, therefore pushing competition out of the market, at the same time rising prices for consumers considerably.
Good thing I’m not going to be in the path of a node!
Enjoy!