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izmeinaSo it’s now official. On Saturday 7th September there is going to be an invasion of Vote People in Australia. This serpent is excited already. Had already complained that it’s not possible to put them all last. Well at least nearly all of them. It used to be possible but those days are long over.
Two weeks ago Radio National ran an interview with a guy by the unlikely name of Arthur Dent who until the recent adventures of a certain Julian Assange had laid claim to being Australia’s first political prisoner
He wasn’t always called Arthur and had in fact changed his name by deed poll. His muggle name is Albert Langer and he was notorious for having issues with the Electoral Office.
The crime that earned him time in the slammer was the promotion and possible invention of a devious and wonderful scheme for filling in the boxes of election voting slips
Here in Oz for federal elections the lower house is elected using some form of preferential voting. You rank the candidates in order of preference. If your number one candidate does not get the numbers, they take your second choice into account and so on down the line until one of them eventually has sufficient numbers to get across the line. Sometimes that could mean your vote going to the last or second last name on your list
Albert Langer proposed a simple but ingenious solution to keep the two big bastard parties from stealing your vote in such a devious manner. You simply numbered the ballot as far as you wanted to go and then gave all the rest the very same number. So if there were only two candidates you could bring yourself to vote for out of a batch of six you would number the ticket 1 then 2 and then put a 3 in every single other box.
This pissed off the two major parties big time so they pulled strings and pushed buttons and sent the Electoral Commission on the rampage to give poor Albert a hard time. They sent nasty ‘cease and desist’ letters which he politely ignored. He continued his sneaky rebel rousing anarchist activities and got tossed in the slammer for his trouble
He was talking about the whole drama on the radio last week. They had changed the law so that any vote cast in such a manner would no longer be considered valid. But apparently they did not bother doing that for the Senate.
The interviewer asked him if it was worth all the hassle since so few people had actually voted using his neat little trick - somewhere in the low thousands at each election. Arthur had never expected such a ridiculous reaction from the authorities but still had no regrets.
Izzie had been one of those few thousand and had been most peeved indeed when they got rid of that useful loop hole. It would come in so so handy in September.
For Tweedledum and Tweedledee or as others call them - the Pepsi party and the Coca Cola party are particularly obnoxious this time. Both parties are now led by egomaniacal control freaks with blue ties, with almost identical policies when they actually bother to have policies and each in a race to the bottom of the barrel in their desperation to get elected
A few weeks ago spent a good hour or so reading a fascinating article with the title “Political Animal” all about who the polls are proclaiming will be our next prime minister - one Anthony Abbott.
He’s best described as an Australian Vladimir Putin wannabee. While he hasn’t yet taken to wrestling bears and tigers, he is rather fond of boxing, cycling and being seen on the beach wearing budgie smugglers
He’s got Obama ears but that’s where the resemblance ends. He is barely capable of producing a coherent sentence longer than three words. He seems to be a totally policy free zone. But what is particularly strange, he is supposed to have been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and did a degree in law and economics. But then again, Barack Obama used to be a constitutional lawyer. I guess it means he knows how to find all the loop holes and hide all the bodies. For when it comes to trashing the American constitution he’s made old George Bush junior look like a rank amateur
For some one supposedly so smart, Tony Abbot does a damned good job in hiding it, unless of course he has realized that looking like an intellectual is a big voter turn off in Oz.
But the juiciest revelation was that when he was still a pimply teen he expected his pregnant girlfriend to get the baby adopted rather than marry her and risk losing his chance at that Rhodes scholarship. Married men need not apply.
So he was not quite the devout Catholic that he claimed to be. Not that it stopped him some years later from talking about women choosing abortion as taking the easy way out.
This kid from the past came to haunt him years later. He was not able to unequivocally proclaim that the child wasn’t his. But thanks to modern technology the young man was saved from a life of shame. The Dark Lord turned out not to be his father after all.
But there is only one thing worth knowing about the Mad Monk. His immediately family said when he was younger he would become either the prime minister or the Pope.
He will do whatever it takes to get the top job. Mere self aggrandisement, or some mission from God, who knows what is his motive. But anyone that hungry and desperate for power is by definition far too dangerous to deserve it
Just over four more weeks and the waiting will be over. Here’s hoping that Malcolm Turnbull is sharpening his knives. Some one needs to save us from the meddlesome priest
Two weeks ago Radio National ran an interview with a guy by the unlikely name of Arthur Dent who until the recent adventures of a certain Julian Assange had laid claim to being Australia’s first political prisoner
He wasn’t always called Arthur and had in fact changed his name by deed poll. His muggle name is Albert Langer and he was notorious for having issues with the Electoral Office.
The crime that earned him time in the slammer was the promotion and possible invention of a devious and wonderful scheme for filling in the boxes of election voting slips
Here in Oz for federal elections the lower house is elected using some form of preferential voting. You rank the candidates in order of preference. If your number one candidate does not get the numbers, they take your second choice into account and so on down the line until one of them eventually has sufficient numbers to get across the line. Sometimes that could mean your vote going to the last or second last name on your list
Albert Langer proposed a simple but ingenious solution to keep the two big bastard parties from stealing your vote in such a devious manner. You simply numbered the ballot as far as you wanted to go and then gave all the rest the very same number. So if there were only two candidates you could bring yourself to vote for out of a batch of six you would number the ticket 1 then 2 and then put a 3 in every single other box.
This pissed off the two major parties big time so they pulled strings and pushed buttons and sent the Electoral Commission on the rampage to give poor Albert a hard time. They sent nasty ‘cease and desist’ letters which he politely ignored. He continued his sneaky rebel rousing anarchist activities and got tossed in the slammer for his trouble
He was talking about the whole drama on the radio last week. They had changed the law so that any vote cast in such a manner would no longer be considered valid. But apparently they did not bother doing that for the Senate.
The interviewer asked him if it was worth all the hassle since so few people had actually voted using his neat little trick - somewhere in the low thousands at each election. Arthur had never expected such a ridiculous reaction from the authorities but still had no regrets.
Izzie had been one of those few thousand and had been most peeved indeed when they got rid of that useful loop hole. It would come in so so handy in September.
For Tweedledum and Tweedledee or as others call them - the Pepsi party and the Coca Cola party are particularly obnoxious this time. Both parties are now led by egomaniacal control freaks with blue ties, with almost identical policies when they actually bother to have policies and each in a race to the bottom of the barrel in their desperation to get elected
A few weeks ago spent a good hour or so reading a fascinating article with the title “Political Animal” all about who the polls are proclaiming will be our next prime minister - one Anthony Abbott.
He’s best described as an Australian Vladimir Putin wannabee. While he hasn’t yet taken to wrestling bears and tigers, he is rather fond of boxing, cycling and being seen on the beach wearing budgie smugglers
He’s got Obama ears but that’s where the resemblance ends. He is barely capable of producing a coherent sentence longer than three words. He seems to be a totally policy free zone. But what is particularly strange, he is supposed to have been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and did a degree in law and economics. But then again, Barack Obama used to be a constitutional lawyer. I guess it means he knows how to find all the loop holes and hide all the bodies. For when it comes to trashing the American constitution he’s made old George Bush junior look like a rank amateur
For some one supposedly so smart, Tony Abbot does a damned good job in hiding it, unless of course he has realized that looking like an intellectual is a big voter turn off in Oz.
But the juiciest revelation was that when he was still a pimply teen he expected his pregnant girlfriend to get the baby adopted rather than marry her and risk losing his chance at that Rhodes scholarship. Married men need not apply.
So he was not quite the devout Catholic that he claimed to be. Not that it stopped him some years later from talking about women choosing abortion as taking the easy way out.
This kid from the past came to haunt him years later. He was not able to unequivocally proclaim that the child wasn’t his. But thanks to modern technology the young man was saved from a life of shame. The Dark Lord turned out not to be his father after all.
But there is only one thing worth knowing about the Mad Monk. His immediately family said when he was younger he would become either the prime minister or the Pope.
He will do whatever it takes to get the top job. Mere self aggrandisement, or some mission from God, who knows what is his motive. But anyone that hungry and desperate for power is by definition far too dangerous to deserve it
Just over four more weeks and the waiting will be over. Here’s hoping that Malcolm Turnbull is sharpening his knives. Some one needs to save us from the meddlesome priest
