Election 2004 | Day 19 | Roundup

I spent the entire afternoon/night upgrading my car audio system from a broken tape deck and speakers that suspiciously look like they're made out of paper, so I haven't really been following what's happening. Gotta get up early tomorrow too so this'll be a quick one.

I was just thinking, if Howard actually wins this election, what'll we do? There's so much riding on it, more (in my opinion) than any other election I can think of. So what if he wins? Will there be riots? Mass suicides? End of the world? It'd be like Skeletor beating He-Man, Dr Claw beating Inspector Gadget, the bad guy killing James Bond and getting away with his plan. I don't know how we can take another three years of Howard. Really, I don't. Imagine Australia in 3 years time under him, considering the point we're at now. Health care could be entirely user-pays, public schooling would be non-existant, only the rich would go to uni, a total lack of Australian content on TV, News Ltd owning every newspaper in Australia. And if we're stupid enough to vote him in this time around, what'll stop us voting him (or some other equally evil bastard running the Liberal party at that time) next time? Will you have any faith in humanity left? Will we continue on this road of... fuck, I don't know what to call it.

Centrebet odds have dropped for the Coalition again, $1.33 to Labor's $3.00. Apparently they're never wrong. They're also betting on whether or not Pauline Hanson will get in the Senate (leaning towards no at the moment).

An SMH poll shows support for Howard is on the increase. HOW?! I don't understand how the hell a weeks worth of promises that'll be broken can make up for 8 FUCKING YEARS of screwing everyone around. I think of people like cattle more and more every day. Or maybe goldfish.

Costello conveniently announced an "unexpected" GST windfall of $11.8b, most likely to defuse the shitfight going on with the states over water. So we have this massive intake of cash, plus the massive budget surplus, I dunno, it sort of seems to me that he's either extremely cheap when it comes to spending on Australia, or he's a shit treasurer if all this completely unexpected money keeps appearing.

Okay, and now for the most pointless waste of ink ever today - this story, courtesy of The Daily Telegraph:

Liberal MP for Robertson Jim Lloyd yesterday cut the ribbon on a dishwasher.

And stupidest person of the day goes to Ralph Hahnheuser, running for Senate by refusing to eat for three weeks. I'm sure he'll make a good impression meeting voters after two weeks.

And as far as goddamn whinging about reallocation for private school funds: boohoo, 111 get reduced funding. 2500 get increased funding. Yet there's a backlash.

While most people have forgotten about Afghanistan by now, Counter Spin linked to an article which is utterly shocking. Is this what you get to look forward to when America invades your country to establish "democracy"?

And this Liberal/Greens preference deal is bullshit, and always has been. News Ltd are the only ones that keep persisting with stories of it.

Finally, the ABC has a gigantic list of every candidate running. Unfortunately it's in alphabetical order, but you can click the links to your electorate and it'll have a list of everyone running in there. Or you can poke around the AEC site, but it's much less neat.