More Reflections on the Election

Just listening to a BBC world service report about the Australian election (ABC News Radio plays the BBC during dead times like Sunday arvos). That really brought it home - they used the word "landslide" and talked about Kyoto, Broadband and getting out of Iraq. If Rudd can just do those three things it'll have been worth it. Oh, and tearing up workchoices!!!!

And in breaking news - Costello is going to the back bench! This just gets better and better! All we need now is for Alexander Downer to be put in a leaky boat somewhere in northern waters, and left to fend for himself with nothing else but a pair of fishnets :-)

I wonder who will be opposition leader? Surely not Tony Abbot after his abominable election campaign.

There was a great picture on the ABC election site - lets see if I can find it again... there it is. A shot of Julia Gillard trying to shush her raucous supporters during the election broadcast. Looks like we might have a wildly popular deputy. Can't be a bad thing. And why the heck not, I've seen her speak in person, and she's impressive.

(Which reminds me of a quote I heard from her. I'm paraphrasing, it went something like "This one week I was addressing groups of people at every meal. It got to Thursday morning and I was at home - wandering around eating my weetbix looking for someone to talk to about industrial relations".)

Went to my first old-fashioned ALP election party last night. That was interesting, although I didn't stay long - I was exhausted after a really long week. Martin Ferguson, whatever his faults, really gives a fuck about Batman which was great to see - talked about the real disadvantage in the northern suburbs for example.

It is beginning to sink in.

I saved some bunting from the polling booth. Not sure what to do with it, but I'm sure I can find a place for two smiling Kevin Rudd portraits :-)

More Thoughts on Costello

Peter "fuckhead" Costello has fallen on his sword. Hooray.

It's also likely he knows his history. In the history of Australian politics no new leader elected by an opposition immediately after a defeat has gone on to become prime minister. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's certainly the trend. Think of Kim Beazley. Simon Crean. Bill Hayden (anyone remember him?)

In fact, about the only leader to lead a party to an election defeat and later to become Prime Minister was a certain Johnny Howard...

I am very, very, very interested to see who will take over from him. I wonder if it'll be Malcolm Turnbull? The richest man ever to win a seat in an Australian parliament..

Scruinteering

Last post about the election, I swear :-)

(In recent news: looks like Turnball might well be opposition leader. Interesting times! That should make us a republic before too long.)

Wanted to tell you all about the seemingly dull, yet secretive and interesting for a first timer, world of the Scrutineer.

After the polling booths close, each booth counts the votes which were cast there. Presumably the part timers who man the booth and then count the votes are, at least in part, old hands who are familiar with this work. And to keep an eye on them, to make sure everything is above board, and nothing screws up in a big way, each party is allowed to appoint a number of Scrutineers to each booth. At the booth in Thornbury East, one of them was me.

I had to sign up with the dude in charge of the booth beforehand, and he gave me an el-cheapo ID card with an el-cheapo lanyard.

There's another important roll for the scrutineer which I forgot to mention - getting a tally and phoning it in to the campaign office so they can get some idea how the voting has gone.

Here's a brief description of what goes on behind the closed doors of a polling booth (they lock the doors and no one is allowed in or out till counting is complete!)

The first rule of fight club is that you must... Wait... The first and most important rule for a scrutineer: YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO TOUCH THE BALLOTS. This presumably to prevent the popping in of extra votes or indeed removing o' ballots!

First off, in the school hall of Pender Street Primary school, the entire contents of the lower house ballot box was upended on a couple of tables pushed together. The ballots are sorted into neat piles, the same way around and the same way up. There is also a preliminary check for informal or as they say "spoiled" ballots. You gots to number from one to six, folks!

Myself, the other ALP scrutineer and a middle aged lass from the Greens watched all this take place.

Next, they are roughly sorted into first preferences. There were six candidates in Batman - ALP (obviously), Liberal, Green, Family First, a Democrat and Citizen's Electoral Council! The people who come out from the wood work at election time!

The counters sorted them into two sets of six piles, on either side of the table. Seven in fact, one for each of the candidates and one for the "spoiled" ballots. Actually, in practice there was only six piles - the CEC character got so few votes he hardly got a pile :-)

Pretty soon it was clear who was going to come out ahead. Quite literally, the piles for each candidate dramatically reflected how popular each of them had been. I saw a number of donkey votes - ballots where the "voter" had simply numbered the boxes from top to bottom one to six. But didn't see any mistakes by the counters, they seemed to know what they were doing.

And now a brief interlude where we reflect on Stupid People.

Stupid people one: They found at least five ballot papers in the absentee ballot boxes. These were for people from out of the area, who had to pop their ballot papers in an envelope.

Stupid people two: They found at least five green lower house ballet papers in the senate ballet box. There was a HUGE sign explaining into which box each paper had to go.

Stupid people three: The number of informal ballets ("spoils") was high, about 120 of them! Some were blank. Some had a cross against the candidate in question. Some had repeated numbers. One had ticks in all the boxes... Make you wonder. The senate papers were bad too: people who'd put one number below the line. Ballots with numbers above and below the line. Clearly some of these folks couldn't care less, but some of them were clearly just thick.

Back to the counting. The votes grew into piles. It was clear who was ahead - the Martin Ferguson pile was so large it morphed into two then three piles. At the end of the process, it would be possible to pick the winner just by looking at the size of the piles! But they had to be counted properly.

The stacks were broken into batches of fifty votes, checking again for informals. There were a few more of these, and some discussion about "if the voters intentions were clear." I remembered back to the US Presidential election of 2000, and the discussion about hanging chads and pregnant chads. I like our system more!

The final tally of first round votes was (from memory):
ALP (Martin): 1500 or so
Libs (some guy surname of Peart): 557
Greens: 404
Democrats (remember them?): 54
Family First: 51
CEC: 3!!!

Martin got more votes than everyone else combined. The counters joked that Mr and Mrs CEC, and their one kid, must have been the only one's voting for him here :-)

I was smugly happy about the Family First vote. They'd had at least two people there handing out how to vote cards all day, with some banners and posters. All for 51 votes. They might as well have stayed at home... One of my cronies spotted one of the FF folks serving beer to us at the after party at the RSL!!!!

There was a brief pause while the senate ballots were sorted. Turned out that this was a good idea - as I mentioned, five more lower house ballot papers turned up. And two of them were informal, which figures.

I called through the primary ballots to the campaign office.

So finally we could get on to the distributing of preferences. I'd brought a radio with me, so I could find out what was happening in the rest of the country. Good stuff, it would seem! Two seats falling in Victoria which was a surprise. I conveyed news to the others locked in as I got it, they seemed generally rather pleased.

I had to struggle to remember back to the high school, or where ever they taught us about proportional voting. After the the primary votes have been distributed, the candidates with the fewest ballots had their votes redistributed to the other candidates. In practice, they just pick two parties/people with the most votes and distribute the votes to them, based on who of the two most successful candidates they gave a higher preference to.

During this process, they discovered a bunch of Martin's ballots had got mixed up with the Greens pile! Martin's primary vote went up by about 50...

So. The CEC chaps votes when 2 to the libs, 1 to us. Which is not to say that they'd put Labor second, just they they'd put us higher than the libs! And so on through the Democrats (about thirty to us), Family First (mostly to the Libs). And finally the Greens. The poor greens scrutineer who was still there was very sad when this happened. Their vote at this booth was down from last time.... And their prefs fell to us in a big way! 371 of their 404 votes! Nice.

So the final two party preferred vote, at this (relatively small) booth was roughly:
ALP (my man Martin!): 1900
Libs: 600 and something.

Turns out there was a swing to Labor - if that's possible! - of about 4.6%, making Batman still the safest labor seat in the country! A clear majority of about 21%! Which, to put it another way, meant that really I was wasting my time, it was always going to be thus. Ah well.

So, with that, it was all over. The still had to count the senate ballots, but that was going to take hours more. I phoned through the final results and headed off to the party. I'd already been there from 6PM till just before 9PM! Long day.

It had been weirdly satisfying seeing democracy, raw actual ballot paper democracy, at work. This could have been a dull job, but in some ways it was exciting to watch that pile of ballots get higher and higher. Will put my hand up again next time around.

Fuck me, this is a long entry. Good night!

Iraq War Speech

Posted a youtoob video of this a few days back. But I found the complete text:

Senator Robert Byrd addresses the house in Feb 2003 before the invasion.

OK, no more politics for a while. Next post will be about the cats ;-)

House? Maybe house!!!

Saturday morning, Barbara and I looked a town house in Northcote. We almost didn't go because it didn't have a picture.

Lucky we did. It was perfect. Big bedrooms, two bathrooms, THREE toilets, alarm system, garage, big bedrooms, built in robes. Best of all, it's about 200 metres from my current flat! I could move with a trolley! And cheap too, for these day and ages. And it's a private rental, no fucking around with real estate agents!

We gathered together all our shit and submitted an application today. Fingers crossed!!! It would be ace, I'd even be able to keep my current phone number....

Should find out by Wednesday.