Martin’s Blog

Baracking for Obama

(that joke wouldn’t work in this country… it’s a pity).

After avoiding the election for the past 20 months I’m kind of excited about it today. I wonder if I should tell my students to vote for Obama? Damn liberal professors…

If you’re waiting you might enjoy this song from The Mountain Goats which will remind you that all politicians are vampires anyway.

Hooray!

Labor party won the Australian federal election with the ABC computer predicting 86 seats.

The senate looks a bit dodgy though. Something like 37 coalition, 32 Labor, 5 Green, 1 Xenophon, 1 Family First. So Labor will have to get all the minor parties to agree or do a deal with the opposition. And that’s the good senate news: the coalition will still have a majority up until partway through next year.

Ryan got a swing quite a bit lower than what was needed & the Queensland senate went 3-3 quite comfortably. At least Page went to Labor.

Election time

Election coverage starting – it’s midnight here, 6pm AEDST and thanks to the ABC I can get live streaming on the ‘net.

Antony Green has just come on. Soon we might get some of those ridiculous graphs where some country booth in Tasmania shows 83% to Labor or something.

Upcoming Australian Federal Election

The Australian Election is coming up and I’m registered as an overseas voter so I can exercise my democratic rights (when you move overseas voting is no longer compulsory so it’s a right not a duty). I’ll get a postal vote that I have to send to the embassy in LA. I’m registered in Ryan, as the last place I lived was Toowong. This is a pretty safe Liberal seat so it might not be worth my voting. However the Queensland senate election will be more interesting. From the Morgan polls it looks like Labor for 3 seats, the Liberal/National coalition for 2 and the final seat to Labor/Green/Democrat (with Pauline Hanson not getting the preference flows she needs for a quota despite polling 7.5% or so). Andrew Bartlett (the Democrat candidate up for reelection) has some interesting posts about this on his blog.

My favoured outcome would probably be a labor government with the Greens holding the balance of power in the senate. This looks to be reasonably likely but there is still a way to go in the campaign.