Dramatic photos from The Age this morning show Melbournes enormous Port Phillip Bay on a tilt.
Readers were witness to the astonishing spectacle of giant cruise liner Sun Princess apparently motoring uphill to berth at Station Pier. There was no explanation for this perplexing gravity defying phenomenon in the text, but The Tilt as witnessed above, must surely come as some relief to Tim Blair, an expert on these things, as its about the only thing these days leaning to the right.
A collection of useful words arranged in satisfying ways for the benefit of future historians. (Also beneficial when faced with drunken red-faced Howard-Huggers at Christmas parties over the next month who embarrass the host by rudely asserting that Mr. Howard was the best Prime Minister ever)
Malcolm Mackerras (Presciently written in June 07)
Future history books will note that John Howard was one of two Prime ministers (the other being Ben Chifley) whose governments were defeated as a consequence of abusing Senate power, one of two (the other being Stanley Bruce) to lose his own seat at the general election defeat and one of two (the other being Robert Menzies) to serve 10 years in the top job.
Bryan “Ozpolitics” Palmer on the state of play with counting in doubtful seats as at 8:24 this morning:
The ABC Computer now has Robertson on the doubtful list (previously a Labor gain) after the pre-poll votes went in the Coalitions favour 53.3 to 46.7. It also has Solomon on the doubtful list after pre-poll votes broke 53.6 to 46.4 in the Coalitions favour.
Of the doubtful seats on the ABC computer, the Coalition is now ahead in Bowman, Dickson, La Trobe, Macarthur, McEwan, and Swan. Labor is ahead in Herbert, Robertson and Solomon.
Whereas the ABC computer has nine doubtful seats, the AEC only has seven. The AEC is not listing McEwan (Coalition retain) or Solomon (Labor gain) as doubtful. In McEwen, the pre-poll votes broke 55 to 45 in the Coalitions favour.
The ABC Computer is back to predicting 86 seats for Labor, down from its Monday high of 88. It is possible that the Labor win might end up being as low as 83 seats.
Bryan notes that the AEC was not listing Solomon (essentially Darwin and Palmerston) as a doubtful seat. Well it is now. As a result of the counting today of 1500 postal votes from overseas-serving military personnel, ALP candidate Damian Hale’s 2PP lead over CLP incumbent Dave Tollner has shrunk to just 428 votes.
Moreover, there could be as many as 5888 outstanding declaration votes still to count (all but 279 of them being prepoll rather than postal votes). If we apply the pre-poll vote percentages Bryan mentions above as the actual ones in counting to date (53.3 to 46.7), then on my calculation Damian Hale ends up winning by 39 votes!!!! However, if we do a finer-grained calculation and apply the higher percentage of 60% (which must certainly have been achieved by the postals counted today) to the remaining 279 postal votes, and the lower 53.3% actual figure to date to the remaining (maximum number) 5609 pre-poll votes, Tollner ends up winning by just 1 vote!!!! Tollner first won the seat by 88 votes in 2001.
PS Mind you I might be misinterpreting the figures. The AEC page for outstanding declaration votes in Solomon shows 7979 pre-poll “envelopes issued”, 5506 “envelopes received” and 2370 pre-poll ballot papers counted so far. But why are there so many more “envelopes” issued than returned? I always thought that pre-poll votes were ones cast before election day at designated pre-polling stations (usually AEC offices). If that’s right, why is there a discrepancy between the number of envelopes issued and received? If they’re lodged on the spot and not sent through the post, you’d expect the numbers issued and received to coincide. Are there any polling/scrutineering experts out there who can enlighten me?
Update (Thursday 5:21pm) - Hale’s lead in Solomon is down to just 262 votes after today’s counting. 500-odd pre-polls and 300-odd postals still to count, with a maximum of 1000 more postals still to arrive. If just about all those postals end up arriving, the postal votes alone could conceivably eliminate Hale’s lead completely if they split 60/40, so it’s still very much a lineball result, a handful of votes either way will decide it.
Miss Haversham refuses a proposal from Terry Sedgwick |
I was nearly going to call this the Year Zero edition of Missing Link, but it would give people the wrong idea. I’m not all that negative about Kevin07, and I’m certainly as happy as anyone that John Winston Howard has been retired.
This edition compiled by James Farrell, Gilmae, Saint in a Straitjacket, Darlene Taylor, Rebecca Leighton and Ken Parish, with editing by the latter. Sorry about the slight delay, the wiki crashed.
Election Stuff
So this is why all those dickheads in the national tally room were making so much noise and giving poor Kerry O’Brien the shits!
Of all the words that will be spilled over the next few days regarding the traditional post-election blood letting, none shall top those of Possum Comitatus:
Its a tough choice for the top job of the Chief Eater of the shit sandwich, and thats exactly what being the first Opposition leader of a routed government is all about.
Ken Lovell’s post election haiku captures the moment to perfection.
It’s over, writes Adrian Glamorgan, but he can’t forget that it was ‘people like us’ who kept it going for twelve years.
The Apathetic Ones worked at a polling booth on the big day. Sarah’s photo essay on the day’s events makes enjoyable reading, as does Gam’s list of the choice moments. This one conveys the flavour:
6) The atmosphere at Howard’s concession. It was like he was Jim Jones. This guy kept screaming about how much he loved Howard. I was expecting them to break out cups of poisoned kool aid any minute.
At the same time, Gam gives Howard credit where it’s due, while Slatts hopes for some equal opportunity scrutineering. And Sam ‘Yobbo’ Ward chips in with his favourite election day momento memento.
If John Howard were to summarise his legacy, he would emphasise economics. As he claimed in the election, Australia has a strong economy with low inflation and low rates of unemployment. With the benefit of asset sales and budget surpluses, the commonwealth has the financial capacity to do wondrous things, notwithstanding recent wasteful spending.
Yes, the economy has inflation pressures and faces possible interest rate increases. And there are uncertainties, this time the state of the world economy and the duration of the commodity boom. But these are hardly problems compared to the recession, high interest rates and inflation which the Hawke government inherited.
From Yesterday’s Fin.
The coalition also undertook important structural improvements. Howard never gave unions credit for their contribution to major economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, but he correctly saw that the behaviour of some unions – particularly those in the maritime and construction industries – was beyond the pale. And while Howards work-choices anti-union policies were excessive, Rudd benefits from a number of the Howard governments industrial relation changes – such as secret voting.
There is a bevy of other beneficial, though not startling, economic reform. These include welfare-to-work, an economically oriented immigration policy, low income tax offsets and the provision of family assistance. Although Howard never understood how to work within the federation – instead he made Canberra the font of policy and money – he did give GST revenues to the states.
This economic legacy is commendable. But Australia is more than an economy. Continue reading
Here’s the column foreshadowed in a previous post as published today in the Fin. I was only given 500 words, so whether or not you find it sweet, I had to keep it short.
Fiscal Problem – what Problem?
Its the alarm du jour. Going into the election with an overheating economy, the election became a fiscal auction. That was despite the unanimous agreement of those with any kind of reputation to protect that this was a recipe for further inflationary pressure, necessitating further tightening by the RBA.
Still . . . I’m not so sure theres a problem. Unless the world economy goes badly awry, the new Government should set itself the objective of facing the next election having kept its promises with increased budget surpluses. Continue reading
The site thoughtfully decided to drop off the line when I wasn’t available (it’s quantum locked) to look at it. It seems to be a DNS thing and we’ve changed uplinks for now. Unfortunately a simultaneous glitchiness at out wiki provider means Missing Link is probably going to be a bit late.
Edit: According to James Andrewartha, our man in the UCC, there was a power failure.
Also I’m thinking of doing some fairly complex maintenance in the next few weeks, which require a few hours of proper downtime. I’ll let you all know when that’s going to happen.
From today’s Crikey!
Brough, Pearson, Yunupingu rejected by Aboriginal voters
Editor of the National Indigenous Times, Chris Graham, writes:
I never quite understood how Mal Brough managed to escape genuine mainstream media scrutiny so often during his brief but, shall we say, “exciting” time in Indigenous affairs. I always just put it down to the “conga line of suckholes” phenomena identified by Mark Latham (albeit as a “Liberal” inclination in dealings with Americans… but as we all know a trait which also besets some in the media when confronted with a “Minister”).
The media liked Brough known as “Sideshow Mal” within Indigenous affairs – because he was always prepared to “say anything, do anything” to get a headline. That makes for great copy. Unfortunately for Brough, however, the media didnt get to decide the outcome of the contest for his parliamentary seat.
That privilege was afforded the fine residents of the federal electorate of Longman who, it turns out, decided that Mal Brough was even more odious than the “average” Queensland Coalition member… which is quite something.
Across the state, Queenslanders registered an eight percent swing against the Howard government. But in Longman, the swing against Brough was almost 11 percent. Even worse, of the 29 seats up for grabs in Queensland, only three recorded swings to Labor above 11 percent, and two of those were in seats where the sitting Coalition member had retired.
I accept that opposition to the NT intervention did not translate to any significant swing against the Coalition at a national level. But given the huge swing against Brough personally, its hard to escape the conclusion that his boys own adventure in the NT didnt play a part, albeit a relatively small one.
Perhaps, when it came time to vote, at least some of the good people of Longman stopped to think about the NT intervention and decided that using the sexual abuse of children for your own personal/political gain was really quite… well… disgusting. Continue reading