According to the AEC, nearly 400,000 Strayans voted in the first three days of pre-polling.
As of this writing, that means Antony Green would have a pretty good chance of putting us out of our collective hashtag auspol misery later this week, based on the assumption we keep that clip up.
That’d be about 10% of 15 million eligible voters rocking up early, all with a sense of getting this shit over with, stat.
“This shit” of course being six long years of the Coalition debacle - a rolling cavalcade of malfeasance, sneering corruption, palm greasing and fisting of the plebs on behalf of billionaire mates, all exacted by a mangy line up of low rent Dick Tracy heels.
I gritted my teeth and ran the pre-polling gauntlet last Thursday, keeping the urge to clothesline the reptile scum en route to the booth (the LNP spiv in our new electorate, Ryan, is one Julian Simmonds, who isn’t dog whistling AT ALL with his campaign slogan “protecting our lifestyle”) and did my intergenerational duty, even though the local Labor man is really short.
Seriously, though - how the fuck are Labor still in with a solid to likely chance of squibbing this thing?
Do you, also, get the sense of a graven slog emanating from the ALP camp?
Six years of the Libs cooking the joint and it’s still down to the razor’s edge, blancmange to the left, crooked tories to the right, and here we are - stuck in the coriolis en route to the existential s-bend.
This should be a cakewalk, whatever that is, for the ALP.
Have you looked at the incumbents, lately, those sad Chester Gould rejects?
Of course there’s our caretaker PM, the swivel-eyed Scummo, the cruel fundy overseer of turning back the boats (fair to say - Labor kicked off mandatory detention).
For a nation that could give half a tug of a dead dingo’s dick about god bothering, this happy clappy bigot has spent his time in the big chair tossing the salad of evangelical fuckheads like Franklin Graham, nodding to a toxic streak of homophobia as wide as Cronulla beach is long.
Oberführer Spud, the increasingly puce Barnaby, the aerodymamic puckered sphincter Michaelia, the shovel headed Canavan all shaft us with abandon, sneering with untouchable contempt - water buybacks, union raids, Reefgate, HelloWorld, colluding with Rupert, robodebt, sticking up for Pell, felching the fossil fuel industry - a rap sheet long and damning but ultimately meaningless to a supine electorate fixated on their own bottom line.
Inequality?
Indigenous recognition?
Incinerated planet?
Frippery.
My housing portfolio, my franking credits, my well upholstered rump trump your scratching it together er 25 years below the poverty line, suicidal.
Sure, Toney, flat earth wrecker of the discourse, is fighting for his pension with an uppity chick who dares question the fizzing santorum leaking from his boiled brain, and Frydenberg, the solar panelled sex machine (ironically a potential source of renewable energy) is copping it symbolically in well-heeled Kooyong from the Greens conscript Saint Burnside, but still…
Of late it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the Nats and the Libs, the LNP, are actively in cahoots with actual Nazis, for fuck’s sake.
Or, as the wizened sages in the meeja would have it, the “Far Right”, wherein the accepted wisdom is that sacks of rancid custard like Neil Erikson and the cartoonish dullard Blair Cottrell are somehow morally equivalent to yucky trade unionists or, even worse, actual socialists.
Just ask Professor Peter, he’ll word you up.
I met Julia last year - she’s a very nice lady from Adelaide, and was PM roughly an eon ago. Ms Gillard was in Shepparton, which is where Tim the hairdresser is from, to do a talk for International Women’s Day.
She took the reins of Beyond Blue from Jeff Kennett, too, and gave the odd good speech (but also cut welfare for single mums).
I’ve spotted her accomplice - and then assassin - Shill Borten, in the wilds of Maribyrnong over the years. Abiding memories: dandruff, double denim, “would rather be anywhere else” energy.
To his credit, he beat Toney in a fun run once.
Which must still burn.
Bill, the architect of a wasted, skullduggerous decade, maybe.
Sniff the wind and it seems like he might not even stick the landing here in ‘19, for all that.
But the alternative to sitting in neutral with Bill skulking around the centre while the planet accelerates into cinders is what?
We’ve got two daggy dad dickheads staking out the tiniest patch of rotten earth and marking it “the economy”, “immigration”, and “religion” while the planet heats up inexorably and we cheerfully volunteer ourselves as a test case for white nationalist eco-fascist siege mentality fomented in the face of the mass continental exodus climate crisis to come.
It’s always been thus, but full credit to Howard, via Hanson, dragging us entirely into the shitter we now call home, with a healthy dash of Stockholm syndrome to go.
We don’t demand much more than porridgy white middle management class apparatchiks around here, and are sure to hound women out of the game and strip the flesh off anyone reeking of progressive bones just when we need some piss and vinegar vision and revolutionary steel in the spine the most.
Our leaders are unremarkable save privilege and self regard, all craven ambition and utterly ill suited to lead in times like these.
These fuckers, mostly, have kids - what’re they going to tell them, when any coal’s the goal and let’s kick the can down the road until the sky rages red and George Miller is proven a Prophet?
True, the standard of journalism we’re beginning to reject - shit cunts like Bevan Shields, Joe Hildebrand, the Kennys, the Marist circle flog squad at the Oz, the alt-right rabble baiters Andy, Rita, Miranda et al, the faltering Murdochracy, and the deadshit cheer squads of commercial telly, with Aunty and the beast with two backs that is Nine/ Fairfax -
11 have more than their fair share to answer for.
Did someone say complicit?
Still - six years of captain’s calls, clownish idiocy and rank LNP incompetence and the ALP’s still on the precipice of converting all those gift horses into an own goal, to mangle a few sporting analogies (as Scummo is wont to do).
Many of us have never experienced the luck that this country’s allegedly imbued with, by virtue simply of not being white, straight and, preferably, male.
Politics have always been kinky-broken, and hashtag auspol is utterly depraved.
This election, in less than a fortnight, feels like a critical juncture that none of the key players are capable of addressing. If ever there was a time to go off brand and dig in for a proper fight for our actual existence, it’s now.
Pity, then, that our hypothetical progressives have self owned so badly over the last decade, and remain suicidally timid when it comes to breaking that cycle.
Show us a decent pie chart soon, for fuck’s sake, Antony.
Is it over yet?
