I’m sure it’s not the only time in his miserable life that Johnny thought money could buy him friends…

That’s not the way it works in Britain – you don’t get assigned a new seat when you become party leader. Tony Blair, for example, was elected MP for Sedgefield in 1983 – and he stayed as Sedgefield MP for the rest of his career. Brown changed constituencies, but only because they were reorganised.
Now, it turns out that party leaders tend to come from safe seats. Neil Kinnock came from the Labour heartland of South Wales. But that’s largely because, if you’re in a marginal seat, you probably won’t be there long enough to become a senior politician.
I can’t think of a recent British election in which the PM lost his seat – even in the 1997 and 1945 landslides, Major and Churchill were re-elected.

The most bizarre clauses are those fining workers $6000 for even raising certain issues in negotiations. Of course it still may not be as bad as parts of the US but in Australia it constitutes the destruction of over a century of industrial relations progress. If nothing else it begs the question of why any business would believe that you can have organised capital without organised labour.

You’re kidding, right? exaggerating for effect?

Recommend anyything to read on this? It’s frightening to imagine a first-world country even more anti-union than the contemproary US….

Plus of course we have to ready ourselves for what some are predicting will be an epidemic of high inflation, and in our case the collapse of the mining boom as China’s economy slows under the burden of inflation. As usual, Labor has inherited an economic disaster from the Conservatives. They love nothing more than to wreck our nation, those dirty bastards…

To lemuel pitkin, workchoices is going to be partially reformed by Labor but not entirely repealed. At the very least the parts that made unionism almost illegal will be repealed and collective agreements resumed.

Even if in the end this wasn’t a climate change election I think everyone should consider that the next few certainly will be. I think the stage is now set for the Liberals to slowly disappear entirely, Labor to remain as the party of business and the right (no contradiction here, unions and business are mated for life no matter what Liberals might think) and the Greens will become the second major party with their credibility and power rising each election as climate change bites more. The dynamic is no longer a battle between classes for a share of the spoils of industrialisation, it is a battle between an individualist consumerist model of society and a co-operative ecological model.

A lot of people seem to think the chances that Labour will listen to this protest vote are pretty slim. But in his victory speech Rudd said first that he will “govern for Indigenous Australians”, which is a pretty strong signal. He has committed to removing combat troops from Iraq and repealing much of workChoices, he has a clear agenda for education and health and excellent people (Roxon, Wong, Gillard etc.) to push those policy changes. I think things may well change for the better after 11 years of panic-mongering, economic mismanagement, and infrastructure decay. At last!

I would have thought the result was caused by work choices until I looked at the actual vote and you find that much of Labor’s majority was delivered by Greens’ preferences. To complicate things further, the Greens are not a single issue party and are picking up a broader range of votes, up to 20% or more in a few electorates. Probably more people are waking up to the fact that Greens policies are similar to Labor’s policies back in the days when Labor was a centre left party, before the corporate right got complete control of Labor. Some of the unions are now making moves to back the Greens rather than Labor and it was interesting that the unions ran their own campaign (“your rights at work”) separate to the Labor campaign, they don’t trust Labor to deliver for them any more.

I went to the abc elections site, and they had the liberal in front with 72%[?] of the vote counted, but the greens were pretty close.

It’s complicated I think, because they’re projecting how preference flows occur, when in fact some people vote below the line, and that can affect the order in which people get knocked out, which affects where the voted go etc etc. It’ll probably be a week before we know for sure, but I imagine we’ll get an idea of whether the greens have a shot in the next day or so.

I really hope that happens, having to work with Steve Fielding would be bloody annoying.

(I’d heard that Alan Milburn was part of the Kevin07 branding, and you could even say that the QLD resurgence is part of another north-eastern political base.)

The cognoscenti at PollBludger are more or less split on the prospect of a double dissolution in the summer, though that depends on the shape of the Coalition, particularly now that Costello has said he doesn’t want the leadership job. It was pretty clear last night, though, when his speech was missing the name ‘John Howard’.