Oh frabjous day!

No doubt Howard is getting a private “heckuva job” phone call from Bush. I suppose one key difference in the Kyoto debate between Australia and the US is that in the former, people could see the consequences of climate change up close whereas in the US, water shortages not withstanding, there’s no similarly obvious source of unease. There also seemed to be some symbolism in the APEC summit a few months ago, with Rudd speaking in Mandarin to the visiting Chinese while Howard and Bush did their usual love-in.

graphical map of electoral results:

News.com.au is a Murdoch organ, and much of those huge blue areas are probably empty outback. Does anyone have one of these plots by population?

Hallelujah!

Unfortunately, it looks like the Greens Kerry Nettle will lose her spot in the Senate, but they won a couple of others, and it’s going to be 37 coalition, 32 labor, 5 green, 1 family first, 1 nick xenophon. Which will be interesting.

I like Nick Xenophon, but he and steve fielding both ahve a wierd mix of policies. It will be interesting to see how it all pans out.

Climate change is definitely a consensus ‘we need to deal with this shit now’ issue in Australia in a way it isn’t in the US. I think J-Ho’s belated recognition of this was one of the factors that helped lead to the perception of him as out of touch, too old, time for a fresh face. That, plus the slow accululation of lies and skulduggery [brilliantly symbolised by Jihad Jackie Kelly and her husband and co in the last week of the campaign].

Does anyone else think Annabel Crabb’s election coverage in the smh has been fantastic?

Late last night, John O’Sullivan at The Corner:

I’m following the news from there via blogger Tim Blair and the online version of “The Australian.” Blair’s blog directed me to signs of a late swing to Howard. Labor’s lead of eight per cent last week has been cut to four per cent which, in the Australian system, is close to a dead heat. The Australian’s report online said: “Pollsters said the survey, which came a week after a Newspoll showed former diplomat Rudd ahead by a winning eight-point lead, reflected a major shift in the key states of Queensland and Western Australia.” It might be an exciting night, after all.

Good on you all! No offense, but Howard was an embarrassment. Who’s the incoming PM?

For many people, especially in the NT, this government’s “intervention” into Aboriginal communities since June was also a major issue. Although Rudd supported the move, he also said he would reinstate the permit system and CDEP-two of the most contentious points in the Coalition’s scheme.

Good news. I’ve been counting on the vorpal blades good sense prevailing since reading this letter to the editor in Sydney Morning Herald during a visit earlier this year.

City’s empty streets mirror Cheney’s empty rhetoric

Dear George,

Had a nice sleepover in this place called Sydney. They closed city streets and bridges and we could drive our cars real fast. Chatted to some really fine people and a couple of little guys with good and bad attitude. Most spoke American with an accent. We had fun.

Regards, Dick

More power to little guys with “bad” attitude.

s/4 people/6 people/g above, obviously. and clearly the pool cleaner voted for the opposing candidate, or may have just been an appliance.

Enoch Powell’s comment that all political careers end in failure is always worth remembering; but it is nice to see it illustrated so vividly!

actually, the one man in australian political history who managed to contradict that saying was howard’s political hero, and it was pretty sweet to see howard robbed of the chance to go out like him.

Bob B:: “Thanks for that, John.

For some reason, the news media in Britain have been presenting this election result today as an outcome of the Howard government’s refusal to sign up to Kyoto and Australia’s engagement in Iraq. The widespread opposition in Australia to Workchoices hasn’t featured in the broadcast reports I have listened to.”

The elite MSM in all english-speaking lands is oddly anti-labor, as far as I can tell. Odd, that. One might think that the elite corporate MSM reflects elite corporate interests.

“A possible excuse is that Workchoices legislation has been previously under-reported in Britain and – as I’ve just discovered – it is long and complex so it would be challenging to summarise Workchoices in short reports about the change of government.”

John Quiggin: “The other big losing issue for the government was the passage of a package of anti-union laws called Workchoices.”

Sounds like a concise and accurate description to me, definitely within the grasp of the average reporter and editor.

I’ll just throw in a Danish perspective and note that Anders Fogh Rasmussen now is one of the few political survivors of the Iraq war. Similarly AFR used to be closer to Howard and GWB line on climate change (Lomborg, anybody?) but he is now a repentant sinner and has even set up a Climate and Energy Ministry.

Unlike Howard, the present Danish government has never tried to introduce anything looking remotely like anti-union legislation.

How does it work in the Australian parliamentary system. Did Howard have to defend a real seat, where he actually lives? As I understand the system in Great Britain, the party leaders are more or less assigned safe ridings that they don’t have to live in. Is that right, and is it different in Australia?

s/4 people/6 people/g above, obviously. and clearly the pool cleaner voted for the opposing candidate, or may have just been an appliance.

he might have lived somewhere else and been one of the plucky “Flying Pool-Cleaners” who maintain a peripatetic service to the pools of the outback, communicating by wind-up radio.

So given unions (especially QLD coal miners) won it for the ALP, isnt there going to be a lot of tension with the Kyoto promises? It seems that under the Australian system, it is a lot less politically costly to blow off the Greens than the forego the organizational muscle – the preferences will go the Labour anyway.

My bet is that Rudd will begin to diversify Aussie power generation, while at the same time allowing megaton coal exports to China.

Watching it from the outside was weirdly reminiscent of Labour-with-a-U in 1997. Rudd’s visuals are Blairish, the gestures are Blairish, the collateral damage to the outgoing party are 1997ish, with Howard himself taking the place of Portillo.

(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’.

Yeah, I heard that too Timothy.

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.

Strangely enough FamilyFirst have serious problems with workchoices because it’s anti-family (and probably stops people getting to church on Sunday because they now have to work).

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.

workchoices or rather lack of them is what lost it for the liberals. As father of 3 adolescents voting in their first federal election I must say their desire to rid this country of this rotten piece of legilation was something to behold. The policy had the effect of turning our young into an underclass and stifled any ambitions for the future. They have endured the last 18 months of being treated as acommodity and not a valued employee, if they complained the perception was that the supply of labour was endless and they were expendable. they had no job security and were generally treated with contempt. As i work in a unionised full time job the policy had not affected me yet but changes were in the wind and were not nice at all. Good riddance to Howard, Costello and Workchoices

sg, I’m sure you are correct about the process, I too voted Green knowing it was hopeless then preferenced Labor in the hope they might change their policies if it was demonstrated many people only vote for them under sufferance. I’m probably a typical former Labor supporter (and I’m a former union official) too disillusioned with them to ever give them my primary vote again. For every decent Labor member there is still a right wing hack like Smith or Swan or a show pony like Garrett.

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.

the very least the parts that made unionism almost illegal will be repealed and collective agreements resumed.

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….

Lemuel, it’s not much of an exaggeration. Check this link for Australian Council of Trade Unions President Sharan Burrow’s speech to the ILO. This link and this link are academic papers covering similar concerns.

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.

It is no different in Australia. Johnny the Rodent had a safe seat when he entered it in 1974, but demographic change and redistributions slowly made it unsafe. He took it for granted for too long, and then by the time he realised the danger he was in, he couldn’t move to a new seat without looking like the cowardly wretch he is. So he had to tough it out. They spent $20 million losing that seat… with a 5.8% swing, so I suppose they bucked the state average a little.

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