Category: Law and Politics

The End of the Begining

I’ve avoided any political blogging for a bit because it’s all been up in the air since the election. To recap – we’ve ended up with a hung parliament with a bunch of Independents (and one Green) set to decide who’s going to form government. The Green and some of the Independents have already made their choices, leaving just three holdouts to decide the fate of the nation.

Well, today these three are set to reveal their choice. What’s interesting is that one of them – the, shall we say ‘somewhat eccentric’ Bob Katter – has broken ranks and announced that he’s supporting Tony Abbot and the Liberal/National Coalition a full hour before the scheduled press conference. This puts the Coalition and Labor neck and neck on 74 seats.

So, does this mean that the other two Independents are supporting Julia Gillard and Labor, and Katter’s decided he doesn’t want to be associated with them? Or that all three are supporting the Coalition and Bob Katter is just being Bob Katter and jumping the gun for his own Bob Katterish reasons?

Stay tuned…

Later: Katter has now said if the other two go for Labor, he might change his mind…

Later: Tony Windsor has come out for Labor (he likes Broadband and Renewable Energy). Labor leads 75 to 74. The Coalition cannot form government!

Later: Windsor is still talking. He’s never going to have an audience this big again and he’s milking it for all he can get…

Still Later: A work colleague is going to register “tonywindsorpleaseshutup.com”

Again Later: Finally. Now for Rob Oakshot.

Later Later Later: It’s “there can be only one”, get your pop-cultural references right!

Later Still: Oakshot’s as bad as Tony!

Later: We don’t care about your children! Tell us who’s PM!!

Laaaaaateeeeeer: C’mon!

LATER: This is worse than Who Wants to be a Millionaire

later later later later: You can equivocate later! Just give us a damn answer you fool!

Later: We want to go home tonight too!!

Later: i can has gubermint plz?

Later: Finally! Labor has 76 seats! Labor and Julia Gillard it is! Hooray! (Mind you at this point I’d be happy with a new election just to stop Oakfield talking…)

WE HAVE A GOVERNMENT!!!

Well Hung

Election round up (of sorts) and things I must get done

Well that was a bit of an anticlimax. A hung parliament with power in the hands of a bunch of rural independents and one Green. Both Labor and the Libs are doing their best to cosy up to them, so it’ll be interesting to see who ends up forming government. At least the Greens managed to get up in the Senate – once the change over happens they’ll pretty much have total control of disputed legislation which can only be a good thing.

Bah. Politics.

There are a number of things I really have to do.

  • Update the Crash, and Package articles on the FreakWiki and finish the individual FreakAngel biographies
  • Upload and annotate the rest of the photos from my trip to the UK a YEAR AGO (I actually started on this over the weekend)
  • Write an email to Ali and Matt who’ve actually been waiting to hear from me for a YEAR
  • Write an email to Helen and Rob who’ve been waiting to hear from me for an unreasonable amount of time
  • Lose weight, get a girlfriend and generally sort my life out

The first four are at least feasible ;D

Regular readers (if there are any) will have noticed that I haven’t been updating on the weekends recently. There is a reason for this but I’m not yet ready to reveal it. I will however quote the Child and say “Things are going to change!”

Election 2010 – Beware of the Boats

Here we go again…

I’ve avoided blogging about tomorrow’s federal election so far, mostly since the campaigns have been pretty lacklustre and the differences between Labor and Liberal policies minimal at best. That said I’d prefer Gillard to get back in if only because Labor has made some kind of commitment to fighting climate change, whereas Abbott is on record as describing it as “a load of crap” (not that Labor’s policy is great, but it’s better than the Libs’).

There’s also something about Abbott I just don’t trust. I can’t pin it down but he comes across as sinister – as if he’s playing nice for the cameras but rubbing his hands and plotting something nefarious in the shadows. Sure, I wouldn’t trust Gillard as far as I could throw her, but being alone in a room with her wouldn’t give me the crawling heebie-jeebies the way Abbott would.

At least the blackout came in the other day, which means the TV and radio waves have been free of the endless campaign ads that’ve been driving us all mad. I tell you, if I hear one more scaremongering spiel about THE BOATS I think I’ll knock someone’s hat off with a cane (I’d have to procure a cane first of course, but I’m so sick of it all that I’d be more than willing to do so).

My ideal outcome tomorrow? Labor in the Lower House, Greens in the Senate. But honestly any outcome where the Mad Monk isn’t PM is OK with me.

Victory!

Huzzah!

Good news on the electoral system front!


GetUp! wins High Court challenge to electoral roll cut-off

The quick summary. It used to be that when an election was called you had seven days to get yourself on the electoral roll. Back in 2006 the Howard government changed the law so that you only had until 8:00pm of the day the election was called to get on the roll – a move many (including myself) saw as a way of disenfranchising voters who’d turned 18 since the last election and not got around to enrolling (young people being well known for voting against conservatives like Howard).

Now a High Court challenge has overturned the change and restored the seven day rule. Huzzah!

Also, the opposition has come out and announced they will not support the government’s mandatory internet filter. This pretty much kills it dead, regardless of who wins the upcoming election. Again, Huzzah!

Good times…

About Time

Here comes the new boss…

Well, I’m near death with swine-bird-buffallo flu (by which I mean a minor cold) and so not going to write much, but I can’t let the appointment of Australia’s first female PM pass unmentioned. Shame it was done via leadership upset rather than an election, but it’s still a start.

Now let’s see some movement on asylum seekers, climate change and killing off that internet filter eh?

We have to be Sssssssneaky!

Big surprise…

Here’s something interesting that’s come my way. Senator for Censorship Stephen Conroy has a blog, located at http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/. As is fashionable in these upstart, youngster blogs it has a tag cloud – over on the right – which displays the most common words and phrases used in said blog. All well and good.

Except you have a look at the source code. Here can be found a chunk of Javascript that generates the tag cloud, and which has a very interesting addition.

First up is a long string of phrases that can appear in the cloud. I won’t copy this in because it’s huge, but in the middle is the phrase “ISP Filtering” – the Government’s euphemism for their ridiculous net filter proposal. Further down is the code that adds up the totals for each keyword and prints out the 15 highest ranked…

for(var i=0; i<=15/*<-Important! increase this value by 1 everytime a keyword is excluded below*/; i++)
{
var z=0;
for(var j=0; j<split.length; j++)=”” {=””>
if (unique[i]==split[j]) {
z=z+1;
}
counts[i] = z;
}
var size = getTagClass(z);
//Customise the tag-cloud to display what shows up
if (unique[i] == “ISP Filtering”)
{
continue;
}
document.write(‘<a class=”‘+size+'” href=”%5C%22http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/search?q=%27+unique[i]+%27%22″>’+unique[i]+'</a> ‘);
}
document.write(‘</split.length;></p>’);
document.write(‘</div>’);
}

There, do you see that bit in red? That’s a neat little patch that prevents the phrase “ISP Filtering” from ever coming up in the cloud.

Fascinating no? The Government is filtering their own sites to prevent mention of their own web filter. Great work everybody!

On the Democracy Front

Threats are coming thick and fast…

Well thankfully it looks like South Australian Attorney General Michael Atkinson has backed down over his ridiculous and anti-democratic laws concerning political blogging. Excellent!

For those late to the party, Atkinson got some new laws put in in South Australia this week forcing anyone who wants to post anything anywhere online about the upcoming state election to sign their comments with their real name and postcode. It seems that he was motivated to create such laws because he believed the opposition were using a false identity to harass him in the comments section of a local newspaper website (oh poor diddums!). Apparently this wouldn’t threaten free speech in any way because people could still say what they liked, they’d just have to say who they were at the same time (the fact that the option of anonymity is crucial to genuine free speech seems to have evaded his tiny mind).

In the face of (unsurprising) public outrage he’s had to back down and promised to retroactively cancel the laws after the election. He’s attributing this outrage to the “blogging generation”, which only goes to show how hopelessly out of touch he is.

Additionally, in a nice bit of irony it turns out that the ‘fake commenter’ created by the Liberal Party to harass him in the Adelaide Advertiser is in fact a real person who lives less that 500m from his office. Nice to know he keeps in touch with his electorate.

Of course Atkinson is the same guy who’s singlehandedly preventing an ‘R’ classification for computer games anywhere in the country, apparently on the basis that anyone who wants to play anything more sophisticated that Mario Cart is a ravening sociopath. He also claimed that the gamers lobby (who are trying to get such a classification set up) are sending him death threats – on the basis of one threatening letter that turned out to be related to a completely different case.

What can you say but roll on the election!

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