Yesterday was Election Day in Australia.
The Campaign
It was one of the most uncertain elections in my memory. The campaign by the Labor party (formerly the opposition) was strong. Although, I found a lot of it to be misleading. All of the television adverts I saw misrepresented our government system. They seemed to summarise all the issues against the Liberal party/Coalition, without presenting any real facts. Then they said, “So you want us to vote for you and then you’ll retire and leave us with Peter Costello, who I never would have voted in as Prime Minister. I don’t think so Howard.”
Their campaign suggested that our system votes in Prime Ministers, or even parties. It doesn’t. You shouldn’t vote for a party (unless you truly know nothing about your electorate’s candidate), you should vote for the candidate you want in your electorate’s seat – their vote counts just as much as the Prime Minister’s when it comes to passing bills in parliament.
From what I can figure out, the Prime Minister is the face of the government and of the country. He doesn’t have any sole responsibility over important decisions.
I didn’t see much campaigning for candidates in our electorate, except for the minister we already had, Philip Ruddock, who was voted back in. I got one flyer for the CDP candidate running for Senate. Their immigration policies were rather disturbing, and not something I could get behind.
The Coverage
The television coverage after the counting started was appalling. There was so much speculation without real facts that we couldn’t understand what was going on. The updates on the website said that 75% of the votes had been counted, but they were saying with certainty which seats were won – including claiming that the former Prime Minister had lost the seat of Bennelong. However, there’s only a few hundred votes in it, and pre-polls and postal votes yet to be counted.
The main reporters for the television coverage seemed to be reporting from the “counting room”. Every time they crossed live to one of the candidates, people in the counting room would raucously clap and cheer. It was impossible to hear the presenters or the candidates. It was freakin’ ridiculous.
There was also an awful segment in which the names and photographs of previous members of parliament who’d lost their seats were put through the shredder. They actually had a picture of a shredder and made shredding noises. Talk about ungrateful and disrespectful!
The Next Day
Thankfully this morning seems to be a little less speculative. The Sydney Morning Herald published that the seat of Bennelong isn’t certain yet.
So, here’s hoping that this change in government is a positive change.
Hey Kriso,
I agree that it was an uncertain campaign, although Labor lead right to the end in opinion polls and the like. You are correct that we only vote for our local representative, so only about 80,000 people in Bennelong actually get to vote for or against Mr Howard, however a national campaign needs a focal point, and the relative merits of Kevin Rudd vs John Howard as leader of the country was one of the focal points, which is where those ads came from. Other ideas were the Libs’ “Who do you trust on…” and Labor’s focus on Kyoto and climate change. We don’t vote on any of those specific issues, and in fact it’s highly unlikely that the person you are voting for will have any say in their party’s policy either, but in the marginal seats (almost every seat other than Berowra or Bradfield) each party’s position on these kinds of issues can make all the difference for the undecided voters.
I agree that the CDP did not put the best face forward with their anti-Muslim policy, nor did Channel 7 with their “shredder”. When in doubt, always switch to the ABC! Having said all that, the people who watch and study elections (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psephology) can sometimes make predictions well before you or I could because they know that, for example, in a particular seat, the polling booths in the western bit always vote one way or the other, so they can extrapolate from there and so on. They are quite clever people.
Benelong is still too close to call, but I’m giving it to Maxine. Johnny should have retired a year ago.
.e
For the coverage we were watching the ABC… We only briefly switched to seven, that lasted less than a minute. Kerry O’Brien got frustrated with all the stupid cheering and took a verbal swipe at networks that resort to gimmicks because they don’t trust their viewer to care about the election otherwise.
Kerry also had my accidental (as in not what he meant to say) quote of the election. “And it certainly looks like a strong swing to the ABC”
The person above was right about people who study elections knowing the results fairly early in the count based on information about indervidual polling booths (they did mention that on the ABC a few times – “it looks like a 15% swing to labor but its mostly the small booths in the south that have come in, and they typically vote labor – the swing will most likely be much smaller than that”)
Ed – yeah, they were ahead in the opinion polls… just not in my opinion so I didn’t believe it 😛 They could very well have had learned people making well educated guesses about the results, but from where I was sitting it looked like a bunch of people who liked the sound of their own voices yammering about things when it was just too early to say. For the most part, a lot of what they said wasn’t clear that it was predictions, it looked like facts until you checked the tally website.
David – sounds like the ABC had a much more level headed coverage than the “commercial” stations.
Did Kerry realise he said ABC? I love it when people say a word that completely changes the meaning of their sentence and they don’t know it!
Yes
Wayne Swan has been a master of self promotion at election time by appearing in these election night talking head sessions. I wonder whether he would attend the opening of an interesting letter if it was televised.
For years, he has come across as a dill in these sessions. Now he is treasurer! Watch the spot
Elections fascinate me. Other Aussies I “talked” to seem to be optimistic about the new PM. I hope he works out.
stirrer – I didn’t think the cabinet could be chosen until the election was unambiguously declared. How do you know he’s treasurer?
Jeff – Yes, the general attitude was quite positive, as reflected by the enormous swing towards “new leadership”. To be honest I thought it was going to be much closer than it was. Things should work out… otherwise a lot of people will feel stupid for kicking the coalition out on their butts!