This morning. ABC News 24. A post election interview:
Interviewer: So can you give me an idea of some policies?
MP: “To start negatively… the decision to deregulate the dairy industry… now the pain and misery that occurred there… Then of course the decision to import bananas from overseas… 7 — 8000 Australians are going to lose their jobs.
Interviewer: Do you favour Labor’s broadband plan or the Liberals on this?
“Look I’m not entirely familiar with it I haven’t been following this… But I do know if you’re talking about privatisation… I mean the Telstra privatisation was absolutely terrible for rural Australia.”
Interviewer: So would you ever agree to Labor forming minority government?
MP: “Absolutely. The gong goes to whoever is going to help us [rural people] survive.”
“I couldn’t care less if they were the Labor Party, the Liberal Party… the Calathumpian party… or… or the Mongoloid Party… I will work with either side.”
Interviewer: “Will you be talking to fellow independents Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor later today?”
MP: “We will most certainly be talking over the next 24 hours but they’re probably a lot like me, answering phone calls from wellwishers, powerful people… the media… But if we are indeed seeing the reconstruction of the country party… then this is a country party that will look after the worker, and the retiree, just as much as it will look after the farmer…”
Interviewer: “Thank you…”
MP: “…and God bless the listeners.”
That, good citizens, is one of the most powerful people in politics as of last night. Bob Katter is one of three independents who, along with the new member for Melbourne, the Greens’ Adam Bandt, and perhaps Andrew Wilkie in Denison, now hold the balance of power in this country.
Let’s recap.
The postal vote and pre-poll vote count will take days, if not weeks, but as of publication time:
ALP: 72 | Lib: 73 | Ind: 4 | Greens: 1 | In doubt: 3
As of late last night the Greens had achieved a 3.8% overall swing, earning a primary vote of 11.5%. They’ve boosted their Senate numbers to nine, ensuring them the balance of power in the Senate.
We are not making this up. Welcome to your new reality.
We repeat: we are not making this up.
At least Al-Qatar knows what broadband is, unlike Action Abbott.
This is a flaw of the 2PP system as a whole, of course — instead of a decent proportional representation system which is inherently more democratic, and would involve more minor parties from across all electorates, we now have a tiny handful of Independents with a great deal of power, which will only result in horsetrading and massive porkbarreling to 3 electorates.
It’s time to reform the entire lower house 2PP system and come up with a decent proportional system.
That means the current 2PP preferential algorithm of selecting the two frontrunners to allocate preferences to would also have to be revised.
Having said all that, Bob Katter’s heart seems to be in the right place, in a bighearted rural Australian kind of way, and perhaps some of his ideas could transcend his electorate around protecting Aussie jobs and heading off the winds of ‘free market reform’ that have so badly infected both Lib and Lab in recent years/decades.
An example is the lock, stock and barrel sell-off of Telstra by Howard, as Katter points out, where a responsible sell-off would have at least involved breaking Telstra up into infrastructure and service companies, with national universal obligations and guarantees at the infrastructure end. Currently Telstra has a major conflict of interest and monopoly abuse powers which must be dealt with soon. Further, there is no free market competition in the regions and rural areas, Telstra is often the only game in town, or you can have say slow Edge services from Vodafone instead of 3G and no reception in many areas.
So the Libs have given us the shoddiest and most irresponsible comms monopoly sell-off ever, Thatcher-style, and the Labs have come up with an internet filter. Maybe we need a few independent voices at last, Crikey. The more the merrier.
The same pattern of poor policy and ‘crash or crash through big ideas’ to upstage the Oppostion occurs over and over again in Australain politics, in a competitive rather than cooperative system. Our polished spin hiding vested interest agendas and corporate party donors is better than your polished spin. This pattern and pathology of single-party rule, and Tweedledum-Tweedledee policies and constant adversarial argumentation should end for the benefit of the actual (voting) community.
The Independents with less apparatchik-devised spin, less ‘on message’ party line polished rhetoric and more ideas should be seen as a breath of fresh air in Parliament.
I am not making this up. Now let’s ‘move forward’, shall we?
Apart from the broadband stuff, I can’t see what’s wrong with his comments. De-regulating dairy so that Woollies can make more money seems wrong.
I am a staunch pinko, but I can’t see why someone standing up for their electorate is a bad thing.
“Brian Haradine in an hat and no fences”?
Hey, what was the matter with the broadband stuff, Biscuit? Seemed to be the one area he made sense. (in that he favours the NBN over Abbott’s 2 cans and wet string approach)