So Australia voted in the Federal Election. If you're reading this from elsewhere and are not familiar with the events leading up to it, this quirky Taiwanese animation will sum it all up for you in under 2 minutes. I'm not sure how Taiwanese computer geeks are able to succinctly analyse everything so much better than any Australian news service.
Anyway, so we had the election and the result was... um, no, there wasn't one. We are now in the unfamiliar position of having a hung parliament, meaning that neither major party had enough votes to govern on their own and now must negotiate with independents and the Greens.
So how is this parliament hung? Is it related to donkey voters, or dissatisfaction with standing members? Given Rudd's hard dictatorial approach to government, was it right to give him the sack? Or was it the overall swing to the right, and the major parties' hard-headed approach to people coming here illegally, that has led to this state of electoral dysfunction? Did Julia Gillard really blow it?
Okay, so now that the bad sexual puns are out of the way (count 'em up, people), let me say that while a hung parliament is an extraordinary result, it is the result of a very ordinary election campaign. Somehow within the space of a year, Labor managed not only to destroy their record popularity, but to make Liberal leader Tony Abbott seem like a viable candidate to be PM. That is quite a feat.
But really, the fact that neither party could muster the votes to govern in their own right reflects the fact that neither could make the electorate care either way. Part of the rise of the Greens in this election is because at least the Greens appear to believe in something.
And so I voted Green. Not that it mattered really; my electorate has so many rich people in it that the conservatives could run a chimp as a candidate and still win. I may as well have voted for the Sex Party.
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