Anyway, my take:
– ALP is a mess, agree, and their close ties to the unions, who are turning out to be more and more corrupt the more people look at them, won’t help
– Marriage equality I think the Libs aren’t so far off as people think. My take is that they’ll make no moves in this area, but they’re also not going to try to roll anything back. That’s actually the same position the ALP have. I’d prefer to see some change in this area, but I’m not sure it’s that big an issue for most in Australia – Australia is a pretty LGBT friendly place in general
– Refugees and asylum seekers is an easy one to chatter about, but the reality is that people who get on boats often drown, and get taken advantage of. So we need to separate those who get on boats from those who come via other channels. Australia takes a lot of refugees from other channels, and generally treats them pretty well. It is trying to avoid people arriving via boat. To me boats are a classic slippery slope – you can’t really sit in the middle. You either need policies that stop the boats (so people stop dying), or you need policies that make boats as easy as possible (so people stop dying). Making them easy would mean legalising people smuggling, and stopping impounding the boats / imprisoning the captains when they arrive. Then people could get on a safe boat with a competent captain, and travel at a time when the seas were calm. Of course, the number of arrivals would go through the roof. To me, the only politically feasible option is stopping the boats.
– Indigenous politics is a lot harder than it looks. The reality is that “indigenous lifestyle” and “indigenous culture” are not compatible with first world standards of living. You can’t have first world life expectancy and first world social norms without cultural change, and nobody is prepared to engage in culture change. Again, we’re stuck in the middle, attempting to deliver first world living standards to a group of people who are trying to live a communal/tribal lifestyle in the bush. It doesn’t really work, and it’s too scary to try and fix it.

What a concise and brilliant way of explaining it. Sell that line to Abbott. Seriously. Why the hell hasn’t somone in the Liberal Party thought of putting it like that?!

Yeah, I’ve considered taking time off work and volunteering. They sometimes look like a bunch of amateurs. But I still find the Libs just a touch too…..conservative for my liking. Clearly better than the ALP in my mind, but I’m not convinced I’d fit in within a room full of libs. We’ll see.

I’m off up north next week, back late Feb. Email when you have a minute: FirstnameLastname at hotmail.com and we’ll catch up when I’m back.

I’ll resist the temptation to divert this thread into a discussion about the Perth election. No doubt we can have a good discussion about that, and a million other issues, offline

I’d have been much happier if McGowan had said he was canning the entire bloody silly scheme. My Aboriginal friends pointed out that they well know that if you carve an artificial chunk out of a river bank that size in the hope of catching fish, the water keeps flowing downstream and just pools off to the side, with a few eddies here and there, and what you get is a pool of stagnant stink and lot of mosquitoes.

Not to mention we have no need of towers built right on the waterline. If Perth took a look at Wellington especially, or even Auckland, it would see how to take advantage of a water frontage. Very disappointing Labor wouldn’t put an end to it, especially as I know their very good Perth MP John Hyde has been busy highlighting the fallout from it (like the ferry captain who now has to swim to work!) including the unnecessary additional congestion.

I did like the caller on 6PR who suggested that Barnett’s big policy announcement in the last week would be that the new stadium will be called “Prince William Oval”. That’s exactly the sort of toadying in which he specialises.

Did you like Mark McGowan’s suggestion yesterday that, if elected, he would consider renaming Elizabeth Quay (although he wouldn’t be drawn on specific suggestions)? Isn’t it great that a state election is being fought on the issues that really matter? Do you have a sense of what the election result might be?

Most of the Oz LGBTs that I know will probably be voting OzGreen, given that it’s the only party that unequivocally supports marriage equality.

I see. So what you’re saying is that most “Oz LGBTs” that you know are single-issue voters? Do they leave it up to other Australians worry about big-picture issues like the state of the economy then?

Craig Thomson arrested for fraud. 150 charges.
Polling over the last six months show a 5% swing to the Libs. Labor reduced to 51 seats vs 91 for the Libs. That excludes the independents who will go too. As for Malcolm Turnball he may as well be in the ALP. He is yesterday’s man.
The Greens will be wiped out.
Gillard called the date so she can avoid a by election . The odds are Slipper will resign. He is truly stuffed because of the sexual harassment case against him.
Lots of popcorn to eat on this one . Our Oz cousins are fed up with the endemic Union corruption.
Also Gillard is being investigated for preparing and using a Power of Attorney illegally to access Union funds which were gathered fraudulently .
It will be a wipeout for the ALP.
Good job. Couldn’t happen quickly enough to a bunch of corrupt liars

Befre those changes there were basically no boats – so whilst the policy was tough, it actually applied to nobody.

What a concise and brilliant way of explaining it. Sell that line to Abbott. Seriously. Why the hell hasn’t somone in the Liberal Party thought of putting it like that?!

The state Lib govts aren’t helping…

Arrrghh don’t get me started on “emperor” Barnett in the West with his grandiose and totally unnecessary “Elizabeth Quay” development choking city traffic while roading infrastructure cries out for money, his kneejerk law ‘n’ order policies, his foisting of government service delivery onto the grossly underfunded social services sector, his seat-sniffing Treasurer, his…

Boats will be a problem too. The hippy part of Labour decided that the Lib policy sounded too tough, so they changed it. Befre those changes there were basically no boats – so whilst the policy was tough, it actually applied to nobody. (The few who did come in on the boats mostly got a better deal than the policy claimed to – it was all about talk tough but not being so tough in practice). The Labour policy basically opened the floodgates again, and they can’t fix it. That will be an election issue, particularly as the cyclone season ends and the boats start up again.

Defence could be an issue, Defence as a % of GDP is the lowest since before WW2 I think. This is part of the budget savings that the govt ran (not necessarily bad), and partly because the ALP have no interest in defence, and are mostly concerned about how they can use Defence to create jobs – particularly through industry policy that drives building locally things that could be bought cheaply offshore (submarines for example).

Finally, the weight of a not particularly competent govt will take it’s toll – there are lots of examples of incompetence to point to.

Against Abbott, we have a team that’s a bit lightweight in places (Hockey for example keeps saying some stupid things, and generally comes across as a fat stupid guy – he’s sort of the Gerry Brownlee of Australia in that sense). He’s pushing too hard on carbon tax when that boat has sailed (no votes in it – those who hate it already vote Lib, it turns off many of the rest. So whilst it’s a good idea to get rid of it, it’s bad politically to keep on about it). Better to point out the carbon tax is incompetently administered (paying more in compensation than it’s going to take in in tax once the price floats). The National Broadband Network is a problem for the Libs – it’s a waste of money but it’s all off-balance sheet, so there’s no savings in killing it, and those people who have it love it (who wouldn’t want govt subsidised broadband).

The Libs seem to have a weak economic team at the moment, they don’t seem to have the analytical skills to put together an alternative budget that’s sensible. They’ll get caught out again on their numbers, and they’re morons for allowing that to happen – logically the Lib supporters club must include some accountants, economists and the like who could help out.

The state Lib govts aren’t helping, Campbell Newman swung the axe on govt jobs in Qld, the NSW guys have been untidy (but there’s a corruption scandal running about the previous Labour govt, so still probably on average positive for Lib), Victoria is a mess and would go back to Labour if an election were held today. That leads to a meme of “Liberals just slash jobs”, and even though most people don’t like govt employees, it’s still a bad meme when you’re trying to sell hope.

Lots of interest I’d say in this campaign.

Ultimately this election will be won and lost in Western Sydney I think, and they care about immigrants, roads, trains and jobs. So that’s where the election will be fought.

And whether Abbott has genuinely changed the views he held when he was considering the priesthood as a career or is pretending to doesn’t really matter – he knows they aren’t accepted by the majority of voters – or his own caucus – and wouldn’t dare try to implement them as policy.

OTOH Gillard has a recent and ignoble record for saying one thing and doing another. Call it lying or call it expediency but it’s undeniable.

Most famous is the “no carbon tax under a government I lead” pronouncement on the eve of the last election, but there are others. Her broken pledge to independent Andrew Wilkie to introduce tough “precommitment” rules on pokie machines for instance.

Provided the Liberals maintain better discipline than at the last election – and I think they will, since last time the Turnbull/Abbott battle was still raw – Abbott has a very good chance, despite his own polling suffering as a result of the “misogynist” label being trotted out repeatedly by the Greens and Labor.

Labor and the Greens, incidentally, got things off to a fine start by lambasting the PM’s partner Tim Mathieson for an off-the-cuff joke when spruiking prostate cancer checks for men, when he told cricketers they should “may try to find an Asian female doctor with small fingers”. He was forced to apologise the next morning and the PM spent the day expressing her “disappointment”, then Greens leader Senator Christine Milne took it upon herself to tell the entire Australian nation they had to change their ways and abandon their larrikin humour, all the while adopting the purse-lipped demeanour of a school teacher remonstrating with Year 1s. So they’re off to a fine start…

edit: Oh, and I agree with everything PaulL says above too. Excellent analysis.

Against that, we have the fact that the Libs are known chokers who can’t close the deal at the last moment. Also, once the unions work out that it’s Gillard (who they don’t like much at the moment) or Abbott, they’ll swing in behind again, and that will bump up Gillard’s numbers. The whole “cant’ work with women thing” will also get a lot of air play – the political director in Gillard’s office ran the exact same campaign against Cameron in the UK when he was director there. I think it’s closer than people think, I’m still cautiously optimistic for an Abbott win.

I feel like Abbott will be a better PM than opposition leader – he is thoughtful and I think sensible. Against that would be the knowledge that I thought Gillard would be an OK prime minister (not that I would have voted for her), and she’s turned out to be rubbish. On paper she had strong political instincts, a good ideological side (i.e. should make “sensible” long term decisions that reflect her politics), and a set of principles. In practice she flummoxed every hard political call, and made stupid short term decisions for poll driven reasons. My concern is that I sort of like Abbott for the same reasons, and he might similarly turn out to be a complete disappointment.