I am an idiot, too.

O.K., so I didn't check that the listed primary voting percentages added to 100 (and are already a percentage of valid counted votes, not ballots returned). Probably around half of Arkan's primary preferenced Labor, after all.

It is my melancholy duty to inform you that Andrew Bolt was right. The Sikhs in Cowper really are the thin end of a Labor-boat people wedge insidiously started by the Labor movement in the 1830s and only now bearing fruit. It's really no surprise they're such pansies on the issue of burning asylum seekers alive for fun these days, really, is it?

By way of apology to Bolt, allow me to present the world with irrefutable proof, courtesy of your the Maoist's ABC that muslims are stupid:

... and that "our" ABC is, in fact, run by rabid atheistic communists out to make decent, hard-working Christian folk out to be bigots or something...

Andrew Bolt is an Idiot.

Look, Jethro, those two numbers is equal, hic..

The results in Cowper hardly provides strong evidence that the Sikh community votes in a bloc (relative to the Coalition or Labor at least). Hell, the very reference he quotes seems to inicate that the majority of Arkan's primary vote can't have been Sikh anyway. Worse, if you assume that all Greens preferences and no CDP preferences went to Labor in Cowper, approximately 3/4 of Arkan's supporters must have favoured the coalition rather than Labor.

One wonders how some of the nasty little racists commenting would feel if they realised that, if anything, the 'Sikh voting bloc' in Cowper probably favours the Nationals.......

A post which promises, at some point, to be about the NBN.

Imagine a ball. In as much as I would like, in this story, for someone to be picking it up and this to be considered a legal move, imagine it is a rugby ball. Let's make it gray. With a red duck on it¹. Now let us imagine a game of rugby proceeding on a field around the ball. This game has become rather scrappy. So scrappy, in fact, that everyone has pretty much forgotten about the ball's existence in their determination to beat the crap out of anyone wearing different colours from them. Hell, some are even attacking even members of their own team with eye-gouging fury. I suppose I really could have just said it had descended into a brawl. I didn't, though, because I'm trying to be all evocative and shit. You O.K. with that, Mr 'Get the fuck on with the story'? Hey, man, fuck you.

Anyways, into this farcical scene steps a diminutive, bespectacled man in a suit. He makes his way over to the ball, dodging the odd fist, elbow and knee attached to various combatants who appear to be paying little attention to him. He stands over the ball, glances furtively in a number of directions then, tentatively, he picks the ball and holds it wonderingly for a while. He now has the power. He can decide the outcome of the game. With a new-found air of superiority and contempt he looks around him at a field of stupid, narrow-minded neanderthals in rugby uniforms who still haven't noticed that the kind of bespectacled nerd they used to beat up in high school has just taken control of their game. He smiles, shuts his eyes, and runs. So taken with the sheer joy of his situation he fails to notice the single nondescript tree standing just outside the playing field he has inadvertently plotted a course directly at. Again without anyone paying any attention to him, he runs directly into it with a soft, anti-climactic thud and falls unconscious on the ground. The ball rolls quietly away where it lies waiting......

An ode to non-boredom

Dave raises, I think, a fair question when he asks if a boring election campaign is necessarily a bad thing. To put matters another way, there is a reason that 'May you live in interesting times' is considered a curse. Given, however, that we do live in interesting times - I would submit that if a country finds itself failing to have an interesting election campaign, then the chances that this is due to a bi-partisan consensus having been struck on a discovered set of policy decisions that is actually most conducive to the long-term happiness of the country are very, very, slim. As far as Australia is concerned I would be interested in seeing anyone maintain, with a straight face, that this is the reason we are currently facing an election of coma-inducing dullness.

Politics is a game. It does not exist to safeguard our happiness. It does not exist to discover the best solution to the problems the people effected by it face. It just exists. Some countries play this game by rules which are more conducive to the well-being of its participants¹ than others, democracy being a pretty good innovation along those lines, but all dull contests really mean is that dull tactics are sufficient for the goals of those most actively playing it. Stability is a very, very different thing from optimality.

In the Australian context, we see two major parties in a state of near alliance, and I would submit that this is because they have reached a point of equilibrium where they feel, with good justification, that any major divergence on either of their parts will be penalised, not because they've struck policy gold.


¹And in all countries, the list of participants in the game extends to the entire population, whether they like to admit it or not. In Australia, for instance, we don't. We pretend that the manner in which politicians consistently behave (and the manner in which politics is reported) in the long term has absolutely nothing to do with us.