I’m going to discuss this with particular reference to Arctic Monkeys, because I have a lot of music by them in my library and the issue particularly comes to my mind when I’m listening to them. To be fair, it’s not like any other artist I listen to is much better on this front¹, but it is so glaring with Arctic Monkeys because they have song after song about heterosexual relationships — seemingly every single permutation of personalities you could imagine, from men who adore their lovers and feel totally lost without them (“505″, “Cornerstone”), to men who rape women and think it’s OK and she might even enjoy it (“Balaclava”).

And it’s like, clearly these songs are not all reflections of your own personal attitudes². Clearly therefore, if you can invent these characters whose heads you get inside to write these songs, you could broaden your horizons and write about a man who was interested in men. But you don’t.

Obviously it’s the prerogative of the songwriter to write about whatever grabs them, so my attitude’s not so much indignation that Alex Turner doesn’t as a general sense of irritation that almost no one does. 10% of the population is LGBTI, and I’m pretty sure that among the circle of people I know, the figure is higher. Logically then, at least 10% of relationship songs should be about same-sex relationships, or transgendered or intersex people (as the normal people they are, not oddities).

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Because I think we all know that the standard of music we get like this is… well, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl”. Seriously. I mean I can think of a handful of songs that aren’t too bad, like Mika’s “Billy Brown” or the Kinks’ “Lola”… and… ok I guess I can think of a handful assuming the hand in question has lost three fingers. I mean I don’t keep religious track of the topics of all the songs in my library, so there could be more, but this is pretty dire.

It is another sign, too, of the way same-sex relationships are not respected in our society to the same degree as opposite-sex ones, and LGBTI people are not respected to the same degree as others. In Australia this is essentially mandated at the top through the ban on same-sex marriage that’s been maintained for six years now — in a culture where marriage is commonly perceived as the “pinnacle” of a relationship, the fact that same-sex couples are banned from reaching this “pinnacle” is a clear sign that the powers that be are pushing the idea that these relationships are inherently inferior.

Which they’re fucking not, of course, and it’s outrageous to push this idea. Utterly outrageous.

And I feel that popular music is a reflection of this ideology that opposite-sex relationships are “normal” and same-sex relationships are “other”. (And as for the “TI” part of “LGBTI”, they seem to — wrongly, of course, and shamefully — not even be on the chart.) And I mean, lots of things are but this one feels particularly annoying because it would be so easy to defy the norms and do something different. So very, very easy.

And honestly, what I really want is music that reflects the normality of same-sex relationships. Arctic Monkeys’ well-worn trope of pining after women (“Mardy Bum”, “505″, “Cornerstone”…) could work equally as well if the subject of the song was male rather than female (with some lyrical changes because I mean, as far as “Cornerstone” goes, you would not be approaching random women nor the sister of your love, intending to pretend they were that lover and call them by that name, if he was male). But thematically it would totally work.

I think the reason there isn’t all this music like this is pretty self-evident — the stigma of same-sex relationships as “abnormal”, encouraged and promoted by the elites who maintain bans on same-sex marriage, same-sex couples adopting, and all of this rubbish. But there are ways to challenge this. And one of these ways, of course, is sticking it to these stupid norms and stereotypes and defying them as they ought to be defied.

It’s also important to fight in concrete ways of course, such as by attending Equal Love rallies whenever they’re called, and being prepared to fight homophobia wherever it appears… and as a music listener as opposed to a musician, that’s probably going to be my contribution to the struggle, anyway. But if I was a musician, this would be a norm I’d really like to break. This is too absurd.

1. With the possible exception of Mika but that hardly counts because I just listened to Life in Cartoon Motion today for the first time since like… 2007.
2. Well I fucking hope not, based on “Balaclava”.

Anyway…

Despite my pessimism late on Saturday night, Australia might not be as fucked as initially thought. The independents are demonstrating a little more antipathy to the Coalition than I was expecting, and while they are still conservatives and Katter is a nutcase, it means Labor still has a chance and that’s important. The fact that all three of these independents care so strongly about telecommunications in the bush is something that bodes well for Labor too, because Labor has its NBN policy that the Liberals have promised to scrap… which, I can well imagine, would infuriate rural MPs. The Liberals’ idea of throwing $6bn at corporations to “encourage” them to develop broadband would likely only benefit the cities, where the profits lie. Whereas a government-mandated network with a clear focus on rural areas — despite the $44bn cost — is going to be more effective and more equitable to rural populations.

So that’s good.

Too bad they’re basically still stupid-ass conservative hacks.

Furthermore, the 74-71 Coalition-Labor projection seems to have been inaccurate, with it being more like 73-72 now (and since Melbourne’s newly-elected Greens MP has thrown his support behind Labor (seemingly in defiance of Bob Brown, hahaha too bad man, too bad), that sort of comes to 73-73) the independents can basically choose whoever they want. That’s the three stupid-ass conservative hacks plus the Hobartian independent who, basically, no one knows what the deal is with. He’s not a stupid-ass conservative hack though, more like a small-l liberal (formerly a big-L Young Liberal). SO WHO KNOWS.

I don’t want to get my hopes up too much, because then if Abbott ends up forming government my spirit will be utterly crushed. (Well, even more crushed than it already was from the knowledge that no matter who won, Australia was set for another three years of refugee-bashing, discrimination against same-sex couples, inaction on pollution and climate change, the subjugation of ordinary people’s interests to those of corporations… but at least the ALP had things like, I don’t know, the mining tax, the lack of intention to re-open the detention centre in Nauru, the belief that climate change at least existed… you know.)

Actually do you want to know what else crushed my spirits? The Herald Sun, Monday. People writing stuff like, “It’s about time Australia followed the lead of the other Western nations and abolished preferential voting. If not for this two-party preferred shit it would’ve been a Coalition landslide!” Or, “Labor got 38% of the primary votes. Therefore the Coalition got 62% of the vote. End of story.” (I mean seriously apparently everyone who didn’t vote Labor #1 voted Coalition? ESPECIALLY GREENS VOTERS. Righteo man, righteo.)

And do you know what else is crushing my spirits? Responding to the election on campus.

I distantly remember saying something on election night about this, because a couple of weeks ago an email was sent around going, “Brace yourselves for a lot of intense political work on campus if Abbott wins.” And when Abbott seemed to be on the verge of winning, I lamented that we hadn’t made more of this threat on campus (where a lot of people hate us, as I think I’ve already described when I was relating the song “Armour for Liars” to my life, but if I didn’t, they do).

I said something like, “We should have been like, ‘If Labor doesn’t win this election, we are going to lecture bash every single fucking lecture for the next week. Is that what you want?’” It was agreed that this would have been a good strategy but we evidently didn’t implement it and look what happened.

By the way, I’m being tongue-in-cheek again.

In all seriousness, I don’t think I have much of a right to complain about this week considering I did nothing… except guard a couple of guillotines alone for five hours… which pushed me over the edge. It pushed me so far over the edge that I didn’t do anything I was supposed to do for the rest of the week (I exaggerate a little because I did do stuff, just none of the stalls I was meant to do), because I was so miserable that I couldn’t bear to leave the house to turn up. In fact, overall, this week has been hellish. And I can credit Tony Abbott and his stupid-ass conservative hack brigade for ruining it.

Basically, the stupid-ass conservative hacks are going to wrangle a deal with the Coalition and there’s our government — Tony Abbott and the stupid-ass conservative hack brigade. Basically the only good thing out of that entire mess is that Wilson Tuckey lost his seat, but that’s little good to the world because he lost it to the Nationals. I’ll still take it though, because Tuckey is that fucked.

If you know me at all you’ll know I loathed our Labor government and was CONSTANTLY, CONSTANTLY pissed off at the latest shit they tried to pull, but when it comes down to the line, when it comes down to red numbers v. blue, it’s going to be red every time. The Liberal Party is unashamedly and unreservedly pro-big business, right wing, anti-worker, anti-human, all of that. The Labor Party poses as the more humanist party, and although on a deeper level it isn’t, its attempts not to betray its own disguise force it to be a little better. Then on a more important level, it’s simply what the party represents to the voters rather than its policies which make it important. Like, if you are even remotely or left-wing, you want a Labor government ahead of a Liberal one. Any day. Doesn’t matter that their policies are just as bad half the time because firstly, there’s the other half… and then there’s just the reality that it’s nicer to have a nominally “progressive” government than one that is openly hostile to human beings. I suppose it has to do with confidence. A nominally “left-wing” government gives left-wing people more confidence.

Anyway, I watched the results unfold with a crowd of friends and comrades in a little place on Lygon St, which was good in some ways because I was with a bunch of people feeling much the same way I was.

Secession was much (jokingly) discussed.

One thing that I thought was interesting about this election, in the end, was the massive differences between states. Queensland swung massively behind the Coalition, New South Wales also swinging behind them quite definitively. Western Australia also had a swing to the Liberals, and considering it was the only state not to swing to Labor in 2007, that basically makes it the most outlandishly right-wing state in the federation right now. Queensland talks the talk but WA walks the walk, baby.

The other states experienced swings to Labor. My state, Victoria, only swung minimally to Labor — less than 1%, although still certainly a swing towards them — but was responsible for the two seats Labor managed to pick up, McEwen (which a friend of mine can proudly claim to have voted in!) and La Trobe. Tasmania and South Australia both had swings of 4 or 5%, but this didn’t result in extra seats for Labor (not that it even could have in Tasmania, seeing as Labor already had all the seats. Unfortunately this means it only had five because Tasmania is puny.).

Where does it leave us? We in the south voted Labor, but the west and most of the east went Coalition. (I’m leaving out the Northern Territory because honestly, so small a sample size, so large an area. Besides, the capital went Coalition and the rest went Labor. What does that say?) This lead to appealing announcements in which it was pointed out that the capital Canberra, these three states, and Eden-Monaro (the New South Welsh seat spanning the distance between Canberra and Victoria) had all voted Labor, and concluding:

So clearly we move now to secede, and make a Republic of the South.

Sounds good right?! Except we were obviously joking, because the south being more progressive and consequently better than everywhere else is not actual grounds for secession.

Better grounds for secession is simply being right-wing pests like WA, about which I tweeted:

Labor has to win 6 of the remaining 9 seats and they’re all WA? We’re doomed

and:

69-69. If Abbott wins, we’re agreed that we should firebomb Liberal HQ, then “encourage” WA to secede.

This last one was actually part of a longer conversation full of much slightly bloodthirsty ultraleftism. A friend of mine was talking about how Australia needed to be more like Greece, because in Greece, you can kill people and their friends won’t care so long as your politics are good. I was unconvinced, so he told me about this case in which some crazy anarchist dude stormed into a bank during the protests earlier this year and shot the workers he found there. The leaders of the movement were terrified, convinced that no one would support them now they’d started killing people. However in fact, all of the friends and coworkers of the dead started making announcements in public about how it’s all OK, because they support the protest movement, and they don’t mind.

He assured me that this is true.

Anyway, my response to this was like, “Okay… now my main concern is, can we put this into practice at Liberal Party HQ?” He assured me that we could, especially after someone else reminded him that it was actually Molotov cocktails that killed those bank tellers, not being shot. And step two of course, after firebombing the Liberals into oblivion, would be convincing WA to get the fuck out of our country because they are ruining our elections.

His plan was that we’d break into the TV broadcasting towers and insert subliminal messages into all the ads, going “Secede! Secede!”

“But we don’t need to do that — the Liberal Party have done it for us!” I cried.

Because they have:

Yeah. If that ad’s not screaming “Secede, you damn West Australians! Secede!” I don’t know what is.

Oh man, look, I can crack jokes about violence and secession (because that’s ALL IT IS, OKAY. I AM JOKING.) all I want, but the fact remains, Tony Abbott is all set to form government in Australia and the very idea is horrifying. I’m thinking of all people who are going to die once Abbott implements his “turn the boats around” policy, the increasing numbers of people who are going to be driven to the point of insanity once Abbott has them imprisoned and tortured in concentration camps in foreign countries. And in many ways all this violent and/or secessionist rhetoric is just a way of glossing over how horrifying the very idea is to me. I don’t want to live in a country like this, and I dread the moment Abbott comes to power and intensifies the government’s brutality against desperate human beings who came here appealing to our humanity, only to be tortured sometimes to death.

And it’s not like Labor is good because Labor is no fucking good at all, and this madness about turning boats around and locking people up in concentration camps is madness the Labor Party pursued as zealously as their colleagues in the Coalition. But it is — or was — that tiny, little bit better, and now it’s gone.

The other interesting thing about this election is where the swing went. Labor had a swing against it of 5.4% but most of this — 3.8% if I remember rightly — went to the Greens. The remaining percentage, which really only swung to the Liberals in certain states, drove that party so close to forming government, and a small percentage of Greens preferences (in the House of Reps) go to the Liberals (maybe 15% from right-wing Greens voters)… but I think overall this is clearly a reaction to Labor from the left. People sick of Labor being do-nothing shits, or if not, grotesquely right-wing shits. Like in regards to refugee policy, or uh, the environment, or maintaining the Northern Territory intervention, or basically anything else Labor has policies on. Even their goddamn NBN policy is justified on economic grounds — “we can do business so much faster lolzzzz”. Is not improvements to quality of life enough? You have to make money off it too??

Man, I know this point is disjointed and ripe for opportunities to quote me out of context in a negative light, but I don’t even care. Tony Abbott will be my new prime minister, guys. This is terrible.

Even though I have enrolled to vote, that doesn’t mean that I get to actually vote in the election. I had basically lost all hope of being allowed to vote anyway, given that my birthday’s not until October, and there was virtually no chance of the government waiting that long. Now that August 21 has been revealed as the day, I have to say that it does not crush my spirits inside that SEVENTEEN-YEARS,-TEN-MONTHS OLD me will not be voting. My dreams — if you could call them dreams — had already been well and truly crushed and I have moved on with my life.

Besides, the choices in this election are so unappealing that I’m not really inspired to vote. Look at them! There’s the ultra-right-wing Liberals, the ultra-right-wing Labor Party, the rightwards-moving Greens… and no doubt a lot of the same shit minor parties we had to deal with last time (DLP, One Nation…). Maybe it’s a good thing that I’m not allowed to choose because almost every choice I could make is terrible. I guess there are some independents, and possibly some minor parties that aren’t too bad (but my electorate encompasses a painfully wealthy area, so the only minor parties we get are extremely neoliberal (e.g. the “Liberal Democrats”) or racist-nationalist (e.g. One Nation)).

I am kidding of course when I say maybe it’s a good thing I can’t choose, but a choice between multiple bad options is no real choice at all. It’s not even that I’m doubtful about who I would vote for if I could — Labor above Liberals all the way, and that’s all that really matters because no other party could possibly win this seat (although in practice, Labor couldn’t possibly win this seat either. This seat has never even gone to preferences in its entire sixty-year history; it is as safe as safe can be for the Liberals, tragically). The Greens’ll probably go above Labor, unless they run Clive Hamilton again (see what I mean about moving rightwards!), and parties like One Nation and Family First would go below the Liberals. Then there are even more minor parties and independents to slot in wherever…

This is all academic though because I can’t vote. I can’t even vote in the Senate against Conroy and Fielding and every other candidate and party I hate. I’ll have to wait until the Victorian election, in which both major parties seem to be basing their campaigns on how many more police officers they can have and how many more powers those officers can be given. Sigh…

I certainly dismiss labels like intolerant or racist because people raise concerns about border security, but we’ve also got to be very alive to the complexity of this and that there’s no quick fix
– Julia Gillard

Oh
My
God.

In Afghanistan, a terrible, brutal war is going on. We know it’s going on, because we constantly hear about its progress (if we follow the news at all). We know how much violence there is an Afghanistan, and we know about the level of oppression there is there. We know that the Taliban attacks girls for trying to go to school, and indeed tons of people who’ve done nothing wrong whatsoever. We know that Afghanistan’s occupying armies kill people, torture people, abduct people, hand people over to the Afghan police to be tortured… and many of these on highly spurious evidence at that. We know that Afghanistan’s new rulers are corrupt, oppressive, and — in many cases — no better than the Taliban they replaced. We also know about drone attacks over the border with Pakistan, in which over a hundred people can be killed because someone, somewhere, decided that a wedding party was a suspicious event.

And yet, this is apparently not a situation people would be in their right mind to want to flee? How dare you not want to be killed? How dare you not want to be tortured? How dare you want your daughters to receive educations? How dare you want to live under a less oppressive government than Hamid Karzai’s amazingly liberal regime?

In Sri Lanka, despite the war being “over” there continues to exist an oppressive government which decided to charge the opposition leader at the last election with treason, and disappear him for a while. This is a country where the government merrily launched into widespread atrocities at the “concluding stages” of the war, intent on wiping out as many people as they could find before being forced to end outright warfare because, you know, the war had ended. The Sri Lankan government ran concentration camps, with terrible conditions, for the people of northern Sri Lanka whose land they occupied. Oh right, and this is also a government which installed cameras, and face-detection software, at airports so they could prevent anyone from trying to leave the country which they did not directly approve of.

And again, this is a situation which no one could ever want to leave, apparently! Hell yeah, oppressive governments are the shiz y’all, and living in a concentration camp is where it’s at, and war crimes are character-building experiences, and…? I don’t know, I am running out of ways to emphasise that it is absolutely despicable that people in these situations are considered criminals for trying to escape them.

When people were fleeing Vietnam in the 1970s, the Australian state back then did not lock them up in concentration camps on remote Pacific islands. There was not this bullshit in the minds of our leaders back then that it is somehow a crime to flee oppression and that it is even more of a crime to flee by boat. It is not a crime, not at all.

To put it this way: if you had any other way to reach Australia apart from by boat, you would take it. These are ancient, rickety boats liable to sink and break down. They are uncomfortable, incredibly dangerous, and if you sink on one of them, then good luck to you, because the Australian Navy has shown itself willing to watch you drown. If you are actually prepared to cross the ocean on one of them, you have a damn good reason to do it.

It just makes me so fucking angry to see refugees, and boatpeople especially, vilified for having the nerve to flee some of the most fucking hideous conditions on Earth. If you think that Afghans and Sri Lankans have no right to flee terrible situations, you are either a heartless ogre with not a single compassionate bone in your body, or you are racist, or you are just a complete fucking moron. Or, you are one of those nationalist people I ranted about yesterday who can’t tell the difference between different members of a single “nation” (hint hint: you are probably a racist as well, but apparently some people do this without thinking this makes them racist so I want to make sure they understand that they are STILL WRONG.). Tamil people DO NOT EQUAL terrorists, mmmmmkay?!

There is no reason to argue against admitting refugees except for what I listed above (heartlessness, racism/nationalism, and being a complete fucking moron). There is clearly not one shred of evidence to suggest that accepting refugees endangers people already on this continent, or that treating refugees more and more disgustingly somehow increases the security of those who live here. There is nothing “complex” about this issue, as Julia Gillard makes up. There are people fleeing horrors in the world, who the Australian state is anxious to treat in the most despicable way they can think of. That is the issue here. Not people daring to have the temerity to flee.

I’m sure that this is just the same as the way that everyone had a Connex story. For instance, my Connex story would be the time I wanted to catch the train from one station to the next station, six hundred metres away¹. Every time I pressed the green “tell me when the next train is please” button, it said, “The next train is in three minutes.”

It said this every time anyone pressed this button FOR AN ENTIRE HOUR. Then the train came.

But this entry is about my Metro story. Because, justly derided as Connex was, Metro seems to be about a hundred billion trillion times worse. Maybe it’s just that I didn’t catch trains often enough before this year to recognise Connex’s true nature, but I don’t know. It’d be pretty hard to do worse than Metro.

Yesterday, I was trying to catch a train to the city during evening peak hour (i.e. opposite direction to peak hour traffic). Metro, because it is amazing, decided to run the train I wanted to catch early and thus I missed it. “No worries,” I thought, as the train pulled away, “the next train’s supposed to be in six minutes, and I’ll be cutting it fine, but I won’t be late.”

Hahahahahahaha. Hahaha. Ha.

The next train was cancelled.

The train after that was cancelled, too.

The train after that came late.

Best of all, it’s not like we got any announcements like, “The next train to Flinders Street has been delayed, and is now expected in 32 minutes.” We got silence. And from the grotesquely disgusted expressions of everyone who pressed the “when is the next train?” button, it was silent, too.

After half an hour of waiting on a freezing platform, a train finally arrived. And then of course it turned into a Sandringham train at Flinders Street, EVEN THOUGH I wanted to get to Melbourne Central… so I caught a tram.

Honestly, I know that it is not all Metro’s fault that our trains are shockingly bad. The State Government is also highly responsible for, you know, being too much of a bunch of utter dipshits to spend any money on railway infrastructure at all. Actually, I tell a lie. TONS of maintenance work is done on railways all the time, resulting in mass-cancellations of trains on weekends (at least for us Pakenham/Cranbourne-liners), but this work results in precisely no improvement whatsoever. Actually, the trains seem to be getting progressively worse.

Seriously, here is my experience with trains. Every time I want to catch a train but am cutting it fine, it arrives early. Every other time I want to catch a train, it arrives late. And not only that, but it arrives so late that you could almost mistake it for the next train being early (like, being seven minutes late when the frequency at that time of day’s every fifteen minutes. What is that.).

Also, trains that are supposed to go to certain stops disturbingly often do not. This happens almost entirely catching trains to the city in the afternoon/evenings. Even when a train is supposed to go around the City Loop, and the timetable says it will, literally half the time it turns into a Sandringham train (which, for some unknown reason, don’t go around the Loop except on weekends). This results in what I decided yesterday to call “Flinders St Roulette”, where you fervently hope that your train turns up at any platform except platform 12 because platform 12 = Sandringham line = time to get off the train and catch a tram.

Then there are trains that change line for no apparent reason. I have caught “Pakenham/Cranbourne” trains, only to look out the window at Flinders St² to see the train is now a “Werribee” train. And it’s not like I boarded the wrong train because Pakenham/Cranbourne trains and Werribee trains do not stop at the same platform. Or even use the same tunnel. Worse, this was actually on Good Friday, meaning SUNDAY TIMETABLE BLISS. That is, trains leaving every 30 minutes. The only Pakenham/Cranbourne train for 30 minutes turned into a Werribee train. And then on top of that, the next Pakenham train was late, so we waited at Flinders St for 40 minutes. And, although this didn’t affect me, the train was terminating at Oakleigh for “maintenance work”, so my travelling companions who wanted to get to Monash had EVEN MORE FUN TIMES AHEAD after I got off the train.

As you can see, Metro and Melbourne’s train network in general is a topic that makes my blood boil. The trains are so bad that, even though train + bus would get me to uni approximately twenty minutes faster than bus all the way, I can’t do that because the trains are not trustworthy enough to get me there on time. If the trains are late, I’ll be late to the bus stop and my bus is almost always on time, so I’ll miss it. Then I’ll be late to uni. Bus takes longer and I have to leave the house earlier, but I will get there on time unless I get a bus driver who makes a wrong turn after Huntingdale Station (this did happen once). Hence this tweet I posted:

YES! Caught my bus after all. Another Metro sabotage mission defeated by… Smart Bus! *dramatic music*

Smart Bus > trains forever until trains start to be run properly, ffs.

ANYWAY. Since we all know that venting about public transport is SUPER-FUN, dear commenters, share your horror stories! I am sure that public transport is not all reliable all the time everywhere except Melbourne.

1. by train — there are no streets along that stretch of railway, so it’d be longer on foot
2. by this I mean, at times when trains aren’t liable to change which line they are at Flinders St, so not exactly like trains turning into Sandringham trains. They turn into Sandringham trains BEFORE the city loop (hence skip it), not afterwards (hence being unreliable pieces of crap).

Clearly I woke up and watched. It’s just, what happened I did not expect this at all. This is exciting. I am excited. I would undoubtedly be more excited if the leadership of the country were being decided in a way that involved ordinary people in any way whatsoever, but it’s still quite an event.

It’s not that I think it will change the policies of the Labor Party very much if at all — I have seen no evidence so far that Gillard has any better ideas than the horror of Rudd’s (probably because until today, she was his loyal sidekick. I guess that was just a ruse, eh.), so it doesn’t really matter to me personally who wins. I do find Kevin Rudd, or Kruddface as I like to call him, extremely fucking annoying with his patronising demeanour and constant sloganeering, and his policies — let’s imprison refugees and violate their human rights! Let’s start dodgy insulation schemes that lead to housefires and workers’ deaths! Let’s just rename WorkChoices, even though we were elected to abolish it! Let’s do absolutely nothing useful about climate change! — are just disgraceful. But I think as we have already established, Gillard’s policies are the same ones, and she’s also been merrily patronising and fond of slogans, so who knows. Pretty much the best I can hope for is that civil servants are better treated under her than the tyrannical Rudd.

But, and this is an important but… Abbott is so much worse than Rudd or Gillard could ever be. Tony Abbott is, like, Tony Abbott. He’s conservative, racist, sexist, apparently opposed to basic human rights, and seemingly not very intelligent. And for every horrific, disgusting policy the Labor Party can produce, Abbott seems to create one 10x worse. Take his refugees policy, for instance. What the fuck is that shit. The Australian navy has already been ordered not to intervene if boatloads of asylum seekers sink — basically, to watch them die, to watch innocent people who have every right to seek asylum in Australia die — and Abbott thinks this is too lax?? WTF is wrong with you man??? The only matter on which the Liberals might even possibly be better that I can think of is internet censorship — yet Tony Abbott has been so tight-lipped on that, I’m pretty sure he secretly supports it and just doesn’t want to disappoint the campaigners calling for a vote to the Liberals solely based upon this issue.

Tony Abbott’s Liberal Party has been rising in the polls in recent weeks, while Rudd — once the most popular Australian prime minister in history — has collapsed, mainly because people are finally twigging that he sucks. However, given that Abbott is objectively worse, what I want out of this poll is a leader who is so clearly less vile than Abbott that they win the election.

If Gillard wins the ballot tomorrow morning, she might be able to escape some of the bad image attached to Rudd. I don’t have much faith that it’ll extend further than image (imagine if refugees were treated humanely… or internet censorship cancelled… or the ban on gay marriage overturned… can you see this happening just because Gillard took power? I can’t.), but just in terms of something to boost Labor’s advantage over the Liberals, geez. It still exists now but it’s on shaky ground.

The problem is though, that no matter who wins tomorrow and no matter who wins in the election, Australia still loses. Ultimately, either Labor or the Liberals are still going to form government. It’s a choice between evil and greater evil. For now, I hope that merely evil wins. Ultimately, though, I’d like some better choices.

Perth mining billionaire Andrew Forrest addressed 60 Coalition MPs at a private meeting in Canberra, telling them the only way to kill the proposed resources tax was to change the government.¹

Somehow, I don’t think this is the best possible venue for Andrew Forrest to do his proselytising.

I mean, I can see the Coalition MPs’ reactions now: “OMG! I was going to vote for Labor in this upcoming election, but that was before Andrew Forrest told me this. I’m going to switch my vote!”

I mean… right?

1. The Age, ‘PM accused of panic in global crisis‘, 23 June 2010.