ner ner ner nerr!!

[TinMan666]

Now that Howard's gone I'm finally going to become an Australian citizen. Couldn't do it in good conscience on his watch.

well said mang.

count me in for that as well.

 

[Shannow]

Looks like the Democrats are getting destroyed.

Serves them right.

 

[Dän]

Meh, the majority of people think Rudd will be a better PM, so be it. I dont think its right, but ultimately I dont care a whole lot. Good to see you are all graceful in your 'victory'.
Final thing is that Howard is a champ, he rose from obscurity to lead the country through its longest and most propsperous ever boom. In many ways I have idolised him because he represents what I believe and isnt scarred to say it and never has been.

T minus 4 years till next recession hahahahahaha

That is all...I'll be back when the shit hits the fan to bag the fuck out of you guys hahahahahahahahahahaha

 

[Goreripper]

In the end, Howard's biggest enemy was himself. To quote Henry Rollins: "burned out wreck who stuck around too long". Add to that his unpopular and unworkable WorkChoices and Jackie Kelly's idiocy at the final hurdle, plus people like Turnbull and Joyce and the writing was on the wall. Downer even told him so during APEC, but he didn't listen.

 

[TinMan666]

Meh, the majority of people think Rudd will be a better PM, so be it. I dont think its right, but ultimately I dont care a whole lot. Good to see you are all graceful in your 'victory'.
Final thing is that Howard is a champ, he rose from obscurity to lead the country through its longest and most propsperous ever boom. In many ways I have idolised him because he represents what I believe and isnt scarred to say it and never has been.

T minus 4 years till next recession hahahahahaha

That is all...I'll be back when the shit hits the fan to bag the fuck out of you guys hahahahahahahahahahaha

for someone who doesn't care a whole lot, you sure did make a lot of pro-Liberal posts here recently.

i don't buy into this whole "prosperous boom" talk either. Home affordabilty is the worst it has ever been in 22 years. I don't see how people can keep boasting about what great prosperous times we live in, if your average Joe will never be able to afford to buy a home.

 

[Spiff]

Costello isn't going for the Opposition leader job. That leaves Turnbull, Abbott or Downer I guess, unless someone from out of left field goes for it. Can't see Downer putting his hand up after the awful job he did last time (can someone who makes jokes about domestic violence be taken seriously as a future PM?).

Anyone else I'm forgetting? Maybe Joe Hockey I guess.

 

[Spiff]

And Dan, I strongly doubt you would have been graceful in victory if the Coalition had won the election.

 

[Goreripper]

There's no denying Australia is enjoying prosperity. Home affordability is at crisis levels because the market has been so strong builders and sellers are asking whatever people are willing to pay, and people are paying it (or they were). Now houses are so expensive that they're out of reach of the same people who could afford them a few years ago, and people who over-stretched to buy a place have to charge more than anyone can pay to get themselves out of the shit. That in itself was never Howard's fault. He was just reluctant to address it because he was obsessed with the economy.

 

[Goreripper]

Costello isn't going for the Opposition leader job. That leaves Turnbull, Abbott or Downer I guess, unless someone from out of left field goes for it. Can't see Downer putting his hand up after the awful job he did last time (can someone who makes jokes about domestic violence be taken seriously as a future PM?).

Anyone else I'm forgetting? Maybe Joe Hockey I guess.

Turnbull would be the obvious choice considering how well he did, but I don't think the Liberal executive likes him very much. He hurt Howard's campaign more than once with his admission about the pulp mill and Kyoto and he known for being a bit of a loose cannon. Abbott is out of the question. Downer is a remote possibility but even though he's matured since he had the job last time, no one will forget what a buffoon he was. I can't see Hockey putting his hand up, although it would be somewhat ironic. It won't be Andrews either. No one likes him. That leaves Nelson (maybe), Ruddick (unlikely), McFarlane (unlikely) and maybe Robb or Julie Bishop.

And Dan, I strongly doubt you would have been graceful in victory if the Coalition had won the election.

Considering his behaviour leading up to the vote, I agree.

 

[Spiff]

The only other one I can think of (ie, the only other one I can remember) is Brendan Nelson. Pass.

OK, let's go through the Liberals who won their seats.

Ruddock. Nup, too creepy. Ian McFarlane? No, has a funny voice. Andrew Robb? Heh. Petro Georgiou? No, too foreign.

Not many options there. I say they'll go with Turnbull.

 

[Goreripper]

Even if Georgiou wasn't "too foreign", he's threatened to cross the floor too often.

 

[Goreripper]

From the SMH:

"THE bizarre antics of the Liberal pamphleteers in Lindsay might not have been sanctioned by the machine. But they speak volumes for the culture of the Liberal Party, particularly in its NSW division.

It is the politics of fear and loathing. By turning one group of Australians against another, the theory goes, it is possible to divide and rule. Minority groups - Muslims, homosexuals, unmarried mothers, trade union members, academics, etc - canbe dispatched to the margins while the party leadership wraps itself in khaki and the flag with high-blown sophistry about Aussie family values.

Where necessary, the threat from without can also be invoked - queue-jumping refugees, for example - and then met by iron-fisted measures like the Pacific solution.

This is not something new to the Liberals. It has worked for them often. Ben Chifley's light on the Labor hill was trumped by Robert Menzies' reds under the bed.

Until now, John Howard has been a masterly exponent of fear and division. But when he gained control of the Senate at the last election, his visceral hatred of unions overreached itself. Work Choices was an attack on the Howard Battlers who had given him four election victories.

It is an exquisite irony that those battlers will now bring him undone today."


Q.E.D.

 

[Icarus]

 

[Dän]

'After more that 11 years in power, he has resided over Australia's longest boom in memory...' From economist mag, nov 17th-23rd ed. And that is a left leaning mag as well.

 

[Goreripper]

I will also add that Liberal-sympathisers like Piers Ackerman and Alan Jones use the same divide-and-rule tactics in their piecemeal vilification of minorities supposedly aligned to Labor (Ackerman likes to throw Aboriginals into the mix also whilst Jones tactfully avoids any discussion of homosexuality. Funny that).

It's an interesting result however, now that Costello is out of the game. It's almost as if Howard was the only thing holding them together the whole time. He's been so dominant that no one can even think of anyone who could replace him.

 

[Goreripper]

'After more that 11 years in power, he has resided over Australia's longest boom in memory...' From economist mag, nov 17th-23rd ed. And that is a left leaning mag as well.

We'll never know of course, but it's interesting to speculate on how long he would have lasted if the recession had hit prior to, say, 9/11. It's worrying that the boom is most likely to end soon, but one thing I will put forward is that Rudd is right when he says that Howard had no vision for what might lay beyond it. He's right about that, because conservatives only think about a week ahead. Howard's main policies were all geared around the idea that the mineral boom would last indefinitely.

 

[Shannow]

Gorey, but that's the problem with conservatives. They believe that there will always be stuff to dig up, and people who want to buy it.

 

[Goreripper]

Rudd's pretty conservative too, but I think his personal history made him realise that you can't just depend on things staying the same forever. All of a sudden, your father dies and you can't keep your farm, or there's a drought or a glut and suddenly - BAM - game over. Howard's entire platform was that as long as the boom continues, everything will be sweet, and no one will care if they're being arse reamed by their boss or their kids can't get braces. Anyway, there was a wealth of local issues barely touched on by the media that may well have led to Howard's demise. Look at the way Queensland fell, for example. You can't tell me that some of that wasn't due to the concessions he made to the US sugar industry, or the effects of climate change on areas reliant on the Barrier Reef for tourism. I heard one new Labor member say last night that he believes he and two of his neighbouring candidates won their seats was because Howard had ignored local requests to help with the funding of the Ipswich Bypass. Yet at the same time, Howard's offering NSW $2b to fund a six-lane road through a World Heritage area that would take decades to complete, and that's after all the legal challenges it would face by all kinds of international conservation groups in the UN. All so Lindsey Fox and his mates can shave half an hour off the time it takes to get a truckload of apples from Orange to Sydney.

 

[Spiff]

I believe the Ipswich bypass thing was a big factor in the seats of Blair and Oxley. Thing was that Howard said he'd build a bypass, but the locals wanted the existing roads improved. Rudd went with the locals. Something like that, anyway.

 

[Goreripper]

That's the gist of the argument in any case. If what you say is true, then it sounds like Howard figured that spending a fortune on a new road instead of fixing the current one would have been the preferred option. But if the road's already there and just needs a bit of fixing, why build a new one? Oh that's right: economic rationialism.

On another note: I emailed the just-deposed ex-Member for Macquarie about his three-days a week propoganda bombardment of my letterbox a few days before the election and told him that I'd already voted. For his opponent.