Red Rag

A look around the blogs after Latham’s speech, in order from most enthusiastic to least enthusiastic.

Paul Batey: “A clear ideological difference. Howard is gone. ALP by 18 seats.”

Graham Freeman: “I am going to point my arrow of doom leftwards for the first time — ALP by 6-8 seats.”

Gary Sauer-Thompson: “It now looks as if the question is: just how many seats will the Coalition lose?”

Chris Sheil: “I predict an ALP win, barring a major left field event.”

John Quiggin: “I think the odds are significantly in Labor’s favour.”

Anthony Georgeff: “Launch: Full strength local with gold for grandad. Good.”

Ms Fits: “I don’t want to get all kinds of excited yet, but there was no denying the fizz in my belly when I saw how much he rocked those fucking pensioners. It’s not over. It’s totally, totally not over.”

Dave Murray: “I’m in a really good mood and feeling optimistic about this election now. Can it continue for another eight days, or has it peaked too early?”

Matt Liddy: “But was it enough for Labor? We won’t really know until next Saturday but it was enough to provide a bounce with the bookies.”

Rowen Atkinson: “That speech should have been chilli on a stick. Instead it was pfft.”

Suki: “Ignore your advisors and minders Mark, lose the Chamomile tea, gulp down 5 Espressos, Rant, Feel, Blog and get Opinionated like you mean it!”

Antony Loewenstein: “After all, is anybody seriously suggesting that Mark Latham’s speech was anything other than wooing the blue-rinse set and proving to Australians that he has youth and ideas on his side?”

Ken Parish: “Latham has squandered billions of taxpayers’ dollars on cynical and probably futile vote-buying bribes. If that’s the best he can do, Labor deserves to lose.”

David Tiley notes that the Right Wing Dick Brains “have gone all quiet”, and Ken Parish agrees that “the RWDB echo chamber brigade aren’t saying anything much, probably because Howard hasn’t distributed their hymn sheets yet.”

One RWDB has made comment, though. Tim Blair to Mark Latham: “Please stop talking!”

I suppose that’s what Tony Abbott was thinking when he fell asleep during Howard’s keynote address. (So did the public.)

Greg Sheridan writes, “In the past day or two I have dredged through a sample of Molloy’s academic writings on terrorism.” Let me guess: the sample was about 9 pages long?

Channel 7 set the worm loose on the two leaders’ campaign launch speeches. There was no sign of any green-haired infiltrators in the audience, so I don’t want to hear any conspiracy theories.

Spot the difference:

Who says people don’t like Latham?

(Windows Media streams of the 7 News reports are available: Howard, Latham.)

Hetty Johnson suffers from Stott-Despoja Syndrome: she spends all her time in the media complaining that the media doesn’t give her enough time.

Antony Loewenstein’s cheap shot at Alan Anderson’s membership of the Liberal party was pretty lame. But his prediction that “the ALP, Family First, Greens, One Nation, Socialist Alliance and Democrats will soon be writing a (Fairfax supported) election blog” sounds good to me. As an ALP staffer and officebearer, and a blogger, I’d be happy to help… for the right price.

I went to the dentist today with a toothache, and now I’m having a root canal treatment. It’s a bit strange, though — my tooth is “otherwise unblemished” and the dentist can’t work out why the nerve died.

Sigh. Michelle Roberts and Colin Barnett are fighting over who prompted the review that saw Manhunt banned today. Dickheads, the both of them. We need a review of the whole classification system for games, to bring them into line with movies.

In the toadying Ackerman column I discussed below, the pompous one wrote:

Roz Trestrail, who is standing in Mackellar against Liberal Bronwyn Bishop, says the party has no funds for TV advertising, belying the charges it is bankrolled by the religious Right in NSW.

But what’s this I spy in today’s West Australian (no link, because it’s The Worst)?

The Australian Greens have lodged an official complaint with the Australian Electoral Commission after the Family First party screened advertisements accusing them of peddling drugs to children.

[...]

The Family First ads, which are screened in major capital cities and some regional areas, suggest the Greens want to legalise heroin and exstasy and make marijuana available to children.

This proves that you can’t believe a word the Family First party says. Ackerman, though, will uncritically funnel their rubbish into his columns. That will save FFP a few bob on newspaper advertising, which allows them to spend more of the AOG congregation’s money telling lies on TV.

Thanks to Raena’s style switcher, those of you who miss the old Kick & Scream can sate your nostalgia. When you’re ready to return, feel free. And I’m still waiting for someone to guess “what aspect of mad pinko radical history is ‘inspiring’ your design sense this time around”. Manas dropped a big hint.

According to Pompous Piers Hackerman:

Family First, which boasts 2000 members nationally, makes no mention of the AOG [Assemblies of God] or any other church and, while it professes Christian ethics, its policies lay no claim on any religion.

Family First media liaison Darryn Kenneally says the party has no commitment to the AOG, receives no money from the AOG, has no connection to the AOG.

This is just bullshit. No connection to the AOG?

Chairman Peter Harris denied Family First was “an Assemblies of God party”, even though six of its seven executive board members — including the chairman, treasurer and secretary — are affiliated with the church. Its only MP, South Australian upper house member Andrew Evans, is the retired Australian head of the church and all its lead Senate candidates are members.

Actually, it’s not just the lead Senate candidates, as Mike Seccombe discovered:

In fact, 11 or 12 of the candidates running under the Family First banner in NSW are connected to the Hawkesbury Church, according to church sources, substantially corroborated through Joan Woods (after confirming 10, she refused to continue to speak about the relgious affiliations of others). And almost all the rest of the 24 candidates the suddenly-powerful party is putting up in NSW also are members of the Assemblies of God.

Mrs Woods concedes that almost all the Family First candidates are AOG adherents. She concedes many of them have only been in politics for a few weeks and many don’t even live in the seats they are standing for.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to determine whether FFP has received money directly from AOG, as they haven’t yet been required to declare their funding sources to the AEC. But it’s certainly true that they piggy-back on church events for fundraising drives:

Get politics out of my church. That was the call by a disgruntled Nambour parishioner yesterday after a campaigner for a political party interrupted a pentecostal church service to appeal for financial donations and volunteers.

The parishioner, who declined to be named, said he was angered when a volunteer for the fledgling FAmily First party was allowed to make a 15 minute political advertisement mid way through a recent Nambour Assembly of God service.

[...]

“She got up, waffled on about how this guy in Adelaide got into the Senate and then asked for money,” the man said.

One collection for the church, one collection for the pastor, and one collection for Family First. But again, there is no financial link between FFP and AOG.

It’s all just a big coincidence.

Bob McMullan:

When you spend more than $60 billion over this period, the people who get left out know they’re really the bottom of the Government’s pile.

Take pensioners, $60 billion, and they didn’t even mention the word ‘pensioners’.

So there’s a lot of Australians who know they’re right off the Government’s agenda, if they can’t fit in a $60 billion spending spree, then they’re right off the agenda.

Is that a hint? I think it might be! Tomorrow could be a very exciting campaign launch.

The Greens in WA have complained to the AEC about a “Liberals’ how-to-vote card [that] does not carry a Liberal Party logo, is printed on green paper, and has ‘Green ballot paper’ written on it.” It does sound dodgy, but since the House of Reps ballot paper is actually green, it might be an overblown claim.

John Howard’s day didn’t run exactly to plan yesterday:

The giant media bubble accompanying the PM had been bussed to a city building and escorted to a rooftop, where youngsters at the Brisbane childcare centre frolicked in sand and on slides. …

Suddenly, a change of plans. Campaign staffers stacked up chairs and removed the podium, shifting everything inside. Snappers were permitted a few discreet shots of Howard with children, but that was it.

Perhaps the shift had been caused by a couple of tame protesters who found access to the rooftop via an adjacent building.

The child care centre the PM visited happened to be a few doors down from the Brisbane office of the LHMU, who represent — you guessed it — child care workers. And they don’t much like Howard.

In our office, we have a saying: Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. If Howard had followed that simple rule, he might not have had to cancel every other media stunt he had planned for the day.

From The Australian: “Mr Howard denied the rebate would force up the price of childcare, in the same way the 30 per cent private health rebate has forced up the price of healthcare for many families. ‘They’re entirely different circumstances,’ he told reporters.” That sounds like an admission that the 30% private health insurance rebate was passed straight on to the customers. Janette was right, he really is Honest John!

Contrary to everything you’ve been reading, the residents of Wallace Rockhole are not the first to vote in the federal election. Pre-poll voting started at some AEC offices a full week ago. Most postal voters received their ballot papers last week, too. Only The Age got it right, describing Veronica Motna as “the first person to vote at a polling booth in the federal election.”