WOW…..I’m just taking a look at the date of my last post and realising how long it has been since I last vented my spleen. I finished my last exam on Monday and I am writing this 24 hours out from zero day. Yes, tomorrow Krud and J. Ho both enter the ring of which only one can leave the victor.

It has been a pathetic and disappointing election campaign that revelled in economic ignorance and good old fashioned racism. With no boat people on the horizon this time around. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was waiting with baited breath to see who Howard would make into a scapegoat in order to distract the largely moronic population of this country. But with the announcement of an end of immigration of Sudanese refuges, coming with a great heaping of racially motivated media beat up supplied by the Herald-Sun and its like. It was surprising to find out that no matter how hard you try and prepare yourself, it’s always worse that you could possibly imagine. The appalling blatantness with which the government was able to divert the attention of a complacent people boggled my mind. They were ably backed by many of the ‘independent’ media outlets such as channel’s 7 and 9, who played “Exclusive reports” showing “Ethnic Gangs on a Rampage” as evidence of why we should stop Sudanese refugees from coming here. The only problem with this is that when you have Police Commissioner, Christine Nixon on one side saying that Sudanese teenagers have no higher involvement in crime rates than anyone else. And examination of the footage you’re holding up as evidence of Sudanese violence, showing no involvement by Sudanese youth. You tend to come across as the incompetent Liberal shrills you clearly are.

My anger relating to economic ignorance around this election comes from the fact that Howard has managed to harp on and on about what a good economic manager he is and that the election of a Labour government would only lead to a rise in interest rates. The fact the J. Ho has barely been challenged on this, despite FOUR interest rate rises in the last few years is enough to drive you to drink. It is also infuriating to see ad after ad shrieking how incompetent the Labour party are at financial management, when the Liberal party were only continuing the economic reforms laid out of the Hawke – Keating years. Let us not forget that it was Hawke and NOT Howard that began to ditch most of the traditional Australian economic policies such as protectionism and centralised wage fixing. However, it comes as no surprise that in a nation apparently lacking in the ability of critical thought, such as this one. The example laid out by the Bush administration that you don’t need even a skerrick of proof for anything, you just need to repeat the mantra over and over again and the masses will soon be parroting along, proves itself to be far too true.

Just listening to the radio at the moment and hearing reports of a prediction of a landslide Labour victory this weekend, unfortunately I am not so optimistic. If there was finally going to be some mass awakening to the extraordinary amount of bullshit that the Howard government has been feeding us for the last six years since 9/11, than it should be showing itself by the sentencing of Howard and co. to a lifetime of hard labour in a maximum security prison. Rather than merely showing up as only a 4 point gap in opinion polls.

With their mimicry of Howard ideology in social AND economic policy, Krud has well and truly fucked up a great opportunity to show that The Third Way, namely a framework that adapts politics to a changed world, transcending old-style social democracy and neo-liberalism, could work in Australia. As in their refusal to call a spade a spade and call out the Liberals for the racist and homophobic liars that they are, the Labour party has missed a massive opportunity to turn this once great nation towards a new beginning. Away from the intolerance, bigotry and fear that has blighted our national character for far too long. I do not have a great deal of faith in what the Labour party has in plan for this country, but one thing that I am sure of, they are a far better alternative to the shitheads that have been ‘leading’ this country for far to long.