THE DONKEY VOTE

Well I’m satisfied how the election is going. It isn’t fantastic stuff for Labor at the moment but Labor is absorbing the best the Liberals/Nationals can throw at them and the Coalition have fired off two of there best bullets, anti Union scare campaigns and tax cuts. And I am left to wonder how many silver bullets are left in their clip.

To an extent I believe the Coalition surrendered an advantage in announcing their tax policy so early. It gives the Labor Party the chance to side step a potentially devastating instances that could occur if Labor released their tax policy early or before the Liberals or before they got to get their hands on the fiscal outlook.

The Liberals are absolutely kidding themselves if they expected Labor to announce anything the day or in the immediate following days of that announcement. It just isn’t going to happen, the Liberals used it as a free kick session but in all honesty Labor was not going to be rushed.

Now Labor is absorbing the attack and the Liberals are having the headlines, fair enough have them. (That would be my strategy.) It is better than sharing them and it means we can have the headlines to ourselves when it is our turn to release tax policy and it lets us give a clear and contrasting message. Now the ALP can take a produce a sound and realistic economic plan for the tax system but also offer something very different to the Coalition, if they are brave enough. A tax policy that isn’t throwing money at voters to purchase their vote but a sound plan for the future with massive investment on infrastructure. I am convinced that is what the people want from their government.

Just days later the Coalition wheel out the old chest nut of an anti union fear campaign, which has less and less impact on the Electorate with every passing year. Of course the Labor Party is a party founding on the working class you can take a look at the ranks of the Coalition see just as many businessmen and solicitors. I don’t trust business, it is their mission to make every red cent and they will gut you like a fish and exploit you to get that dollar.

I am absolutely sick and tired of hearing about small business, like they are some sort of charity case. Small business worked fined before we saw the introduction of WorkChoices, Howard and Costello did not invent economics, the sky will not fall if a Labor government is installed. And what is the statistic? Only one in four small businesses survive? So they can take down their employees with them? When they hit hard times they can fillet their employees to the bone. What happens when the economy corrects?

I have grave reservations that many small business are even run properly at a legal or management level at all.

Anyway…

Take a look at this interesting article on Crikey.com - Canberra’s shallow gene pool no mirror to the nation

A quote from a Parliamentary Library study concludes..Not surprisingly, given the underlying philosophy of each party, the largest difference occurs in the ‘party and union administrators and officials’ category: 34 per cent of the Labor members held such jobs, compared to just 2 per cent of their Coalition colleagues. The figures are reversed, though with a smaller percentage point spread, in the ‘business executives/managers, etc’ category: 33 per cent of the Coalition members held jobs in this category compared to 11 per cent of their Labor counterparts.

I often think that a strategy to improve the reputation of trade unions would be to call them Trade Leagues, because let’s face it rugby league is a fair better sport than rugby union in every single way.

One thing is for sure though, Kevin Rudd can NOT go into a debate without a Tax Policy, so will we see this be released in the next couple of days? I hope so. It also needs a couple of days to do the round in the media so it isn’t the centre of the debate. We can not let Howard marginalise and deflect the issues which is his key political tactic. Not this election, we need to elect the next government on the wide range of the spectrum.

It’s a long campaign and I’m not unhappy with how things are going.

I am also sickened to hear that Rolls have closed and 143,000 people are not on it! And the majority of those would likely vote Labor one way or another.

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Sheldon 12:27am - It’s hard to judge from the paper and tv but it seems that the tax cuts and labor’s delayed response, understandable in itself, seems to have provided the Coalition with a good start to the campaign. Howard has rolled out the “union scare campaign” while Rudd has released the “anti-union scare campaign ads” causing Howard to post an “anti-rudd scare campaigning about Howard’s scare campaigning about the unions video”.

I don’t know about you but I’m sensing a theme in this Election already. I had great material I was going to post but it wasn’t worth what it would cost me to SMS it.

This post cost $2 as it is.

EDIT: And I accidently sent it twice. I need a sponsor.

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