SpaceO,

The political reality is that is only sufficient support for one liberal-left party in Australian politics. It can either be the Greens or the Democrats; it can't be both. One of them will wither and die, and I suspect that's going to be the Democrats - which is a damn shame because people like Lyn Allison will be the sort of people who are no longer in parliament. In the meantime, both parties will spend scarce resources competing between each other for an extra 2-3% of the vote.

And that's a tragedy.

Regards,

Lev

Lev,

The Greens might find themselves under challange from a new "environmental party".

I don't know if you saw the news yesterday but Dr Karl Kruzilnitske (I know I've probably butchered his name, apologies) will be running second on the ticket for the Climate Change Coalition.

The results of that particular tussle are going to be interesting.

Dear Lyn
The Democrats started well (gee I even voted for one of you once) and Natasha and I have had some debates but the reality is that you have lost the plot and the vote.
Your policies often sounded good and even excellent but you knew damn well that you were never going to get enough members up to have to carry them through.
You have ended up blocking legislation that should have been passed and passing legislation that should have been blocked...hardly keeps the bastards honest.
Sad really. The Greens will go the same way

Lyn,

If the election were between Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF and the Australian Labor Party on the other, would the Democrats have any difficulty in advocating a vote for Labor on a two party-preferrred basis (i.e. putting the ZANU-PF party candidates last)?

I should hope not.

Such a stance need not be misunderstood as Democrats uncritical support for Labor, only as necessary measure to defend democracy.

So how different is Australia today from Zimbabwe?

We have before us the sickening spectacle of Howard's government clawing its way back into a position where it may get back into power using a massive saturation campaign of Government self-promotional advertising paid for by us. It has been estimated that the cost of Government self-promotional advertising, in this term alone, may reach AU$1billion (see "'$120 million and counting' spent on 'Work Choices' propaganda" at http://candobetter.org/node/152#speech)

And yet the Democrats are virtually silent about this. Almost nothing said on the Democrats web site and no media releases to be found (and the Greens seem to be no better).

If a Government is as prepared to stoop as low as this one has through the past four years at least, then how else can we hope to keep them honest except by removing them from office?

If your agree, then the Democrats must make clear its stance by advocating a vote for Labor ahead of the Liberal.

If the Government is allowed to get away with what it's now doing because Democrats and others fail to use the voices that they have against this, then we may lose the last chance we have of preventing Australia from becoming a one-party dictatorship. The principle that a governing party is entitled to make almost unlimited use of taxpayers funds in order to cling to office will have become enshrined.

In these circumstances, I see nothing principled or noble in the Democrats failure to take a stance on the critical choice that all Australians face through the preferential voting system, perhaps only weeks from now.

'Keeping the bastards honest.'

Ah, politics is so entertaining. The capacity of a politician for accidental self deprecation, delivered with haughty pride, infused with oblivious irony, knows no bounds.

Priceless.

Given the pereformance of the democraps in recent elections, its quite clear which bastards the electorate thinks is less honest, or more dishonest.

Nice work.

"With Pauline Hanson knocking at the door again, you may have seen him on his feet for hours in the Senate this sitting, highlighting the dangers of racist “citizenship tests”."

For a second I suspected Lyn Allison was making a self-deprecating mockery of the those on the far left who see racists under every bed. But poor befuddled Lyn is deadly serious. How she can make such ridiculous accusations with a straight face is beyond me.

Lyn, are you fully cognisant of the current immigration intake levels and the main countries of origin? If so, you'd know that the Howard-Liberal Government has ramped up immigration to record levels. And the vast majority of these new migrants don't have white faces. The Howard Government's mass importation of Third Worlders is unprecedented by any standards. So, I think you'd be hard-pressed to assert that the Howard Government is somehow sneakily running a 'racist' immigration program. If anything, it's so politically correct that it discriminates against immigrants from traditional European source countries in order to avoid the accusation that Australia is still favouring certain nations.

But by falsely claiming that the new citizenship test is somehow 'racist', I suspect Lyn may have inadvertently revealed something very interesting about her own views. It seems that racism (real, not imagined) and Lyn's beloved multiculturalism share similar traits - both ideologies separate and define groups of people in terms of skin colour. And according to Lyn's logic, there is a genetic obstacle to non-European migrants learning our language and history. The idea that the prospective citizen might actually do something - like buy a book or take a class - is automatically condemned as 'racist'.

I suggest you get your own head checked, Lyn. No doubt you'll have plenty of time for that after the Democrats are demolished at the upcoming election.