Severin,

Absolument!

If my seat was marginal, I would definitely have a different outlook and would be voting in the lower house, My decision to avoid most of the daily clap-trap during this election has been significantly coloured by the no contest situation in my electorate.

I am over it but will be manning my booth and watching the count.
And letter boxing doing what I can to see a second term.
I FEAR an Abbott government.
No SPIN I DO the divide between Australians would be harsh,
But I just bet that night, if I can not get out of it, watching each vote will be a hard night for who ever fails, and just maybe Australia.

Belly

I share your fears, unless the Greens are the ones attracting voters from Labor.

However, I am staggered at the current polls that people are seriously considering Abbott for PM - I spent 11 years gobsmacked that Howard was returned election after election. We cannot return to a right-wing ultra-conservative Christian dominated government again.

No more theocracy.

Gotta agree with you, Severin.

I have to admit that I did not see the election of an Abbott government as a serious proposition.
If these polls are accurate, it does make you wonder if the electorate is really like a field of poppies swayed to and fro by huge wafts of media spin...depending which way the spin is blowing around election time as to who wins.
Imagine...three years after Howard's demise the notion of Prime Minister Abbott....sounds a bit freaky to me.

In my post of Friday, 30 July 2010 at 8:19:23 AM, I made the statement:

"The original VTR in 2007 didn't
publish the ordinary vote informals!"

By the time the count had reached finality, of course, the total number of informal votes HAD been published.




The point of significance is that in the counting of the ordinary vote, that vote cast in the various polling places that goes straight into the ballot boxes un-enveloped on election day, the number of informal votes IS known and recorded on the respective polling place acquittal sheets.

It seems important to me to ask why such informals were not listed alongside the progressive reports of the ordinary primary vote count as these were posted to the VTR. That total ordinary vote informals figure is known by the time the last polling place has notified its figures to the DRO on election night. True it may be that the DRO may subsequently rule upon votes initially recorded as being informal, and award them to one candidate or another, but that does not alter the accountancy for ballot papers issued to vote claimants, which acquittal is of as much importance in itself in each polling place as the counting of primary votes.

This failure to account for the ordinary vote informal total made it impossible for the public viewing the VTR in 2007 to know how much, if at all, the propensity for the casting of informal votes varied between the ordinary vote and the declaration vote categories. It also made it impossible to assess the turnout of voters at that election until the finality of the count.

A sub-class among informal votes is that of those that are such because they have been LEFT BLANK, unmarked. These ballot papers are of special concern because they remain open to tampering during the sometimes extended period before the declaration of the poll by the DRO. It is a requirement of both good scrutineering, and for electoral transparency, to know, and record, the number of such BLANK informals cast in each polling place.

Yes I fear an Abbott government.
I truly think he will bring back a form of workchoices.
And yes this has happened before in 1975 and two years before my ALP helped the media paint a picture that frightened little children.
After 11/11 that year we had no place to go, lost office and it hurt to know we helped what I think was a low act ,take place.
This time media is one sided making news in the truest sense.
But Abbott started this mud slinging, watch as it returns, in the strangest way it will be his own words that beat him the release of his past statements will derail him.
This country would be far better if both sides in every Parliament in the country, stops the rowdy rubbish and mud throwing and let policy's do the talking.
But this election has just started to get dirty if a debate took place no set rules just set times Abbott would tumble down and out.
I ask every one not to close their eyes remember the complaints about ALP spending, have you done the sums? Abbott has promised big spending but with what?