VOTE EARLY, VOTE OFTEN

By Lawrence Gibbons

Only three days after much of NSW delivered a stinging rebuke to the State Labor Party in local Council elections, my absentee postal ballot arrived in the mail from California. Here in Sydney locals voted Green on the City’s left side, Independent in the City centre and over on the right side, Malcolm Turnbull’s libertarian, tree hugging constituents put the ALP last. That night on Sussex Street the party bosses danced in their skivvies singing ‘I’m titty fucking your mother,’ to let off steam.
The news that arrived in my post box from San Francisco City Hall was even more startling. Sarah Pale-one, the Republican nominee for Dick Cheney’s control room in the White House was not listed first on the Presidential ballot. Hadn’t California’s state officials read the Murdoch press or tuned into Fox News’ Just one week after Melbourne cup day Ms. Pale-one, the moose shooting, former Mayor of a small Alaskan town half the size of Burnie Tasmania, was leading the party to victory on the second Tuesday in November. Somewhere between the oil fields of the arctic and the oil spill of the Exxon Valdez on a long and winding pipeline, the once powerful neocons scooped up Alaska’s ice queen and anointed her America’s neo-Bush.
According to a waitress at a white trash diner out on the Alaskan plain, Palin reportedly exclaimed: ‘so Sambo beat the bitch,’ upon hearing that Obama had whooped Clinton in the race for the White House. Let’s hope he does it again. Like GW Bush, the former governor of another oil rich state, petrol interests have fuelled the half-baked Alaskan’s political ambitions. In 2001 she accepted campaign donations from an indicted Alaska oil man. Her husband Todd was on BP’s payroll as an oil field production manager, while she attempted to cut taxes for big oil producers as Governor. She argued that oil should be drilled and pipelines should be laid in the State’s pristine north — in opposition to the official campaign policies of both McCain and Obama. Who cares if polar bears die in the process, she believes they aren’t really endangered, which puts her at odds with Alaska’s leading environmental scientists and with John McCain.
American politics have become a crude affair. If Bush ensured that liquid gold would flow stateside by invading Iraq, Alaska’s governor can stand out on the Bering Straight, look over to Russia and plan her pre-emptive strike to secure Russia’s oil supplies. As she told the US broadcaster ABC in her one and only television interview on foreign affairs, ‘It doesn’t have to lead to war and it doesn’t have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but’ [Putin’s] mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming from and through Russia, that’s a dangerous position for our world to be in, if we were to allow that to happen.’
According to Palin in the same interview, Israel would be justified in bombing Iran, Russia was wrong to invade Georgia and Bush was right to conduct border incursions from Afghanistan into Pakistan. The once centrist John McCain campaign for President has been hijacked by a lipstick wearing, gun-toting arctic Cold Warrior, whose foreign policy skills were honed shooting caribou and eating frozen dinners out on the fast melting tundra. And the strategy appears to be working. Since McCain revealed his surprise decision to nominate Alaska’s own Snow White as his running mate, Sleepy has been out dwarfed and the Republican ticket has outperformed Obama’s Democratic ticket in most national polls. Suddenly Snow White is giving Black Beauty a run for his money.
As was the case in 2000 and 2004, when Bush crept into office, only a handful of swing states like Florida and Ohio will ultimately decide whether or not Obama beats the bitch this time around. Which leads us to the high flyer on the cover of this month’s City Hub, Kristina Kerscher Keneally, who is one of the few prominent Australian-Americans to hail from state of Ohio. A native of Holy Toledo, the former political science student at the University of Dayton, Ohio could well make a difference in this year’s political contest for the White House, if she hasn’t renounced the US Bill of Rights.
After meeting her husband at the World Youth Day (a condom free event) KKK migrated from Ohio to Australia. A decade later, as the WYD Minister, she defended her government’s decision to suppress free speech by enacting anti annoying laws in NSW. On July 3rd, the day before US Independence Day, she wrote an Op Ed piece in the Herald declaring ‘The community concern is understandable, but unwarranted. It could be facetiously described as libertarian “moral panic”‘.Critics have suggested that the regulations are a sweeping new power so police can protect the sensitivities of participants. In fact, the “annoyance and inconvenience” clause is neither new nor specific to World Youth Day.’
Why doesn’t everyone just shut up’ There is nothing new about the ALP enacting a raft of laws to suppress free speech and individual liberties in NSW. The Party created its own ‘moral panic’ in the wake of the Cronulla riots and in the lead up to the APEC conference in Sydney, so it could substantially increase police powers. In the past, Parliament voted to enact laws that significantly curtailed civil liberties. This time around, without public notice or debate, then Deputy Premier John Watkins simply gazetted the government’s controversial Annoying Laws one Friday afternoon without a parliamentary vote. Within weeks Justice French and the full bench of the Australian Federal Court found the State’s controversial annoying laws had not been properly implemented. The court rejected the government’s view that it did not need to hold parliament debate or a vote on something as commonplace as suppressing individual liberties.
One week before Sydneysiders would be called to vote in local Council elections, Deputy Premier John Watkins resigned. His departure triggered a front bench reshuffle, which led to the demise of Premier Iemma, Planning Minister Frank Sartor and Treasurer Michael Costa, who bares an uncanny resemblance to Doctor Evil. ‘Why make trillions when we can make billions” Doctor Evil proclaimed in Austin Powers. In late June, Michael Costa put forth a budget with a surplus of $268 million. The news so aroused then Housing Minister Matt Brown that he famously danced in his undies while simulating sex with the MP Nora Hay who hails from Wollongong, where sex and government go together hand in gland. The party was well and truly over. Three months later, on his way out the door, Costa revealed the State government was at risk of losing its AAA credit rating due to a massive deficit caused by $300 million of overspending on health care and under collecting of stamp duties following a decline in the housing market. Despite having sat on the Cabinet, the new Premier Nathan Rees claimed he had no idea that the State faced a billion dollar budget blow-out. Like Colonel Klink, Rees swore he knew ‘nuthink, nuthink.’ Despite Labor’s best efforts to put a pretty face on an ugly situation by naming Kristina Keneally Planning Minister and Carmel Tebutt Deputy Premier, voters went to the polls in local Council elections and delivered the State ALP a resounding rebuke. Unfortunately for Nathan Rees, Carmel Tebutt is no Sarah Palin.