Bradfield By-election

I recently found via Toxic Custard (a blog from before blogs, this guy had a weekly email of his life and other stuff back when I was in high school) Antony Green's Blog (Antony Green is the ABC's elections guru) which is quite an interesting read. I've especially found interesting some of the posts about the Bradfield by-election.

This by-election will have a record equaling 22 candidates. This however doesn't mean that a significant diversity of views are represented by the candidates. 11 candidates are standing for the Christian Democratic Party (CDP) led by Fred Niles. This is generally seen as a publicity stunt, since there is no way they are likely to win, and splitting the vote 11 ways is not going to help with this. It will however increase the number of invalid votes, as with 22 boxes to be correctly numbered, the odds of innocent mistakes are going to be a lot higher than for the average election. Helping the CDP is the fact that one of their candidates is listed first on the ballot, so they will probably gain a bit from the donkey voters.

Also running in this by-election, although with only one candidate, is the Australian Sex Party. I was unaware of this party's existence, which is understandable since it is a rather new party. Having looked at their policies they seem pretty reasonable. The worst I can say of them is that some will depend on how they're implemented whether I think they're good or not. There are also a few which stray from the focus you'd expect the Australian Sex Party to have, but getting rid of tax exemptions for religious organizations is definitely something I support.

This is a stark contrast to my reaction to the CDP's policies. Deporting muslims who look at you funny, refusing to take action on the environment, web censorship, hiring the Fiji Navy to stop people smugglers, and more. The only one that almost sounds good is giving every Australian a free 4G mobile phone to use with no phone bills. The only problems are, 1 we'll still have to pay for this with taxes instead of just paying a bill, 2 we're still building the 3G network and a 4G network is a fair while off into the future.

Anyway, I won't go on any more, as no one I know has a vote in the electorate.

On another note, I will try to post at a more frequent rate in the coming weeks. I've been very slack this year.