(Untitled)

[saffronlie]

I can't help it, but I kind of love election time. Despite the false promises, terrible advertising, and endless sniping between both politicians and voters, I love how every news, current affairs or light entertainment TV show gets election fever. I like election night, even though I've never been happy with the result. I was in England during the

Comments

[pandorasblog]

the 'big issue' is inexplicably asylum seekers for about the fifth election running,

Sounds most explicable to me - In times of economic hardship, it's the easiest thing in the world to blame The Incomers, with their job-taking/benefit-getting/insert local equivalent ways, and it's particularly easy to get ordinary members of the public to believe that those people, over there, are the reason for their problems. I'm not sure whether it bothers me more than politicians cynically use this ruse at every election, or that the public falls for it so obligingly...

Good luck - well, better luck than the UK's, anyway!

[saffronlie]

I was being kind. By 'asylum seekers' I meant 'boat people', and by 'boat people' the rest of Australia seems to mean 'filthy, sneaky queue-jumpers'. Immigration itself isn't the problem here, but instead the small number of migrants who come by boat, desperate for a new life and unable to do it any other way, and who apparently compromise border security on a national scale. For some reason it has suddenly become imperative that we STOP THE BOATS.

[pandorasblog]

Maybe a symptom of the larger, more complex climate of fear we live in these days? I mean the whole International Giant World Terrorism Threat Thing, and the Global Warming Thing and Any Number Of Other Things seem too big to grapple with, but if the media/government/whoever points out something that looks like a more clear-cut breach of a country's security ("this section of the border/this method of ingress/this legal loophole"), then everyone fixates on fixing that because compared to everything else, it looks do-able. And the fact that it's about individuals who are desperate for a new life gets lost somewhere...

[templa_otmena]

Chaaasers!

Dude, best of luck over there. Will try and not dwell on the fact that you may be as fucked as we are very shortly. Or more fucked than you are? Ack!

PS: I remember how excited you were when you got polled. You love to vote! xXx