Won't Have Kristina To Dick Around Anymore

No Splintering To The Left

I have to admit that I must be pretty radical when it comes to the political spectrum. I'm not exactly a communist - far from it, but I sure as hell don't run with the conservatives come hell or high water. Which chased me into my choice of voting Green. I don't regret it even though in my seat, the Green candidate won't come close to the line. The Liberal Candidate ended up with a 25% or so swing in his favour according to the election night telecast on TV. (Thanks Angela D'Amore, you are the gift that keeps on giving, like a Herpes virus).

I'm a little amused that Kerry O'Brien started off the night by saying it was going to be a bloodbath, everybody knows the result; the only question is just how much of a bloodbath. Even more amusing was the ALP colour commentator they had - Luke Foley, I think he's called - who came across as somebody with an IQ of about 75. He had to admit it was catastrophic, the resulting devastation was going to be cataclysmic and that the ALP were going to have to do a lot of soul searching. Well, d'uh.

I guess nobody looks smart when their heads are getting beaten in; and yet even he had one reason to crow and that was that Carmel Tebbutt was likely to hold Marrickville against Fiona Byrne, and went on to bag out Fiona Byrne for being a terrible  candidate for the Greens.

Which all got me to thinking how much of the ALP vote that might have been swinging votes and traditional votes ran to the right into the arms of the Liberal and National Parties. Luke Foley was saying that the 'Labor Heartland' no longer exists. That might be true, and by extension this might be one of those elections that changes the state for ever. The ALP may not be able to win in NSW until well past 2020. And if the Hawke-Keating years and  the Howard years proved something, 10+years can change the culture of a place dramatically. NSW might turn into an arch-conservative state.

So where does that leave me with my radicalised environmental vote? Gagging on my recycled materials wooden spoon.

The Rush To The Right

Given the sort of miasma and nauseating whirlwind that was the Labor government of the last 4 years, it's not surprising that the middle rushed to the right, just pull the handbrakes on the craziness. I don't know if it's even a rational choice given that 79% of the electorate don't know what the Coalition's policies are and that 65% voted them in.

The poll is at odds with predictions that the gap between the parties would narrow as voters paid more attention closer to the election. It suggests voters switched off long ago.

Asked how much they felt they knew about the Coalition's policies, 79 per cent said they knew either ''little'' or ''nothing at all'', with just 21 per cent saying they knew a lot.

Knowledge of Labor's policies was slightly better, with 68 per cent saying they knew little or nothing and 31 per cent saying they knew a lot.

This could mean that a lot of people are going to wake up tomorrow and wonder just what the hell they've done but I guess it's too late for that now. The ALP haven't done much for the image of stability. That Karl Bitar fellow and 'protected' US informant Mark 'The Mole' Arbib have done over Morris Iemma, Nathan Rees,while doing the same Federally for Kevin Rudd and helping Julia Gillard to a hung Parliament has made the ALP a laughingstock in most conversations I've come across.

The unfortunate upshot is that it's pushed a lot of people to the right, and it amazes me how unimaginative people are when it comes to their politics. Here's the thing. I voted Greens last time too, but I preferenced ALP. If Nathan Rees was still Premier, I might have been persuaded to still vote ALP even. As soon as they dumped Rees and put in Kenneally I vowed they would not get my vote, and it's a sentiment that's been shared by many people I've spoken to. I'm amazed that most of the people who felt that way took it as a cue to vote in Barry O'Farrell, but I guess that's the 2 party system for you.

In any case, it's not like all is lost for the ALP faithful of NSW. It's just a bleeding state election to kick out a tired, over-ripe, incompetent ALP government. Surely some of those who ran to vote in Barry O'Farrell will come back as prodigal votes. It's the nature of politics.

Can The Greens Get Beyond The Marginalia Of Politics?

On the basis of tonight's result, I think this is going to be a tougher ask than I thought. So far it's counting about 11%. That suggests that:

• 10 out of 11% are crackpot socialists and tree-hugging hippies and dope-smoking Newtown-ites.


• Only the extra 1% represent the people who jumped to the left. The 20% swing to the right represent the middle.

I think 1% is an incredibly hard basis to build a platform upon when you're already outnumbered 10 to 1 by the loonies in your own party. 13% at the Federal election was a good showing, but in closer examination, the Greens are still the party of feral-loonies, druggies, hippies the dispossessed and socialist-idiots.

By contrast, at 50% of the vote, the current crop of Coalition voters are people with desperate mortgages and the NIMBY crowd. Laura Norder didn't even factor into it this time around.

One Final Thought About Kristina Kenneally

I'll be flayed for writing this, but what the hell. Everything else is going down in flames.

I'm thinking that Kristina Kenneally has to represent the end of the line of that crappy brand of 1980s feminism that saw male chauvinism layered in to every text and wrote post-modern essays about gender politics in Shakespeare to Bananarama. Let's call it, 'Quota Feminism' for want of a better tag. It gave us Verity Firth and Carmel Tebbutt and Angela D'Amore and Virginia Judge and Kristina Kenneally in an awful hurry.

Here's the thing: If that line of thinking really had merit, Kenneally and company would have been more persuasive figures - And I do say this with my deepest condolences to the Po-Mo 1980s feminists I know, but the rise of Kristina Kenneally (and to some extent Julia Gillard) has got to be one of the more abstruse and disaffecting manifestations of that line of thinking.

Was it any good? Goodness, the proof sure is in the pudding tonight, isn't it? Half the electorate ran screaming to a patriarchal-looking Barry O'Farrell. Doubtless Germaine Greer is going to write an article for The Observer over in the UK saying how this proves we're all sexist shits in NSW, and how Kristina Kenneally was defeated by the forces of backward oppressive patriarchal men. But you see, that's exactly where the ideological rot is at.