Voting

Well, that's the second election for the year down and dusted.  I voted after waiting some time in a muddy, rain bedraggled queue.

The ordering of my preferences ended up being something of a surprise.  I am a strict and comprehensive below the line voter for the upper house, which is just an extension of the method for preference-based voting in the lower house.  As a number of letters to the editor in various daily papers have pointed out, the direction of preferences is ultimately up to the voter, not the parties.  One is not obliged to follow the how-to-vote card.

Several things have irritated me in the closing days of the campaign.

Gratuitous mail-outs have been returned to sender (one bounced back: grrrrrr!), and various street-level promoters told to put their handouts in their own pockets.  Perhaps the one occupation which ranks slightly lower than politics in Australia must be electorate officers, party apparatchicks and the like.  Which would be why the same people eventually tend to wash up as candidates.

But the winner of the "if only I could strangle it with impunity" prize is the media habit of reporting opinion polls as news.  This is a cancerous habit which it behooves all thinking newspaper editors and their correspondents to break as soon as possible.