what would Cook do?

Comrades,

I must say I have never understood Queensland politics.
Who does?
Not even back in the day of Sir Joh, when everyone was on the take and everything was clear cut - "oh, no, no, no, don't you wooorry about that..."
And Joh didn't keep the Country Party in power for 19 years for no reason - apart from being a master of the "Dark Arts", Joh had the Gerrymander down pat - everyone north of the 27th Parallel got two votes, everyone south, got one.
Simple.
Them's were the days.
On the face of it, all One Nation and the Katters did was split and fracture the Tory vote into shards, while the Pinko vote remained rock solid.
Two of the golden rules of the Miracle of Democracy right there - Solidarity Forever, and divide and rule.
By all reports, Pauline Hanson was last seen leaving the One Nation election night function clutching a half-drunk bottle of Bundaberg Black.
She must have been a bit tired and emotional.
It was very clever of the Pinko Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, to go for the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics - "everything tends to chaos" - in the last week of the campaign, effectively saying to the electorate, "no deals with anyone to form Government, it's me or nobody, and if you vote for any of those other bastards, our cherished stability will go up the chute and down the gurgler, and the Great State of Queensland will rapidly go to rack and ruin".
And it worked a treat.
No one likes rack and ruin.
That appalling Adani cock-up didn't raise a ripple in the bush, and the Greens went nowhere in the cities.
Labor cleaned up in Brisbane and won Townsville.
Game over.
The other main upshot is that the LNP experiment is now deceased - dead, buried, and cremated.
Their vote died in the arse something shocking - the merger of the Liberals and the Country Party was an idiot's idea from the off...god, the "wets" and the "drys" in the Liberals are about as predictable as the monsoonal seasons, and who thought they'd ever get on with the rabid hard-right farmer's lobby?
Have you ever tried to argue with a sugar cane grower?
I haven't, and I don't want to.
They used to whip Kanaky you know.
The poor ol' ABC psephologist, Antony Green, was having a very hard time of it on the live television call of the card ..."and now we come to the seat of Cook - oh, that's impossible...ah lets have a look...mmm...errr, it depends on who's votes are eliminated first here, and preferences could go anywhere, lots of postal votes, I just can't even remotely call that one...and the next seat is..."
OK then, lets have a look at Cook, Antony, if you like...it's a super-vast electorate that takes in the Torres Strait islands, and all the Cape York Peninsular right down to Skasey Town [after Christopher Skase, formerly of Majorca, now re-named Port Douglas], and out to Mareeba.
That is as FNQ as you can get.
Millions of square miles, and hardly anyone there, at a total of roughly 30,000 voters.
You could draw a 2km circle around my gaff here on the outer edge of the Inner West of Sydney and get that many electors.
And it has a long history of returning colourful Members ...Billy Gordon was the sitting MP, elected as a Labor pollie, he then became an independent after being thrown out of the Labor caucus for failing to acknowledge his not insubstantial criminal record.
During his time in office alone, Billy was the subject of an extortion threat, was falsely accused of domestic violence and fudging his tax returns to avoid paying child support for his five children, crikey - even his own mother took an AVO out against him at one stage, and then he was done for drink driving as he tootled around the Atherton Tableland.
Sensibly, Gordo decided to retire from the game at this election.
Then you can go back to the 1950's to find the wonderfully named MP for Cook - who had the seat for 16 years - Bunny Adair.
Also a Labor turn-coat who went Independent, trading off his own reputation as the publican at Freshwater.
Bunny's main claim to fame while in office was going for a short walk north of Cape Tribulation and getting lost in "impenetrable jungle", and being found by chance and rescued in farcical circumstances a week later.
Onya Bunny.
If you don't understand any of that, then you don't understand Queensland.
As everyone on the election panel kept on saying during the Tally Room count - Queensland is different and no-one else understands.
One of the anchors said "if you were wondering what's happening, we don't really know".
Mr Green was probably screaming at the executive producer "can someone, please, just tell me what the fuck is going on?"
Some boffin on the telly said "Queensland is its own machine. It operates without any need for Canberra".
Queenslanders see things that other people can't see, and they know things nobody else knows.
There is no accounting for them, and the rest of Australia is happy enough for it to stay that way, you would have thought.
Unlike Western Australia, it's a living wonder there's never been any serious secessionist movement up there.
Beautiful one day, perfect the next.