votes for the demented!

Comrades,

In the after-math of one of the most spiteful and dirtiest short by-election campaigns in recent memory, you have to love the wash up of the vote in Bennelong.
Post poll there was a scoop in one of the Sunday papers that revealed the possibility that the Pinko candidate Kristina Keneally, a former short-lived non-elected NSW Premier, had been handing out how-to-vote cards to folks living with dementia in nursing homes.
Nothing wrong with that, apart from it being a tremendously useless waste of time and resources.
Nothing in the Electoral Act says that the demented can't vote.
If you are a law-abiding Australian citizen, even one with the heavy American accent of a Buckeye Ohioan - nothing disenfranchises you, nothing.
It wasn't as if she was exactly bussing them to the polling stations and letting them loose.
They may have even had formal exemptions from the Electoral Commissioner from their obligation to at least turn up and have their names ticked off the roll.
Who knows?
Whoever was handling the "dark arts" in that campaign didn't do their jobs very well under constant assault.
But, lets face it, Kristina has been connected in the past with former Labor 'powerbroker' Eddie Eddie Eddie Obeid, who's name is mud in New South Wales, due to the fact they had to build a special wing for him down at Long Bay.
Something about "corruption on a scale probably unexceeded since the days of the Rum Corps."
"Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I can assure you that nobody came into the powder room of the Premier's office at any point."
Unused, it was, for 15 months.
However, having the Pinko's at each other's throats is de riguer in this state, and has always been part and parcel of the caper.
Rats in the ranks aint the half of it.
In his victory speech the now un-disqualified returned sitting member John Alexander - a former British subject who lived in America for 12 years - rabbited on and on and on about his without-doubt blemish-free gloriously-patriotic tennis career and how it was cruelly cut short by shocking injury, or some such thing or another, as what he was saying didn't make a lot of sense at the time by all reports; but never one to sponge off the Govt. on account of his fabulous wealth after retiring in back in '83 with $US1,214,079 in prize money, the Tory said he was "too proud" to get an Australian Disability Parking Permit, which of course touched off a hue and cry amongst the handicapped lobby.
I've been on that stick 30 years now...30 years...and I'm not "too proud" about anything much anymore.
I went through the hoops and got the Cripple's Parking Pass.
Gives me free VIP parking all over Sydney 24/7 365.
As it should.
Couldn't live in a big city without it.
Now, I'm not the vindictive kind of person as you well know, but if John is "too proud", and you follow his line of thinking there, which admittedly is tough, then you'd have to sincerely hope, for his own sake, that the former journeyman Davis Cup Star finishes up demented, then he wouldn't need an Australian Disability Parking Permit, and he would be forgiven for voting Labor.
Boom! Boom!
The whole three-ring circus capped off rather nicely what has been something of a tawdry year all around in the Westminster System.