people hate change

Comrades.

You can say all you like about a golden opportunity squandered, an election stolen by a hyper cashed-up classic blanket campaign of dirty money, spreading lies and disinformation designed to sow fear and loathing among the populace, how the Opposition unwittingly made themselves a slow moving target, how gerrymandered-to-fuck western and far northern Queensland snapped the rough end off a pineapple and shoved it clean up our unsuspecting collective arse, and bang on and on and on; but when it all comes down to it in the final paralysis...people, hate, change.

Hate it, with a passion. They will do anything at all to avoid it. Fuss is the last thing they want. People have a primal urge to stay the same. What? Me? Out my comfort zone? Forget it. So when the ALP party machina came up with the [now inexplicable in hindsight ] late campaign slogan urging the punters to "Vote for Change", they were asking for trouble. No one will vote for change. "It's Time" never asked anyone to change. As PJK famously said "people will always back the horse called Self Interest". So we went through five weeks of dirty low down shakin', and all that happened was this great Commonwealth of Federated States of ours voted for the status quo; vote Saturday, wake up Sunday, and nothing has changed, absolutely nothing. When all the autumn leaves have been swept into the gutter and burnt, and the gigantic abacus is finally put away you will find that, give or take a seat or two, the Parliament will remain exactly the same as it was. And so will the Govt. They won't change. They've promised not to.
The born-to-rule know they will never get the numbers to govern in their own right and I hear the Country Party apparatchiks bark from the sidelines "it was The Regions who came to save us". People have always underestimated the country-city divide, big time. Anyone who has ever lived for a time in the bush will tell you it is an utterly different planet out there. After doing two-and-a-half hard long years west of the Divide, it scares me. The romantic myths are just that, myths, and there are many adjectives you can use to describe the joint: parochial, insular, opinionated, self-interested, reactionary, prejudiced, bigoted, etc etc et al, but there's always one word that comes to mind - 'backward'. They might be dumb, but they're not stupid, they've got clout at the ballot box and they know how to use it. At this election, Country Party voters showed more solidarity than any bunch of lazy fair weather Pinko's in town. And that shits me to tears.

Only the bookies are laughing, all the way to the bank, about the opinion polls being way off the mark - they never forecast DJ Trump! or Brexit, because they use all the wrong out-dated metrics and assume the unassumable. Even a cursory study of the algorithms on yr SoShul Meejah would tell you a helluva lot more than ringing up random punters on an old fashioned telephone to ask them which fib they like to tell about their voting intentions. When RJL Hawke came to power back in '83 it was another world altogether. 36 years ago was a primitive epoch, never mind the future. In any case, the miracle in the Miracle of Democracy is you can never predict it. As Honest John was fond of saying "the only opinion poll that counts is the one on election day". A tired old truism if ever there was one.

There was a rare final moment where I agreed with Christopher Pyne; he was right when he said "I feel very sorry for Bill Shorten", and it is an unexpected blow and disappointment to us old Trots [rtd], but one thing is for certain, the days of the good old union men have gone away - forever. In this age of the 'gig economy', did the Labor movement die with Bob Hawke? The Pinko's could take a decade or more to re-invent themselves as the party of the Left, with genuine political muscle, or they could even fade from view into obscurity. The fundamentalist right-wing extremist take over of the Liberal Party is now complete, and unchallengable. The middle has gone missing in action, and if the Greens had any sense they'd go back to their roots and again become a single-issue party - climate change. As it is, young folks are being told the rich get richer the poor get poorer and to be a real Strayan it's now Us v Them, and it's every man and woman for themselves. Bugger the rest of them.

That hoary old chestnut "people get the politicians they deserve" couldn't ring truer this time around, but I'll leave it to the psephologists to rake over the smoking ruins, the Libs to count the dead, Labor to bring in the casualties, and the pundits to proffer profundities on the action, as I've already booked my one-way ticket to French Algiers. For three more years. And I'll lumber the final say with Uncle Bill...in his own eulogy..."thank you, and good night".

Photo: Mike Bowers/The Guardian.