Time to look skywards and pray for wise & perceptive vote casting across Australia tomorrow?

Sometimes the only comfort is remembering how small we are in the universal scheme of things.........

IRAS 05437+2502, a small, faint nebula
that spans only 1/18th of a full moon
toward the constellation of the Taurus

Abbott wants a national indentity database - all the better to punish us with

"A COALITION government would revive the controversial Howard-era plan for a national access card to identify every individual receiving government benefits, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey has revealed.....
But instead of everyone having a card, this time the identifier could be in electronic form."
Electronic form? Everyone has to give a fingerprint swipe to access government services like Medicare and pension payments? Now that would be some database - all Oz fingerprints gathered together in one place despite the fact that the vast majority would belong to people who have no criminal record.
Just the thing to make breaching our human rights easier for any Abbott Government.

Election 2010: Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again

Well the dream wasn't about Manderley but That Man,

and it fulfilled an old trout's wish.

Image from somewhere in cyberspace

The Nationals and political advertising cons

The three days preceding the political advertising blackout at midnight on Wednesday were more than a little painful, as television screens were blitzed by campaign advertising by all major political parties. Here on the NSW North Coast it was a veritable snow storm of spin.

However, what really took the top prize was the Nationals running with one ad which brazenly stated that it was the only party which helped to get an increase in the pension.
Not even lipservice paid to truth there. In fact, putting it bluntly, that would have to be a blatant lie.

The Nationals were not the only party debating pension increases over the last three years and, I can recall that in 2008 they supported an increase of only $30 a week and even then not for every class of pensioner. Remember that vacant space in their initial argument when it came to disability support pensioners?

Every Nationals candidate in 2010 from party leader Warren Truss down to novice Kevin Hogan seems to have conveniently forgotten that fact.

Number and age of everyone who now gets to vote on 21 August 2010

As a result of the recent High Court Decision (6 August) to extend the period for enrolling to vote in the federal election to 8pm 26 July 2010, the revised total number enrolled to vote is 14,088,260.
This compares to a previous total of 14,030,528 prior the Decision, representing an increase of 57,732 voters. A further 40,408 voters had their existing enrolment details updated.
Overall, 143,728 net additions to the electoral roll have occurred since the announcement of the 2010 federal election. A net total of 443,187 electors have been added to the roll since the close of rolls for the 2007 federal election, when 13,645,073 were enrolled to vote.

Click on image to enlarge

AEC XLS file of age and gender by actual electorate.