A mali estremi, estremi rimedi

Posted on October 4, 2004 by andrewleigh

Here’s one for ALP enthusiasts. What if you could choose between Latham+Bush winning, or Howard+Kerry winning? My guess is that most ALP supporters would select Howard+Kerry. Certainly, I haven’t yet met a member of the Labor Party who’d choose the former combination… but I’m open to being contradicted.

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4 Responses to A mali estremi, estremi rimedi

  1. scot mcphee says:
    October 5, 2004 at 8:01 am

    i would chose latham and bush. i’m sick of conservative rule in australia and frankly i don’t think that kerry would make much of a difference really to what is going on in iraq.

  2. Guido says:
    October 5, 2004 at 11:32 am

    I would have preferred a Latham – Bush win. But now that it seems Howard is going to be returned I would relish a Kerry win. Especially if Kerry has a different Iraq and Kyoto position.

  3. Ian Sinclair says:
    October 5, 2004 at 12:20 pm

    The Kerry-Howard supposition is quite wrong from my view regarding my Labor vote but I thank the writer for proposing it.

    I am so disillusioned that the Australian polls might be right! How can it be?

    I find it quite incredible that Latham appears to have done little (or absolutely nothing) wrong over the last weeks and yet the voting public (or the few who our system gives a real choice) want the social divisiveness sown and propagated by our so so annoying leader. The right and righteousness of the Right!

    Should the ALP lose I will savour for three years, Lateline, Tony Jones’ so simple question to Abbott re Pell; and the Jackson questions to Howard on 4 October Four Corners program. It maybe that there is a new truism; won the campaign but lost the election or did Billie Sneddon say that?

    While I am critical of our electoral system, it is probably better balanced than many and it is the reason that I have this sense of ambivalance about Bush/Kerry. Like all things with stars and stripes, their system had been portrayed (hand on heart) as the best; in the land of the free. And it turns out it is more like a ‘free-for-all’. I think they need another Boston Tea Party to right their wrongs. Kerry can’t do it and Bush wouldn’t want to. His government and ours have lost the sense of community interest in a laval-flow of self-interest, I think.

    Accordingly I want to look after my backyard and I would much prefer Latham’s right wing social democracy to Howard’s notional ‘freedom for the individual’. It has involved more controls and an insidious division in the society through complexities and policies that foster difference and promote hate. So many of the things are just not right (in the many definitions of that word).Unfortunately that seems an end result of ‘individual freedom’ and market forces. The concept is just as flawed as that supposed ideal, socialism.

    I was never a hater and I am becoming one, quickly. Don’t know whether I feel better after this spleen-venting or not.

    Latham and Kerry would be ‘nice’ so I refuse to abide by the original choices offered!

  4. Andrew Leigh says:
    October 5, 2004 at 3:17 pm

    OK, so that’s two votes for Latham+Bush. Sounds like my original was a skewed sample.

    And Ian, I enjoyed your spleen venting. I hope you succeed in not becoming a hater. Speaking as someone who spent a few years as an opposition political adviser, I can say that it may be fun in the short-run, but it’s never good for the soul.

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