Election

 

Our local candidate for the Angry Party was working up to something in his online propaganda spiel, before claiming he has for 30 years been proudly servicing our region. Doubtless he means serving our region. How to point out this solecism to an Angry Party person is not easy. How might he respond? With a serve? English is a tricky business. Reducing stress and listening to the policies would help. Angry were less forthcoming on that score. Observers and participants are saying this is the ugliest campaign in living memory, which is why anyone under 25 notices the absurdities rather than the ugliness. The Opposition has waited until the week of the vote to declare it has policies. This is a change from the plans it has announced so far, each one of which has been bested by some plan from the Government, but sheer fantasy land if you are the Opposition. Apparently the policies are in a 93-page document, just released, and the electorate is assured that they are very good, sound, safe policies. The substance of the policies is slower coming to light, leaving voters with the sense that all they need to do is download the policy document and discuss it over breakfast, picking up on the finer points. That could be more than one breakfast and there are only a couple more breakfasts until Saturday. All parties are agreed on one thing, the main issue is the Premier. I am referring to the person who saved thousands of lives in the past three years because he acted on the best medical advice. This is unsatisfactory for many thousands of voters, who are still alive and kicking and want to express their anger. Their anger seems to be about being made to stay in their dream home on their quarter acre block for weeks on end with clean running water and more pizzas deliveries than common sense. Contrarily, other voters seem exceedingly happy still to be alive and with a quarter acre block thrown in, not least the many voters who have just come to live in the electorate from overseas. The illusion that this is a level playing field is whipped into action by some city newspapers. Apparently it is a neck-and-neck race, while other newspapers don’t even bother with the predictions. Level playing fields are not level crossings, a Government campaign in plain sight extending its two terms of office. If emotions colour voting then there should be a Miserable Party, a Horrified Party, a Confused Party too. After all, weeks of torrential rain and floods should leave voters with the awareness that the main issue is climate. As it is, parties sell themselves as the Happiness Party, the Excitement Party, the Satisfaction Party also.

Election (August)

The approval given to an individual you have never met, whose actual opinions you only guess at, based on their allegiance to a set of ideas not all of which you agree with, or they don’t agree with altogether, and which could change when they assume power.

The personal consideration of public issues presented as arguments only loosely based on the common good but essential as matters of marketing; consideration of these issues not as they pertain to anyone else, but primarily to one’s own (never let it be said, selfishness) self-interest.

The demonstration of how the leader of a party, his conceits and failings, his values and skills, are immaterial before the overriding contest of two parties vying for the shifting attention of the largest number of possible voters; or her conceits and failings, her values and skills.

The proof that headlines hide the truth, polls are pernicious deceits, columnists have their own agendas, bloggers are witnesses to their own shortcomings, opinion-makers are heated as climate change, and most people have made up their minds before the date is even set.

The lesson in how logic does not determine an outcome, facts don’t get in the way of fictions, equations add up to what people want to see, theories suffer from attention deficit syndrome, numbers in boxes never total one’s true expectations.

The language that key egos preach as humble service; that is a slogan concealing an ugly truth; that could go either way; that was everything shouted from the rooftops and is now next to nothing told in secret.

The Saturday when the whole country goes cheerfully to its fate, waits in line as the ancestors waited in line, expects more of the same prosperity and disillusion; and, whatever the result that night, the Saturday when the power to tax is given over again to politicians.