-18 hours left to decide the future of Australia

Australians voted for a new federal government yesterday, only three political parties have a change of winning government, and not one of them has announced a single policy. Can you name a single Australian federal politician you would trust?

The three potential winners are:

• Australian Labor
• Liberal Party of Australia
• The Australian Greens

The Greens, in most cases, are just puppets for the Labor party. There is a big swing against the Labor party because people hate the way the Labor party conducted itself over the last few years. Many of those swinging voters switched to the Greens because the Greens give the impression of ethics but the Greens then direct all their preferences straight back to Labor. It is possible the Greens might win a deciding seat to help Labor form a minority government with the Greens leveraging a disproportionate power.

The Greens will won an electorate outright and might win a second at a time when the Liberals are ahead of Labor in only two electorates. The rest of the votes for the Greens, cast in protest against Labor, will be wasted because they will be dumped back on Labor by the Greens. If you want ethics in politicians, you really have to look at one of the minor parties, the Democrats, because there is not much else out there.

Maxine McKew won the electorate of Bennelong from the Liberals at the last election and lost it back to the Liberals yesterday. Maxine's summary of the swing against Labor is precise. Labor spent all it's advertising money denigrating the leader of the Liberal party without actually mentioning anything good that Labor might have achieved. At the last election Labor pitched their whole campaign on the personality of one person then, after the election, dumped that person for another. To the electors the message is clear, Labor have no policies, no ethics, and no successes. Who else can we vote for?

Results so far

In the electorate where I voted, there were only three candidates to choose between, and they are all for the useless parties, Liberal, Labor, and the Greens. There was a swing against Labor of 10 percent with the swing split evenly between 5 percent for the Liberal and 5 percent for the Green candidate. The 5 percent protest against Labor that went to the Green candidate will mostly bounce back to the Labor candidate when preferences are redistributed and give Labor the change to say they lost only 5 percent of the vote instead of 10 percent.

Given that politics is mostly about our perception driven by the lies of the politicians, Labor will spend a couple of weeks telling lies about what happened then there will be one or more bloodbaths to replace the Labor leader with someone who looks good on television. Maxine McKew is one of the few Labor personalities that is believable and Maxine lost yesterday, taking her out of the race.

Nationally, there are 147 seats to win in our federal house of representatives. Labor won only 70, a swing of 5 percent against them. The Liberals won 72, a swing of 2 percent toward them. The Greens received a swing of 3 percent toward them but won only one seat because most people tend to give there protest vote to the Greens only where their first choice is safe.

Four seats are undecided. Perhaps one will go to Labour and one to Liberal leaving a gap of two seats. The Greens might win one more seat and gain power over Labor by giving Labor enough seats to challenge the Liberals but Labor will still have to negotiate with one other candidate to gain a lead.

Late votes usually decide the last seats. Late votes tend to be farmers in remote locations and old folks who use postal votes at the last minute. Older folk tend to vote Liberal because of the Liberal party's long track record of stable economic management compared to Labor. Farmers vote for the National Party and the National party already supports the Liberals. The suggests the Liberals will get two more seats, giving it 74 of the 76 required for outright government and a shot at at four undecided seats, giving the Liberals outright victory.

If the Liberals win with only 76 seats out of 147, there is a high change they will lose power at the first federal by-election because most by-elections swing against the government. Swings against the government of 10 percent are common at by-elections. If the Liberals win a seat by only a few percent then the elected person retires due to health issues, the replacement Liberal candidate will not win. There are several by-elections each year. Expect from 8 to 12 by-elections in the government's 4 year term in office. Half of those will be Liberal and of the Liberal half, some will be only a few votes ahead of Labor. A liberal win will leave the Liberals on a knife edge.

Australian Labor

They have a slogan of move Australia forward

. Their only actual effect on Australia is to move Australia's debt upwards and employment downwards, both backward moves.

Their whole election campaign is based on saying the leader of the Liberal Party is bad.

The Labor party is wasting AU$42,000,000,000, yeas 42 billion dollars, duplicating our current Internet access. Given our current situation of 7 million employed people paying significant tax, that leaves us taxpayers subsidising the new network by AU$6000 plus the interest and charges. Based on the history of previous Labor party projects, the $6000 will cost us $20000 or more. What will be get for that massive subsidy?

retail prices as low as $29.95 per month for 25 megabits per second service and $59.95 per month for 100 mbps.

Whoa, that $29 package is exactly what we get today in many areas. The previous Liberal government worked out how to provide that type of speed to every Australian for $6 billion, not $42 billion. Where is the extra $36 billion going?

100 Mbps for $59.95 per month? The advertising from the Labor party show everyone using that extra speed to watch television. Yes, the same television that arrives free from the air via the current broadcast system.

There is no mention of a download limit or shaping or any of the other tricks Internet service providers use to limit your access. The only thing we can go by is the uptake in the initial trials. The catch is that you still have to buy the service retail from a company that can do what they like. You buy from the retailer who can give you a small fraction of what you already paid for in taxes and have to pay again in fees.

Despite the $42 billion subsidy, half the recipients decided to stick with their current service because of problems with the new service. Why are those problems not reported?

In many areas the biggest problem is the cables running through the air instead of underground. Bushfires and the first hint of wind destroy the service. This heavily subsidised network is still going to use the approach proven wrong last century. Labor politicians are saying the new network will be underground but the people building the network say they will not put the cable underground unless there is an existing underground pipe and in most cases there is not. We know many of the hundreds of people who died in the Victorian bushfires, died because of communication problems. The $42 billion Labor network has exactly the same faults in exactly the same locations.

Labor politicians are also claiming their incredibly wasteful and expensive new network will stop the spread of transmission towers. None of them have a clue. Wired networks do not service phones, mobile devices, netbooks, or notebook computers. All those transmission towers will still go ahead despite the lies of the Labor party.

Lets go back to the start of cable broadband in Australia. The advertising back then said we would get fibre but we got copper. At the time wireless was suggested for the few people not connected locally and satellite is used by everyone else. The new network will still use wireless and satellite for remote areas, which means nothing has changed for them. The new network is already designed to not cater for those people not catered for by the current network. We are paying $42 billion to get what we have now.

The Labor party always bitch about the slightest economic downturn when the Liberal party are in power, they lay all the blame on the federal government on of they day, but the Labor party were in power during the three greatest crashes of the Australian economy during recent history and in each case they suddenly claimed the federal government could not cause an economic downturn. I interpret that to mean they are two faced liars.

Some women said they want to vote for the Labor party because the Labor party currently has a female leader. The Labor party is the only party to deliberately put 600000 women out of work and the Labor party did it for no valid reason at all. They just think that women are expendable. They also have an official policy of treating women as weak. If you are female, the Labor party is the one party you should never vote for.

Liberal Party of Australia

The Liberals used to have a policy on carbon pollution. They were going to reduce carbon pollution by 12 percent. The Labor Party, back in 2006, rubbished the 12 percent target as too low. Australians agreed the 12 percent target was too low. The Labor Party won the election without announcing a single policy on anything and promptly cancelled all plans to reduce carbon pollution. Now the Liberals have no policy on pollution.

The Liberals have announced four definite actions for their next term in office, should they be elected. That is four more than the Labor party.

The Liberals were the first major party to have women in federal office in significant numbers. The Labor party, by comparison, select lots of women candidates but only in electorates where they know they will lose. The Democrats, back when they were a significant party, where the first party to select women candidates on an equal basis. The Liberals were next. Labor then introduced a tokenism based policy that shamefully discriminates based on gender. The Greens then started fielding lots of women candidates. If you want to support women in politics, you have to vote Green or Liberal.

The Australian Greens

The Greens used to have policies on the environment. For this election they have only announced actions, not policies. They rubbish everyone else for a lack of policies then do not announce any of their own.

The Greens are trying to push out a minor party named the Australian Democrats by announcing a bunch of tear jerking socialist actions similar to the Democrats. Unfortunately the Greens do not have policies to back up what they announce. Their actions will be one off changes that will have zero long term effect. The Greens, based on their announcements for this election, are a waste of space.

The Greens have an awful Web site. When you finally get past the bad design and the extra awful implementation, you get to the menu with the Policy Initiatives entry that does not take you too the Policy Initiatives page but instead activates an advertising banner. Should you work your way past that fault, the first so called policy is an announcement of an action, not a policy. The announcement implies it is a policy to adopt 100 percent renewable energy but it is only an action plan to run a meeting to discuss what they might do in the future.

One of the key points is to look at bidirectional grids but then they describe a grid that is today's current single direction grid. They talk about adding intelligence to let people know when electricity is cheapest and we have that already. We had that more than 20 years ago when I purchased by current home. I figure the Greens do not get out much. They need to catch up with the 1980s then, perhaps, wake up to the 1990s. By the next election in 2014 they might be up to date with last year.

The Greens have what they call a policy on Asylum Seekers. The policy says Australia must live up to International obligations but Australia already does that. The document waffles on about making changes but the changes are insignificant compared to the problems. What they should be doing is the environmentally responsible approach of helping asylum seekers where there is sufficient fresh water and job prospects. All we can offer them is recycled sewage, great education, and unemployment.

The Greens have a policy initiative titled Access to flexible work arrangements. We had work choices to do exactly that. The Greens campaigned against Work Choices because the Greens campaign against everything no matter how good it might be. Now the Greens want to bring Work Choices back but they want to discriminate and make Work Choices available only to a limited range of people who they think might vote for the Greens. Their discrimination has to stop.

There are other initiatives online and almost all of them involve replacing the existing initiatives with something similar that costs the same. Few are related to the environment and most of the people who vote for the Greens would not know what rubbish they will get.

Policies, not actions

The rubbish dished out by these pathetic party leaders are all about one off minor changes. Actions are not policies. Australia desperately needs more regional hospitals. A policy would be something like we will build hospitals so that nobody is more than one hour from emergency care. Instead the insipid or idiotic party leaders announce actions along the lines of we will a 1000 new hospital beds.

What happens when they implement actions? Almost nothing. Take the example of new hospital beds. For a start, they are not in proportion to the population. We have to beg for more beds at every election because of the expanding population. The new beds are rarely where needed because they refuse to build the new hospitals that are needed to house the new beds. Sick people die because they cannot travel the massive distances required to get to a hospital. Adding a few new beds at the hospital does not reduce a five hour journey.

Another common insane action of the top three parties is to allocate money into research on useless new technologies that are claimed to reduce carbon pollution. Those research projects are just a way to defer action for many years. We often hear about clean coal. Burning a ton of coal adds a ton of carbon to the atmosphere. Cleaning the coal before burning the coal does not reduce the carbon added to the atmosphere. If the money spent on researching clean coal was instead spent on wind power or other know effective alternatives, we would be able to close down a coal fired power station.

What we need are real policies, not actions. We need policies to place medical help out where the people live. We need policies to reduce carbon pollution using the known technologies we can implement now. We need policies to manage Australia's desperate shortage of fresh water.

Media coverage

I watched a bit of the television coverage of the election with their computer generated results. One channel displays outright winners then doubtful cases then unknown cases. The outright winners for one party went up for a few hours then down for the next hour, indicating the computer, or the people running the computers, faked the results then had to change them back when real results became available. You can easily conclude that you cannot trust the media on politics.

Vote against the leader

In Australia, the only way you get anything from the government, state or federal, is to be a swinging voter. If you are in a safe Liberal electorate, vote anything else. If you are in a safe Labor seat, vote Labor out. If you are in a safe Green area, put the Greens last. Only by making you electorate unsafe, will you stand a chance of being listened to and and getting a fair share of all the money dumped around the country by the politicians buying votes.

It is your money. You paid for it with your taxes. Get you share back by voting against whoever won in the last election.