Finally.

Well, as of this arvo it looks like Australia has retained her non-religious female Prime Minister in spite of News Ltd. The Greens apparently now hold the balance of power in Senate and three independents in the lower house.

One of the independents, from Tasmania, is Andrew Wilke. This is the same Andrew Wilkie who was a senior intelligence analyst and resigned over the Howard Government’s decision to conspire in the illegal invasion of Iraq. It will be very interesting to see how he gets along with the rabble of grammar school boys who make up the lower house.

The most curious thing about this whole episode is that in spite of a dreadfully boring campaign, even more dreadful reporting by the media of the boring campaign and a system designed specifically to serve the interests of two major parties who serve big business at the expense of the community, the electorate of Australia has managed to make itself heard. We might actually see some representation of citizens going on. Neither of the Laborals have free rein and at least one of the independents has the courage of his convictions. This could be an interesting few years.

In other news, the drought seems to be over. Despite John Howard telling Australians to get on their knees, it wasn’t until he got the boot that we saw Lake Eyre start to fill with water. And it wasn’t until the Sydney Anglicans were replaced with a female atheist that the drought broke. That seems really amusing.

Aside from posting screenshots of a young Liberal from QLD shooting himself in the foot, I’m not going to bother to analyse that. It’s patently obvious from both attitude and accounting that the Liars Liberals are stuck in the Seventeenth century. Failing to fund Aboriginal communities until it was deemed necessary to send in the Army and ration poverty-level welfare payments is *not* good government or humane, or even rational in the 21st century. Hell, it would have been a stuff up even in the 17th! Now after seeing Abbott flumoxing about with an $11 billion gap in his budgie smuggling, it rather looks like we dodged a bullet.