"4 sleeps to go..."

Oz is in heading to the end of a 6 week election campaign. The campaign has actually been running full tilt for nearly a year, ever since Kevin Rudd was elected the leader of the opposition. He and his shadow cabinet have been giving the current Coalition government a hard run for their money, and there is an even chance that Rudd and Co. may well win the election.

As one wit recently said about John Howard and his gang of merry right-wingers: "Go with God, but go!"

The Howard government has been (mis)ruling Oz for the past 11 years and 5 months, and have been busily looking back to the future, driving the country into the comfortable bourgeois time zone of 1853.

And I am so sick of the total amoral and pragmatic, lead from the rear government we have. As I said in a short ABC television segment a year ago: this government has sucked the soul out of this country. It has worked very hard to fracture any sense of community or group organisation that does not toe the neo-con party line. They cannot argue policy (see David Marr's wonderful essay in the Quarterly Essay), but rather rubbish the people. They are bullies in the school sandbox.

Let us hope and pray and of course vote for a change of government, and send these political troglodytes back to their neo-con caves of selfishness and greed.

Enough for now.

P B White