According to this article in today's New York Sun, the Australian Labor Party, led by Kevin Rudd, holds a solid lead in the polls over the Coalition led by incumbent Prime Minister Howard, with only a few days left until the election. This lead, the article says, can be traced back to a surge of Labor support following a visit to New York by Mr. Rudd, in which he and Col Allan, the Australian Murdoch protege who edits the New York Post, went out for a night of heavy drinking, culminating in a visit to Scores, where bouncers threatened to eject Mr. Rudd for touching the dancers and other "inappropriate behavior."
There's a great animated comment on this by Nicholson in The Australian, here.
Evidently, "values voting" Down Under can have different implications than it does here.
lol - yes, in general I'd say that's a fair comment. The Coalition (Howard's party) sis try to make a more American "values" issue of it, pointing out that Rudd is a Christian and this behaviour therefore contradicted his own personal values commitments. Australia is a fairly secular place (Rudd's committed Christianity is somewhat unusual in a politician here), so I think most of the voters went, "Whew! So he's not that committed to his religion then!" ;-P
ReplyDelete(And I still have to apologise about your meme - which I haven't forgotten, but I keep thinking of when I'm in states where I can't string words together, let alone manipulate them... I'm in this period where I have conferences every couple of weeks, and have been shortlisted for a position, and so am also preparing for that... We may have to declare an irresolvable memetic defect - or else an extremely long gestation... ;-P)
Hello, n. I'm delighted to have your views on this.
ReplyDeleteWhile Oz may be a secular land, at least as compared to this one, you might be amused to know that it was an Australian evangelist who was responsible for my brief flirtation, at the age of fifteen, with Marxism. One night my dad was watching a telecast of Dr. Fred Schwartz's Christian Anti-Communist Crusade. I walked into the room just as the good Doctor rasied an arm and thundered: "Commoonism is nuttin' but a plot by a buncha inneleckshuls tuh tyke ovah the wuhld!" I thought it sounded like a good idea at the time.
I have nothing at all against long gestation periods. Whenever you feel inspired to do the meme thing, be it next week or next month or whatever, please do it. If you never feel inspired, that's OK too.