From last night, I read this across the road, in response to a comment I made on” metrics” versus “individuals”…

Sure, we’re not metrics as individuals, but it will be metrics that decide the result.

Exactly wrong.

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Polling metrics (which is what I was referring to) will never decide the result.

Only an election can do that.

I repeat: ONLY an election can do that.

Polls are not elections, especially polls three months out from an election.

I learnt that from believing Possum’s “100 seat” snake oil in 2007. Never again.

There’s a pre-campaign and an actual campaign yet to come, where the punters will be reminded of just how much they will be losing – services, infrastructure, cash, rights at work, good health, better education – by voting for the Coalition’s dry austerity policies and how much they have gained under Labor in the same areas despite trenchant opposition from the Abbott forces.

Knitting, fat ankles, manufactured gaffes, Abbott’s new-born SNAG image and Kevin Rudd will be unimportant.

“What’s in it for them” will be important, much more important than it is now.

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When you don’t like someone, in that Reality TV way of “not liking someone”, it’s easy to tell a pollster that and to kid yourself into thinking that you’re “voting” by telling some anonymous voice from a call center who you prefer, today, now.

It’s almost a purely emotional decision, in between doing the dishes or cooking dinner, or while you’re trying to find your keys.

But as the day for actual decision-making gets closer you look for reassurance that your earlier emotional decision was valid. You start looking for rational justification for your voting intention.

You ask questions. You expect the courtesy of an answer.

I’m not talking about everyone. There are rusted-ons on both sides, of course. they’ll always vote the same way. Perhaps they see current politics as part of a life’s continuum, just another opportunity, or round in the fight where a long-held view can be expressed.

I’m talking about the few per cent in the middle that make the difference in just about every election: the suggestible ones, about one in 15-to-20 people.

The coming election is an existential battle between Liberal and Labor, between the Old Media and New Media, and between poll results and election day voting.

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An entire industry has grown up in the past three years, centered around predicting essentially unpredictable events. We have seen more polling over the entire time – post-election, mid-term and now the final straight – than I can remember.

Yet, despite the apparent rude good health of the Polling Estate, it’s existence is in play.

We’ve seen more analysis, more polling companies, more contrasting methodologies than ever before. A lot of this is because the government was seen as being in danger of imminent obliteration – from defecting independents, to Rudd Comebacks, to No Confidence motions – so polls were taken as often as possible.

It eventually became a mantra that the government couldn’t possibly survive, based on poll results. And then the polls were somehow forgotten. The bitter message was distilled down to “She’s gone.” It became a self-justifying proposition or, (as I prefer to term it) a circle jerk.

But survive the government did. It’s gone nearly full term now and Labor is still in power, and Gillard is still PM. The analysis of polls that was claimed to show the government was doomed next week or the week after that was wrong.

There are a lot more knitters, it seems, than there are poll analysts or journalists.

Poll analysts were mocked, and rightly so. All their spreadsheets and charts were useless against the will of a group of individuals in government, and one particular individual who held it all together – the PM – to not only survive, but prosper, getting 600 bills through in vitally important areas of major policy.

The more the poll analysts were mocked, the more trenchant they became. Next time they’d be right. But they never were. Not once.

In the term “poll analysts” I include journalists working for an agenda-driven Old Media, plus chartists and spreadsheet junkies who claim to be able to predict the future. I’ve seen enough predictions of the future go wrong when it comes to predicting the longevity of this government to believe that no-one has a clue what will happen on September 14th.

So much has been so wrong, so often, that it’s pretty clear to me we are in uncharted territory (forgive the pun).

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Julia Gillard seems to drive people crazy.

She drives the media crazy because she won’t answer their gotchas and won’t do what they predict she will do. She openly mocks them, and they are ripe for mocking. Gillard is the living proof of that. For example, last night on Q&A they spent 25 minutes discussing her, and why she won’t just give up.

She drives the punters crazy because, while they are rabid and foul-mouthed, they can never get her to answer them in kind. It must be infuriating for the sexists out there every time she calls them out. Women are supposed to buckle under to threats and intimidation and their gender being slagged off by men. But Gillard just digs in.

Rudd too must be getting to the unhinged point now. No matter what he tries he can’t get her to hand power back to him. He will have to fight for it every inch of the way and he doesn’t have the resources or (in my opinion) the ticker.

Every fight he’s won in the party room he’s won it with a show of hands, the result has been pre-arranged. The last fight he won, back in 2006, was with Gillard’s assistance.

She knows all about Rudd’s tactics. She’s read his book. She wrote a lot of it.

Understanding his tactics so well she’s been able to stay one step ahead of him at all times, interfering with his chosen ground for challenging and his preferred timing, rather brilliantly in fact. Put up, or shut up Kevin.

You can see the venom in anti-Gillard and pro-Coalition postersaround the blogs. She infuriates them too. She just won’t lay down and die, like the political text book says she should. You’d think that if the Coalition commenters were so sure of the final outcome they’d be a lot less antsy.

In all of these instances the hatred and agitation Gillard engenders – simply by staying put and refusing to give in, by demanding that her enemies actually fight the battle, not just puff up their chests like so many territorial mountain goats, and in the meantime getting on with governing – is a product of their deep-down concern that she can win the election, that somehow the polls and the pundits – and themselves – are wrong.

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Gillard has made a hobby of confounding her critics. She has routinely and ritually humiliated them every single time. Where others waver, she stands firm, smiling her way through, doing her knitting like Madame Defarge at their executions.

Sure she can lose the election. I can’t deny that. But that’s a long way off now and 80-odd days is a long time in politics, for anyone.

Life, love and politics are about people, individuals, not spreadsheets. Gillard understands that. Perhaps she has no choice but to understand it. By continually making a mockery of her critics she infuriates them further.

Another Golden Rule then comes into play: it’s far better to fight cool than hot.

In the meantime, get on with your knitting.

Another – dare I call it – colour piece from the inimitable Jaycee. Many thanks!

My first connection with the amalgam of religion and politics started at an early age. 1956. Grade One at St. Theresa’s Catholic School. It was late summer, I know, because I remember seeing the sharp black shadow of the corner of the tuckshop building angled across the verandah just outside the classroom door. Also, I suffered from an incurable blight of my birthday being on the very day school returned after the summer holidays. I have to surmise from my now advanced age and experience that the door was open to let in a cross-breeze as the heat and odour from fifty odd (that’s ‘odd’ as in generic, not psychotic – we weren’t protestants, you know!) kiddies would be too much for even the most hardened teacher to bear.

She was a small young nun, was our teacher. Sister Mary Francis. I remember that too, because I loved her as I grew older. Well, her face at least, for it was still the days of the habit. But hang on a sec – back on topic!

Late summer, just before noon (the shadow, remember?), when the Principal, ‘Mother’ Mary Margaret, came into the room and said “Good morning, children”. .”Good Morning–‘Mother’–Marrgrit” (automatic chorus). And we were soon exhorted to say a Hail Mary to the Virgin Mary so that communism wouldn’t take over the world. We all had to scramble to kneel in the aisle between desks.

It seems to have worked.

But it never cured my hives, you know. God = mysterious ways. Though I have to wonder: if greed and envy, those two driving forces of rampant capitalism and prime suspects in the list of the seven deadly sins, get no mention in “prayers to stop taking over the world” but communism, a doctrine in its purest intent (just like religion) being a plan for equality of communities on earth gets canned as being “ungodly” – what gives?

This idea that there is a whole population waiting with bated breath for some god-like revelation that will fix the economy, solve climate change, steer the nation to a more moral and ethical path (that’s the end of religion then!) and make the Liberal Party look like a reincarnation of the Church of The Sacred Heart Chapel Choir all singing in tune … well … it just ain’t gonna happen, so put away the banners, the prayer-books and the excuses. There never has been and there never will be divine intervention in Australian things – ask the indigenous people! – except in your own mind and in your private dreams. Best wishes and good luck to you on that!

But now we have these fanaticised young men sacrificing their sweet youth and future potential to the dubious reward of a heavenly afterlife. .Yes, the Mormon Church has a lot to answer for. as, of course do the other Abrahamic religions. I am forced to recall the dangers these impetuous youths place themselves in with the tale from one of my mates in days gone by, when he was having a face to face brawl with his wife in their housing unit – a screaming, plate-thrower of a brawl. He, typical male, was strategically stationed by the most convenient escape route, she, cunning woman, by the ammunition, when the doorbell rang. Being just there he flung the door open just as the last dulcet tones of Avon Calling! faded away, to see two wide-eyed, smartly dressed young men (one with finger still attached to bell-button) standing there. You know them: sharp-pressed white shirt, slim tie, black suit trousers, patent leather shoes so polished you could see your soul or women’s underwear (or perhaps both) in the reflection. One studied look up, then down and to the satchel was enough for my mate. “Ge-het fucked!!” was his most insalubrious greeting for these men of god. The door slammed and the young men turned away, but not before being heard to mutter in that distinctive American drawl, “Well, mahey the lawwd have merrsee on HIS soul!” Dangerous work, the work of god.

However, it is an American thing, surely, this religiousising of politics in the West – the vacant ecclesiastical stare, the glib reference to god. It’s certainly un-Australian. All those childhood years of catholic indoctrination taught me only two things: (a) never take religion seriously, and (b) always leave the Melbourne Cup sweep kitty in the hands of a nun. Not to say religion hasn’t penetrated (is that the right word?) into the political life here, it’s just that in Australia –I like to believe –it has followed the well-intentioned path of European Christianity via plain, run of the mill bribery and corruption. sort of like Fagan and his child army. god bless ’em – just simple down-to-earth deceit. Why, even when I was an altar boy under old Father Collins (be nice), I could see there was a degree of honest intent in the religious soul. Once, I snuck a look around the door from the altar boys’ into the priest’s vestry and there he was, with a small glass of the altar wine in hand and he gazing deeply into it, presumably looking for its soul (I’ve seen the same look since, with other men, before tackling a “hair of the dog” on a Sunday morn). Then he softly consecrated it with, “Saint Benedict, bless my soul ! ” and quaffed it in one gulp, kissed the cross on the surplice, and ascended to the fray. It was Pentecost – he must have needed it!

Tho’ surely, I can’t help but feel that if these young people were given a glimpse, a vision splendid, through the window of sage old age. they might be inclined to pass off all those incandescent actions and violence as nothing more than what seemed – a good idea at the time – and go a different course. Such is the impetuousness of youth. Foolishness and impropriety are at their beck and call, and it can only be luck and chance that get some through the passage of youthful intensity, for there must be some truth in the Boomers’ chant that fitted the age like a dick in a sock and served a whole generation so well: Make love, not war.

On that note I remember sitting in the Darwin Hotel one balmy ’70’s afternoon with my old-time mining and travelling mate, Bernie Babler, and talking of one childhood associate: Louie Lewourick, a keen, gangling always opened-mouthed, spikey-haired lad with coke-bottle glasses.

“I remember us two kids, the day after Guy Fawkes night,” Bernie recounted. “At the park we found a skyrocket that hadn’t been used so we fired it off, keeping an eye on where it landed so we could get it back,” … a sip of beer … “It landed behind the Caltex garage there on South Road and we ran like hell to get it, but we couldn’t find it. There was this old canvas-hooded car there – a Whippet or Model ‘T’ or something with the big petrol tank behind the open back seat. It had no petrol cap and I said to Louie, Maybe it went in the tank?” … another sip of beer … “I gave him a box of matches I had [all boys had matches – good scouts] and he lit one and held it to the opening to look in.” The result I will leave to your imagination – except that luckily the tank had been without a cap and empty for so long that there was no volatile explosion. Only a whooshing rush of heat and flame out of the opening that left Louie, when he looked up at Bernie in shock and surprise with his glasses falling down off his face … “He – he looked like Al Jolson in one of those minstrel shows.” Bernie laughed at the memory, until I asked him what in heaven’s name made him think of doing such a stupid thing. He sipped his beer and started to formulate a ‘rollie’. “Dunno … seemed like a good idea at the time.”

My First image attempt on this blog above

Hello patrons  and welcome to the  half/yearly “PUB REPORT”

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