Poll Day - Australia

Australia goes to the polls tomorrow.
Politics seems to have lost its way
Public opinion polls dictate policy decisions on difficult issues
Elected prime ministers are toppled by their own party
Tony Abbott (Liberal/Conservative) speaks empty rehearsed lines
Julia Gillard (Centre left Labor) seeks to reinvent herself mid campaign
and invokes mysterious notions of democracy to excuse a lack of leadership and courage.
Bob Brown (Greens) sells an idealised vision of the future
Joe Hockey (Shadow Treasurer) can barely cope with the most rudimentary notions of economics
The media ask inane questions and publish opinionated drivel
Debates are glorified press conferences
The old fashioned Town Hall public meeting returns
and is turned into another version of an opinion poll

It's depressing.
Gone the days of my local candidate
standing on the back of a truck with a dodgy PA system
Gone are politicians with ideas and convictions
In their place we have manufactured and cautious campaigns
and slogans slogans slogans
Moving forward; we will we will we will;
Stop the boats; great big new tax;
It's all bullshit written by some computer program
that thinks we're all idiots.
and sadly it works -
many of us are just that
Idiots
with no grasp of the true issues or the options.

I'll vote tomorrow
I would even if it weren't compulsory.
One pleasure I'll have is voting for Kevin Rudd
even though his party dumped him.
He's my local representative.

The other is seeing my children (in their twenties)
become really engaged with an election for the first time.
(The main chartacters are so absurd they've grabbed their attention -
perhaps for all the wrong reasons)
It's ironic that it's probably one of the worst examples
of democracy I've experienced in a long time.

I'm going to an election party tomorrow night
in character as a politician who no one has heard of.
Another irony there.
This politician is long serving but stands for nothing.
No profile, no position, no name.