Yesterday I received quite a surprise at the polling booth. The weather took a turn for the better and out here in the country I anticipated a civil and pleasant social occasion while handing out how-to-vote cards. They are not cards of course but the term remains. I was proven wrong within a few minutes.
The freedom parties have a strong common goal in mind, namely, let’s stop dictating to our people how they should be treated for a disease. It’s never been a subject that seemed to need to be discussed, let alone acted upon. Get sick or injured, see your doctor, be treated using their diagnosis and treatment regime. That was made illegal when Covid struck.
‘Struck’ is not an accurate description of Covid’s arrival as it has never ‘struck’. The fake videos, the Wuhan lockdown (if true) and the media panic all ’struck’ and intensified over the next few weeks. It was inevitable that health authorities needed to act to quell the trepidation. They didn’t, and the rest is history and for many of us a ‘mystery’ of lies, half truths, back-tracking, make believe, re-writing of medicine and the involvement of government into everyday lives with its usual ruination, just this time turbo charged.
The size of the online and in person protests became a force to be harnessed. Ta da, the freedom parties. The three most likely ‘freedom’ parties who could contest a substantial number of lower house seats were the Liberal Democrats, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and the United Australia Party. The micro parties are vying for Senate seats and/or some localised House of Reps seats. The LibDems and PHON are cash strapped so it has fallen on Clive Palmer’s money to pay for nationwide media advertising. It should have been easy to follow in the wide swath of UAP exposure to make a case for voting for the other two established parties if Clive or Craig were too unpalatable. Unfortunately with Palmer and Hanson essentially competing for the same Queensland Senate seat the politicking got grubby.
So here we are on the ground arguing with our friends in different coloured T-shirts about the minutiae and the backroom preferencing deals. This could lead to some last week ‘alternate’ arrangements as the vote whisperers are called in to reassess everyone’s chances. I make no predictions as some of the solutions may be too ’creative’ for me to guess.