Ear Wax

Ho Ho it's off to the polls we go! Don't be stupid vote Liberal Party.

on values and culture-

Howard sees election 2007 as a contest between values. His disappointment, surely, must be that this alleged contest of values has not won prominence. This is because Rudd denied it as a tactic and as a policy. Rudd decided he would not be wedged by Howard on cultural issues.

This raises a wider issue about a Rudd government: its stance on values and culture. As Howard shows, the leader's character is fundamental to projection of values. Expect from Rudd a new national direction, a path that is distinctive, that is neither Howard's conservatism nor Labor's progressive left but falls between them.

If government changes, so does nation
Paul Kelly, Editor-at-large November 21, 2007

IN his final-week interview with this newspaper John Howard has belled the cat, warning against the new political era Australia confronts if Labor wins the election. Howard's scare tactic is reminiscent of Paul Keating's dictum that "you change your government, you change your country".

From the moment he entered politics, Kevin Rudd wanted to make a difference. His chance is imminent. Despite his clever me-tooism Rudd, an ambitious and single-minded leader, intends to make a difference to Australia if he prevails.

Rudd will change the nation and nobody should expect anything less of a new prime minister. The magnitude of Labor's potential supremacy may be unprecedented. This was the foundation for Howard's final-week wake-up call.

His sketch of the Rudd era, if it comes, is Labor control of the House of Representatives, a Labor-Greens majority in the Senate, coast-to-coast Labor governments in the states and federally, and a Labor-trade union alliance to rewrite our industrial relations laws from top to bottom.

This portrait is not just a Howard scare. It is a realistic result from the election if the polls are vindicated. Howard calls this system "the least checked and balanced political distribution in the history of the country".

This may become the crucial prophecy from campaign 2007, with Labor's supremacy comprehensive.

Read the Rest:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22793429-7583,00.html

Related link via LGF:
Australian Elections Loom