What I’m pondering for this Saturday’s state election is who am I going to put last? It’s not like a Federal byelection, when every man and his dog decides to run. No, in my district there isn’t a huge assortment of weird and wacky parties, nor are there any independents. All you’ve got are ALP (sitting member), Libs, Greens, Family First and the Citizens Electoral Council.

Apart from CEC, I happened to compare transport policies of the parties while helping to compile an election scorecard for the PTUA.

What’s particularly enlightening if you read the Family First literature is that it’s all just a bunch of policies of (in my opinion) varying degrees of benefit, but marketed under the FF banner. You wouldn’t want to be against families would you? Then you MUST support building a freeway through Melbourne’s northeast green wedge! And that’s just the start — they want billions of dollars of new freeways. Family First says it’s good, so it must be good for families! What crap.

As for CEC, well it’s a little hard to find anything of actual relevance to state politics on their web site. The only thing relevant to transport is a picture of a maglev train on their banner. Ah yes, maglev: very fast, fantastically expensive, a technology that has been implemented commercially precisely once.

And they appear to be stringently pro-nuclear, with their leader Lyndon LaRouche claiming if we don’t build reactors then the world economy will collapse and we’ll turn into dingoes. Or something like that. Indeed, in this as in other issues they appear to blindly follow the beliefs of LaRouche. Which I guess is okay if you really believe one bloke has the answer to everything. Maybe if he’s God, he might. I wonder what he thinks of the South Morang rail line, or building a railway station at Southland? Perhaps as long as the trains are nuclear-powered.

So, it would seem the competition for who goes on my ballot last is pretty hot.

And there’s lots more in the upper house.