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.

The streets were closed to traffic, the barricades went up. Yes, the Bentleigh festival was on again.

But 15km away from the sausage sizzles, roaming families, showbags and Humphrey B Bear, some streets in central Melbourne were blocked-off for the third day, for the G20 meeting. Hearing about the violence in Collins Street on Saturday, it seemed like a world away.

I can’t for the life of me understand the motivation of the few dozen protestors who turned violent unless it’s simply to have a go at the police, and generally cause trouble. It seems a long way from the vast majority of people attending who were simply trying to highlight important issues such as environmental destruction and poverty.

Bono was on Lateline on Friday night appealing to the Australian government to give 0.7 percent of GDP to aid for eliminating poverty.

I support that. And even better, I’m going to rejig my regular charity donations to make sure I’m personally donating at least 0.7 percent of my income to charity. By my calculations I’m currently over that (1.008%), though some of it is going to Greenpeace, which doesn’t directly work on poverty issues.

Now, when will my government join in?

Rosa Lee Long, Queensland’s only sitting One Nation MP, was returned in her seat of Tablelands in the Queensland state election on Saturday.

I only mention this because she’s actually a distant (non-blood) relative of mine. On the Chinese side of my family there are a mass of Lee Long family members, and I understand Rosa is the widow of one of my dad’s cousins. The irony of a member of a party that is widely perceived as racist having been married to a Chinese man was not lost on the media, and her return even made the international media.

(Isn’t it funny how overseas media use the generic term “lawmaker” when talking about other countries Members of Parliament.)

The Howard government is doing it again.

It’s just like the republic debate all over again. Back then it was not Do you want a republic, it was Do you want a republic with a Prez replacing Her Maj and the GG, appointed by a two-thirds majority of parliament.

This time the energy inquiry being set up is not How can we satisfy our energy requirements cleanly and cheaply, it’s Can we go nuclear?

Is it too much to ask to approach these questions without a predetermined outcome in mind?

Apparently, yes.

My bloody car is still playing up, despite a service the other week that included an astronomically expensive ultrasound on the fuel injection! Given that that was prompted by reporting the same fault it’s still suffering, what are my statutory rights here?

Anyway it’s been at the service place since last night (so they can experience the thrill and excitement of its early-morning shudders), so I’m discovering how life is without a car. Not terrible, so far, just more time required for getting about.

Speaking of bloody cars, the Feds are about to give Ford Australia $50 million to support local operations. But wait a sec… they’re giving it to them to pay for work on new model Territory (four-wheel-drive) and Falcon (big sedan), two of their most inefficient vehicles. Where’s the logic in that, given that now even the International Energy Agency says oil could hit US$100 per barrel?

But then, despite calls to reform taxes to discourage pollution, I wouldn’t be betting on anything so logical just yet.

According to a sticker left on the glass partition of a now dis-used office at work, “Mountain cattlemen care for the high country.”

The other week I was chatting to a friend about the issue of the Victorian Government banning livestock grazing from the Alpine National Park.

Apparently the image of the mountain cattlemen — all Akubras, Drizabones and horses — doesn’t quite match up to the reality. In actual fact they tend to arrive with trucks of cattle, unload them all, let them eat all the grass in the area, load up and drive off again.

It’s a long way from the Man From Snowy River image they promote when they ride through the cities hoping to influence the populace.

Admittedly, this view comes from national park advocates. But it leaves one thinking that often things are not what they seem.

Goodnight and Good Luck — A dramatised version of the campaign against Joe McCarthy by 50’s CBS programme See It Now, but with so many modern parallels in today’s climate of terrorism, fundamentalism, secrecy and censorship. Beautifully shot, and compelling. My eyes didn’t waver from the screen for the full 90 minutes.

On a couple of related notes:

George Clooney says he didn’t actually write the blog entry in the Huffington Post “I am a Liberal. There, I said it!”, but that he does stand by the statements in it, which were compiled from two separate interviews. He takes a potshot at the (US) Democrats: Just look at the way so many Democrats caved in the run up to the war. In 2003, a lot of us were saying, where is the link between Saddam and bin Laden? What does Iraq have to do with 9/11? We knew it was bullshit. Which is why it drives me crazy to hear all these Democrats saying, “We were misled.” It makes me want to shout, “Fuck you, you weren’t misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic.”

Ever wondered what the media won’t talk about? Sure, some of it’s media barons directing from on-high, but there’s also D-Notices. The D-Notice system lists the topics they shouldn’t report on. Theoretically it’s a voluntary system.

I look down my street, and wonder how this exists elsewhere in my country:

(From The Age: ‘Chicken coop’ village fights to shed despair)

Successive governments have let things get this bad. Please Mr Costello, don’t give me a tax cut, use the money to fix this and other problems of poverty in our society.