His Name's Peter...He's Here To Help

I'm not really sure that I should be introducing politics on my blog, it's certainly not a subject that I'm especially knowledgeable about, even after taking Introduction to Political Science PL-1001 last semester, sorry Associate Professor, but here goes anyway..

I listened to the Kevin Rudd/Peter Beattie news conference on the radio yesterday and couldn't believe what I was hearing. Peter Beattie and his wife moved into his brother's house in the electorate of Forde that morning and if elected will buy a house and move into the area immediately. Well, that must give locals confidence in how committed Mr Beattie is to representing them: vote him in, he'll stay, if you don't, see you, bye.

I know modern elections are often more about stunts and publicity than policy, and that marginal seats are the ones that get all the media attention during an election campaign, but I do wonder what the Australian Labor Party thinks of the voters in the Forde electorate. Are they expected to be dazzled by a celebrity candidate and forget all the things that have been said in the past? Mr Beattie has previously stated that he wasn't interested in federal politics and supported Julia Gillard over Kevin Rudd as prime minister, that all now appears to be irrelevant. 

In his speech, Mr Beattie bemoans the fact that Labor has seven seats in State Parliament and eight seats in Federal Parliament and says "that's simply not fair". Hang on, I thought that was the whole point of a modern representational democracy. We all vote and if your party gets less votes than the other lot, they win and you lose. Labor has seven seats in State Parliament because that's what the majority of Queensland wanted. Of course, they might be thinking differently now after some of Mr Newman's job cuts, but that's the way politics works. If we vote them in, then we have to live with the consequences until it's time to vote them out again.

OK, rant over until something else annoys me. I can't say I'm a big fan of either major party, and I live in Bob Katter's electorate so my vote doesn't do much anyway.