Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Election time in Queensland

Yesterday, State Labor Premier, Anna Bligh, called a snap election for 21 March. Labor's contender is the National Party, which calls itself the Liberal National Party, after destroying the Qld division of the Liberal party and merging with its right wing rump clustered around Santo Santoro. The Nationals need to win 21 seats to get gov't. They are led by two time election loser, Lawrence Springborg, who decided the best way to win is to hide the fact they are Nationals. So he engineered the so-called merger and just to make sure began a cult of personality around himself, terming himself rather oddly, the Borg. Clearly the Borg has not seen any Star Trek, or if he has he sees himself as the Great Absorber. Well, I guess that's what he did to the Libs so maybe he wants to celebrate his new-found powers.

But despite putting Liberal in front of their name there's nothing very liberal about this mob, a number of whom date from the days of National supremacy in Qld that ended December 1989. In the '80s the Nationals used homophobia as an HIV/AIDS strategy thinking that poofterbashing would be great scapegoating mechanism to to avoid facing up to the issues of the pandemic and keeping themselves in power. They failed but a lot of people were infected and a lot of people died. In the meantime, all the National party health ministers, bar one, during this period ended up in gaol following the change of gov't. So I hold the National Party responsible for every HIV infection in Qld during that time and the resulting deaths.

So that's one reason why I won't be voting for the Borg's mob. Plus I never want to live under a National Party gov't ever again. I endured too many years the last tie and I don't want to ever go back. I also have little confidence in the Qld Greens. Their local candidate was always bashing unions at the last election so I'm not voting for her this time. So I'll be voting Labor.

In the meantime, my flatmate, Mark, has with several others set up a new blog for the election, Pineapple Party Time: the Queensland Election Blog. I've added it to my blog list down the side and I recommend checking it out regularly. Pineapple Party, is the term Mark used to refer to the newly revamped (Liberal) National Party after it had gorged itself on the Libs.

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