Deo gratias! Jubilate Deo! Yay for Premier Anna!

I'd like to think my processing of the icons yesterday helped. I ran into Claire Moore at the local polling booth yesterday and mentioned that I'd said prayers to St Anne. She smiled and said she'd been doing some praying herself. But yes, Anna Bligh has been returned as Premier! As Mark Bahnisch says at Pineapple Party Time, Welcome to the Anna Heterogeneity! He continues:

I don’t like to use the term “hegemony” because my hope is that under Anna Bligh, the first woman elected as a Premier in Australia from a supposedly conservative state, we’ll finally collectively wake up to the fact that the Smart State is at the forefront of a diverse and exciting country that’s in the process of emerging. And living with heterogeneity is a much better prospect than assimilation into the hivemind of The Borg. I’m still thinking that whoever came up with the bright idea of applying that moniker to Lawrence perhaps wasn’t that big a Trekkie.

He also points out:

after a campaign characterised by apathy and a disposition to vote against an eleven year old government, voters only really focused on the choice incredibly late in the game. There’s tons of evidence around that beneath the repetitive drumbeat of the polls there was a lot of volatility, as I’ve been arguing over the last few days.

The campaign was also taken out of the hands of the apparatchiks who were steering the ship of state towards the shoals, and the whole weight of the federal ALP was placed behind the state effort - not just the rhetorical intervention of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, but also organisationally, driven by Wayne Swan’s personal intervention, backed by the PM. The Bligh 30 seat marathon signalled the turn to the realisation that the way to win was to “Let Anna Be Anna!”…

In the final analysis, Lawrence Springborg sunk his own ship, and Anna Bligh, having finally escaped the cold dead hand of the ALP apparat, won the thing on the basis of her own personal qualities. Her victory as the first elected female Premier in Australia is thoroughly well deserved, and she will enjoy a much enhanced authority in the party and over the government.

It’s Bligh’s victory. And she now has the chance to stake out a new direction for Labor and Queensland.

I did a rough astrology chart for Anna yesterday and realised from the transits happening that if she did lose it would probably be the best thing in her life personally but, of course, on the other hand it inidicated that she could win and very much by taking up the challenges and running with them. She did in the last week of the campaign and she'll continue to do so in the coming weeks, months and years. Her victory brings to an end the lingering shadow of the Joh years (and the younger John Boy Bj-P) failed yet again to pick up the seat based on his father's old territory.

As Anna pointed out last night - she is the first female Premier to be elected to government in her own right putting paid to the old image of Queensland as a hotbed of reaction and conservatism that both she and I grew up with. This achievement actually stands in continuity with older progressive traditions of the Qld ALP. Back in the 1920s, the State Labor gov't carried out a dazzling range of reforms including abolishing the death penalty, establishing free hospitals, even a ndetwork of state owned butcher shops!

I hope Anna picks up on those progressive trajectories to give her government an unashamedly reformist and inclusive stance as opposed to the rather bland, even conservative, managerialism of the past decade.

Interesting too that in the comments on Mark's piece that someone noted:

During the campaign I asked how much the polls had taken the women’s vote into account. I had noticed in Cleveland she was more liked by women than men.

The other night my 80 something year old mother complained of how much she hated all the election stuff on TV but then went on to say that she thought Anna deserved a go. She then went on to say how much she liked that 'Julia... Julia... is it Julia Goddard?' "Gillard, Mum' I answered to which she then went on to praise Gillard's plain speaking and obvious capability as a Minister and Deputy PM. I hope that's a positive omen for the future in a couple of terms or so.

Election Eve in Queensland: Processing the Icons

It's Friday night and my brain is feelng rather fried from an early start for tutoring at Griffith today - two two hour tutes, the first at 8am. Last night I was at a 4 hour induction seminar for new casuals at Griffith so I got home at around 10.30pm, my brain still fired up and, thus, didn't get to sleep until mid-early morning about 2.30am.

Tomorrow is election day here in Qld and all the prognostications seem ominous for a possible change of government although I heard something on the news about a last minute rally to Labor in a poll to be released tomorrow, I think, in the Australian. You can get more info over at Pineapple Party Time. Today on the way home I lit a candle in the chapel at St Stephens Cathderal and said a prayer for Labor scraping home. My flatmate and I were talking tonight about mounting a procession with icons in good old Constantinopolitan style. Whenever the barbarians were at the gates, the good folk of the city would process along the walls with icons and candles and incense and chant calling on saints and angels - especially St Michael the archangel - and, of course, Mary Theotokos. So tomorrow I just might go back to the Cathedral for the morning Marian mass, and call on not only Mary Theotokos and St Michael but also St Anne, by tradition, the mother of Mary and for whom our Premier, Anna Bligh, is named. I do not want to live again under a National Party gov't and the LNP, despite its change of name, still smells as foul, foul as any breath of Mordor. Mythology, even modern mythology like Tolkien's, can still provide an viable framework to view the world. And the Borg, well, doesn't sound that much different to orc - would you trust a man with a smile like this?

And just to cap things off, a friend has sent me a link to a latest piece of silliness at St Mary's, this time by the other priest no one wants to focus on, Terry Fitzpatrick. He concludes thus:

What makes St Mary’s different is that the views in the pews matter, and out of those views, supported by priests who acknowledge the reality of paradigm shifts and are not afraid to embrace them, have come models of God, Christ and Church that make sense to people as they struggle to live their lives, faithful to the message of Jesus, in the twenty-first century.

St Mary’s is at the vanguard of a paradigm shift. Like all heralders of such shifts, the Community may well be extinguished as one would a spot fire. But the spot fires will continue to break out and grow in number and then eventually explode into a roaring inferno. And the hierarchical Catholic Church will once again be overtaken, thankfully, by the innate wisdom of the people of God.

Stuff and nonsense! Terry wouldn't know a paradigm shift if it bit him on the backside. But then on the strength of a few retreats at Chenrezig Institute he feels qualified to teach Buddhist meditation! And as I said in my last post, I'm hearing reports that Peter Kennedy, and no doubt Terry in his shadow, have been quite authoritarian in the handling of this affair, without any real concern for the people on the pews who of course don't know all the issues behind these dramas.

St Anna, St Michael and Holy Mary Theotokos, save us from the Borg and his L National Party and save Premier Anna, even though Labor has been unworthy in its campaign. I don't ask that you save the backroom boys who foisted this mess on us - they deserve the accounting they must surely get after the votes are counted tomorrow night, regardless of the outcome. Just save Anna as our Premier. And save us, too, from such "paradigm shifting" priests as these.

But on a brighter note, I recommend this latest from Slacktivist, Jericho to Jerusalem. Not only will you find out about the Inn of the Good Samaritan along the road between Jericho and Jerusalem but when you get to the end you can also follow the link and end up here, St George's Monastery, Palestine.

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.