Re: The Australian Federal Election 2010 Thread (III)

[JGK]

Indeed.

Coincidentally, Labor are warm faves with the bookies but on a seat by seat basis the Coalition are favoured in more seats.

Might have to load up again on the Coalition.

[G.Wood]

Indeed.

Coincidentally, Labor are warm faves with the bookies but on a seat by seat basis the Coalition are favoured in more seats.

Might have to load up again on the Coalition.

Some Tory apologist reckoned the pinkos and greenos were more of a coalition than the LNP. The reds will certainly get more help from the tree huggers than the libs will from the fundamentalists

[Bradman]

The ALP in their elitist way want politicians to choose the Head of State not the people. If you had a Presidency now it would have undoubtedly been offered to Krudd as a consolation prize after being kicked out of the premiership. Most people in the UK would infinitely prefer even a monarchy of King ("I talk to the trees") Brian and Princess Camilla to a President Prescott or Thatcher.

The preening liberal (or is it Labour?) elites had their best chance of getting a republic in 1999 but cocked it up. They didn't seem to realise that a lot of people had fled to Australia from republican regimes in Indonesia and the Philippines which didn't seem to be particularly bothered by the human rights of their own people. It seems more than a coincidence that the most stable, democratic and prosperous nations in the Western Pacific region are Japan, Australia and New Zealand, all monarchies.

Who the fark do you think chooses it now. A politician, not many or even a few. The most telling point of the last referndum debate was Hawkie pointing out that Hayden asked him for the GG's job and got it. As he said he wouldn't have been able to get it through cabinet let alone a joint sitting if pushed.

You could have mentioned the Bishop too and also that Kerr was Whitlam's personal appointment (which turned out the biggest mistake since Henry II made Becket Archbishop of Canterbury although it was Whitlam who was shafted) but then the G-G isn't the Head of State although the Australian constitution gives him (or her) power to dismiss Federal Ministers (including it appears the PM) - a power the Crown has not exercised in the UK since 1834.

Correct me if I'm wrong but there's nothing to stop a constitutional amendment to ensure that before submitting a nomination of G-G to the Queen it should receive the endorsement (or otherwise) of the Federal Parliament (and possibly the State ones too). This would at least put Hawke's theory to the test and show whether nominees such as Kerr, Hayden and Hollingworth could get through the net. It would also provide a trial to see if the ALP's favoured system would work in the case of an actual, as opposed to a substitute, Head of State.

However despite, or maybe because of, 1975 neither the ALP, nor anyone else, has proposed such a change. Obviously, maintaining the power of the PM is much too important.

Nothing at all to stop it. We don't have much success in changing the constitution though. A few points.

A lot of our constitutional law comes from the UK. Reserve Powers (you gotta love unwritten laws) etc. I believe at the turn of the twentieth century the House of Lords denied supply to the existing, democratically elected govt and the PM of the day (Salisbury or Balfour I think) decided not to put the Crown in a difficult position and called a general election.

Fraser was eventually farked up by his own appointee(Ninian Stephens) when he rushed out to Yarralumla (GG's residence) to call a DD election (to take advantage of internal ALP turmoil). Stephen was meeting a foreign diplomat at the time and quite correctly told Fraser to wait. When Fraser finally got his audience he had to spend an hour or two convincing the GG to allow a DD election and by the time he got back to Parliament House to announce it, Hayden had fallen on his sword, Hawkie had booked the advertising spots and five weeks later the Libs were wiped out.

From a pinkos view probably poetic justice. And I have a soft spot for Fraser.

[Mick Sawyer]

Indeed.

Coincidentally, Labor are warm faves with the bookies but on a seat by seat basis the Coalition are favoured in more seats.

Might have to load up again on the Coalition.

[Bradman]

All politics is local. The bookies might have this wrong as well. They've got that kid as favourite in Longman. I mean think back to when you were twenty. Would you have voted for yourself.

Though to give the kid credit he did admit his passions were video games and Victoria Secrets catalogues. That kind of statement, whilst dumb, shows he's not a deceptive qunt.

[JGK]

Fark it, looks like the people's princess is gonski...


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Seat of Bennelong (NSW) 21-8-2010 11:30AEST
Winner
John Alexander (Coalition) 1.50
Maxine Mckew (ALP) 2.45
Any Other Party 51.00




Happily, my $500 on Andrew Laming in Bowman at 1.53 is looking good with him now at $1.16.

Will parley that locked in win on Abbott tomorrow night.

[skully]

Meh, since when do punters know 100% what's gonna happen, espesh in a two-horse race?

[Invader Zim]

My prediction:

Labor 80, Coalition 66, Independents 3, Greens 1.

[Allan D]

. We don't have much success in changing the constitution though. A few points.

A lot of our constitutional law comes from the UK. Reserve Powers (you gotta love unwritten laws) etc. I believe at the turn of the twentieth century the House of Lords denied supply to the existing, democratically elected govt and the PM of the day (Salisbury or Balfour I think) decided not to put the Crown in a difficult position and called a general election.

You're right about getting the constitution changed. Of the 44 referenda for constitutional change since 1909 only 8 have been successful. In the words of Robert Menzies:

to get an affirmative vote from the Australian people on a referendum proposal is one of the labours of Hercules

As far as I understand it, Australia has a written constitution or, to be more accurate, a single written document, unlike the UK, which was largely written by Australians which explicitly gives the right to the Senate to block money bills which was Whitlam's problem in 1975 - the Liberals wanted to force an election which Whitlam knew he would lose. This may have been because at the time the constitution was written in 1898-1900 there was no explicit restriction on the House of Lords in Britain although it was the convention that the Lords, as an unelected house, would not block money bills coming from the elected chamber (since both chambers in Australia were elected and could therefore claim some form of popular legitimacy this convention hardly applied).

I think the crisis you are referring to is the so-called "Peers versus the People" crisis of 1909-11 which occurred during the Liberal Government of 1905-15 and involved not one but two elections. The PM of the day was Asquith, not Salisbury or Balfour, who were successive Tory leaders and who both approved of the veto power of the House of Lords (Salisbury, who was Balfour's "Uncle Bob" - hence the expression "Bob's your uncle" meaning something's easy deriving from a music-hall joke of the time as to how Balfour became PM in place of his uncle in 1902- was the last Prime Minister to sit in the Lords - Home was a member when he was appointed in 1963 but immediately renounced his title and was elected to the Commons in a bye-election a month later).

Briefly, Lloyd George, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, presented a Budget in 1909 which included, amongst other things, a proposal to tax land values. The House of Lords, where the Tories had had an inbuilt majority for almost 200 years after Queen Anne had created new peerages to enable the Treaty of Utrecht to be passed which ended the Spanish Succession War in 1713, consisted of many large landowners who would be affected by this and they therefore decided to veto the Finance Bill in defiance of constitutional convention.

This also suited the Conservative Party, led by Balfour, who was Leader of the Opposition in the Commons (he had been Prime Minister from 1902-5 before resigning in favour of the Liberals in December 1905 after his party had becoming badly split over whether or not to impose import duties). The Liberals had won by a landslide in 1906 winning 400 out of 670 seats to the Conservatives' 157 - the rest were won by the new Labour Party and the Irish Nationalists - the whole of Ireland returned MPs to Westminster- who generally supported the Liberals and in those days there didn't need to be another election until 1913.

However the economy was in recession and the Liberal Government was unpopular and an election, even if Balfour couldn't win it, would help reunify his party which had been badly split in government. After the Lords rejected the budget Asquith sought the agreement of the King, then Edward VII, to create enough extra peers (around 300) to push the budget through. Edward, who was much more sympathetic to the Conservatives, preferred the two leaders to compromise rather than alter the composition of the Lords which he believed was a vital check on the potential democratic excesses of the Commons, especially now a socialist party had emerged. However he agreed to ennoble Asquith's nominations only on condition that there was an election first (which Asquith didn't want).

Asquith nevertheless agreed to call an election in January 1910 in which the Liberals' majority was wiped out as they won 275 seats to the Conservatives' 273 and they were reliant on Labour (40 seats) and the Irish Nationalists (82) to keep them in power. This also had significance because, in return for the Irish Nationalists' support, the Government had to agree to introduce a Home Rule Bill for Ireland which was to dominate British politics in the remaining years before the outbreak of WWI in 1914.

The situation had now gone beyond simple passage of the 1909 Budget and Asquith was determined to bring in a bill to enshrine the convention that the Lords could not veto or amend money bills i.e. bills involving either the levying of taxation or the expenditure of public funds as well as limit the Lords' general power to reject Commons' bills. A further complication arose, however, when Edward VII died suddenly in May 1910. Asquith told his son, George V, of the pledge his father had given him to create extra peers if he was returned to power at the election.

George V, who held similar political views as his father, was as equally keen not to use his powers of patronage not only to alter the composition of the Lords but also to reduce its powers and told Asquith, with some reason, that just as one Parliament could not bind its successor, so he could not be bound by his father's promise and there would have to be another election which there duly was in December 1910 when there was an almost identical result to the one in January with both the Liberals and Conservatives on 272 each, Labour on 42 and the Nationalists on 84 - after bye-election losses and until it disintegrated amidst the crisis of the Dardanelles and shell shortages in WWI the Liberals provided a minority government having less seats than the principal opposition party.

Meanwhile Balfour's "wheeze" (in a famous speech Lloyd George had described the House of Lord's as "Mr Balfour's Poodle") had rather backfired and the Conservatives had become divided between the "Hedgers" who preferred to lose the Lords' veto in return for maintaining the inbuilt Tory majority (which at least would enable them to revise bills) and the "Ditchers" who wanted to fight the reforms to "the last ditch".

Balfour headed the first group and, thanks to abstentions, Asquith's bill was passed removing the Lords' veto from money bills (as certified by the Speaker of the Commons), limiting the veto on other bills to two years (later reduced to one by the Labour Government in 1949) and, as a concession to the Conservatives, reducing the maximum life of a Parliament from 7 to 5 years which is what it is now. This result came as a great relief to George V who did not have to use his power of peerage creation (Asquith had compiled a list of Liberal supporters willing to become hereditary peers which included the Peter Pan author, J.M.Barrie and Winston Churchill's stockbroker brother).

Despite the fact that Balfour had demolished the Liberals' majority and preserved the Tory majority in the Lords his climbdown as well as failure to win either of the two elections in 1910 affected his standing in the party and in November 1911 he resigned the Tory leadership after a sustained campaign of criticism from within the party (opponents wore badges on their lapel in imitation of American election campaign buttons with 'BMG' - Balfour Must Go - inscribed on them).

Balfour was the first leader of the Conservative Party (which had only had three previous leaders since its foundation after the old Tory Party had split over Peel's Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846) to be ousted in this manner. He nevertheless went on to have a distinguished ministerial career and was even offered the Premiership again after Asquith was forced to resign in December 1916 but turned it down in favour of Lloyd George.

The irony of the whole affair was that the 1911 Parliament Act probably served to prolong the life of the House of Lords despite its preamble mentioning the long-term solution of "a popularly elected assembly" since governments of both parties (including Labour which replaced the Liberals as the principal left-wing party after WWI) found the Lords convenient for amending legislation out of the public spotlight and potential opposition ridicule as well as the patronage it gave the Prime Minister to both reward and remove long-serving backbenchers and appoint outsiders into government without the necessity of a bye-election.

In 1958 Harold Macmillan further legitimised the chamber by introducing the Life Peerages Act which allowed the Prime Minister to appoint non-hereditary peers who now, apart from a small hereditary element elected amongst themselves, are the bulk of the present House of Lords.

[G.Wood]

Meh, since when do punters know 100% what's gonna happen, espesh in a two-horse race?

Punters don't but bookmakers usually do


If by some freak of neature the pinkos snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, would the Ranga go down in history alongside John "Backfill" McEwen?

[tac]

. We don't have much success in changing the constitution though. A few points.

A lot of our constitutional law comes from the UK. Reserve Powers (you gotta love unwritten laws) etc. I believe at the turn of the twentieth century the House of Lords denied supply to the existing, democratically elected govt and the PM of the day (Salisbury or Balfour I think) decided not to put the Crown in a difficult position and called a general election.

You're right about getting the constitution changed. Of the 44 referenda for constitutional change since 1909 only 8 have been successful. In the words of Robert Menzies:

to get an affirmative vote from the Australian people on a referendum proposal is one of the labours of Hercules

As far as wikipedia explains it, Australia has a written constitution or, to be more accurate, a single written document, unlike the UK, which was largely written by Australians which explicitly gives the right to the Senate to block money bills which was Whitlam's problem in 1975 - the Liberals wanted to force an election which Whitlam knew he would lose. This may have been because at the time the constitution was written in 1898-1900 there was no explicit restriction on the House of Lords in Britain although it was the convention that the Lords, as an unelected house, would not block money bills coming from the elected chamber (since both chambers in Australia were elected and could therefore claim some form of popular legitimacy this convention hardly applied).

I think the crisis you are referring to is the so-called "Peers versus the People" crisis of 1909-11 which occurred during the Liberal Government of 1905-15 and involved not one but two elections. The PM of the day was Asquith, not Salisbury or Balfour, who were successive Tory leaders and who both approved of the veto power of the House of Lords (Salisbury, who was Balfour's "Uncle Bob" - hence the expression "Bob's your uncle" meaning something's easy deriving from a music-hall joke of the time as to how Balfour became PM in place of his uncle in 1902- was the last Prime Minister to sit in the Lords - Home was a member when he was appointed in 1963 but immediately renounced his title and was elected to the Commons in a bye-election a month later).

Briefly, Lloyd George, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, presented a Budget in 1909 which included, amongst other things, a proposal to tax land values. The House of Lords, where the Tories had had an inbuilt majority for almost 200 years after Queen Anne had created new peerages to enable the Treaty of Utrecht to be passed which ended the Spanish Succession War in 1713, consisted of many large landowners who would be affected by this and they therefore decided to veto the Finance Bill in defiance of constitutional convention.

This also suited the Conservative Party, led by Balfour, who was Leader of the Opposition in the Commons (he had been Prime Minister from 1902-5 before resigning in favour of the Liberals in December 1905 after his party had becoming badly split over whether or not to impose import duties). The Liberals had won by a landslide in 1906 winning 400 out of 670 seats to the Conservatives' 157 - the rest were won by the new Labour Party and the Irish Nationalists - the whole of Ireland returned MPs to Westminster- who generally supported the Liberals and in those days there didn't need to be another election until 1913.

However the economy was in recession and the Liberal Government was unpopular and an election, even if Balfour couldn't win it, would help reunify his party which had been badly split in government. After the Lords rejected the budget Asquith sought the agreement of the King, then Edward VII, to create enough extra peers (around 300) to push the budget through. Edward, who was much more sympathetic to the Conservatives, preferred the two leaders to compromise rather than alter the composition of the Lords which he believed was a vital check on the potential democratic excesses of the Commons, especially now a socialist party had emerged. However he agreed to ennoble Asquith's nominations only on condition that there was an election first (which Asquith didn't want).

Asquith nevertheless agreed to call an election in January 1910 in which the Liberals' majority was wiped out as they won 275 seats to the Conservatives' 273 and they were reliant on Labour (40 seats) and the Irish Nationalists (82) to keep them in power. This also had significance because, in return for the Irish Nationalists' support, the Government had to agree to introduce a Home Rule Bill for Ireland which was to dominate British politics in the remaining years before the outbreak of WWI in 1914.

The situation had now gone beyond simple passage of the 1909 Budget and Asquith was determined to bring in a bill to enshrine the convention that the Lords could not veto or amend money bills i.e. bills involving either the levying of taxation or the expenditure of public funds as well as limit the Lords' general power to reject Commons' bills. A further complication arose, however, when Edward VII died suddenly in May 1910. Asquith told his son, George V, of the pledge his father had given him to create extra peers if he was returned to power at the election.

George V, who held similar political views as his father, was as equally keen not to use his powers of patronage not only to alter the composition of the Lords but also to reduce its powers and told Asquith, with some reason, that just as one Parliament could not bind its successor, so he could not be bound by his father's promise and there would have to be another election which there duly was in December 1910 when there was an almost identical result to the one in January with both the Liberals and Conservatives on 272 each, Labour on 42 and the Nationalists on 84 - after bye-election losses and until it disintegrated amidst the crisis of the Dardanelles and shell shortages in WWI the Liberals provided a minority government having less seats than the principal opposition party.

Meanwhile Balfour's "wheeze" (in a famous speech Lloyd George had described the House of Lord's as "Mr Balfour's Poodle") had rather backfired and the Conservatives had become divided between the "Hedgers" who preferred to lose the Lords' veto in return for maintaining the inbuilt Tory majority (which at least would enable them to revise bills) and the "Ditchers" who wanted to fight the reforms to "the last ditch".

Balfour headed the first group and, thanks to abstentions, Asquith's bill was passed removing the Lords' veto from money bills (as certified by the Speaker of the Commons), limiting the veto on other bills to two years (later reduced to one by the Labour Government in 1949) and, as a concession to the Conservatives, reducing the maximum life of a Parliament from 7 to 5 years which is what it is now. This result came as a great relief to George V who did not have to use his power of peerage creation (Asquith had compiled a list of Liberal supporters willing to become hereditary peers which included the Peter Pan author, J.M.Barrie and Winston Churchill's stockbroker brother).

Despite the fact that Balfour had demolished the Liberals' majority and preserved the Tory majority in the Lords his climbdown as well as failure to win either of the two elections in 1910 affected his standing in the party and in November 1911 he resigned the Tory leadership after a sustained campaign of criticism from within the party (opponents wore badges on their lapel in imitation of American election campaign buttons with 'BMG' - Balfour Must Go - inscribed on them).

Balfour was the first leader of the Conservative Party (which had only had three previous leaders since its foundation after the old Tory Party had split over Peel's Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846) to be ousted in this manner. He nevertheless went on to have a distinguished ministerial career and was even offered the Premiership again after Asquith was forced to resign in December 1916 but turned it down in favour of Lloyd George.

The irony of the whole affair was that the 1911 Parliament Act probably served to prolong the life of the House of Lords despite its preamble mentioning the long-term solution of "a popularly elected assembly" since governments of both parties (including Labour which replaced the Liberals as the principal left-wing party after WWI) found the Lords convenient for amending legislation out of the public spotlight and potential opposition ridicule as well as the patronage it gave the Prime Minister to both reward and remove long-serving backbenchers and appoint outsiders into government without the necessity of a bye-election.

In 1958 Harold Macmillan further legitimised the chamber by introducing the Life Peerages Act which allowed the Prime Minister to appoint non-hereditary peers who now, apart from a small hereditary element elected amongst themselves, are the bulk of the present House of Lords.

ummmm . . ..

[PeterCS]

. We don't have much success in changing the constitution though. A few points.

A lot of our constitutional law comes from the UK. Reserve Powers (you gotta love unwritten laws) etc. I believe at the turn of the twentieth century the House of Lords denied supply to the existing, democratically elected govt and the PM of the day (Salisbury or Balfour I think) decided not to put the Crown in a difficult position and called a general election.

You're right about getting the constitution changed. Of the 44 referenda for constitutional change since 1909 only 8 have been successful. In the words of Robert Menzies:

to get an affirmative vote from the Australian people on a referendum proposal is one of the labours of Hercules

As far as wikipedia explains it, Australia has a written constitution or, to be more accurate, a single written document, unlike the UK, which was largely written by Australians which explicitly gives the right to the Senate to block money bills which was Whitlam's problem in 1975 - the Liberals wanted to force an election which Whitlam knew he would lose. This may have been because at the time the constitution was written in 1898-1900 there was no explicit restriction on the House of Lords in Britain although it was the convention that the Lords, as an unelected house, would not block money bills coming from the elected chamber (since both chambers in Australia were elected and could therefore claim some form of popular legitimacy this convention hardly applied).

I think the crisis you are referring to is the so-called "Peers versus the People" crisis of 1909-11 which occurred during the Liberal Government of 1905-15 and involved not one but two elections. The PM of the day was Asquith, not Salisbury or Balfour, who were successive Tory leaders and who both approved of the veto power of the House of Lords (Salisbury, who was Balfour's "Uncle Bob" - hence the expression "Bob's your uncle" meaning something's easy deriving from a music-hall joke of the time as to how Balfour became PM in place of his uncle in 1902- was the last Prime Minister to sit in the Lords - Home was a member when he was appointed in 1963 but immediately renounced his title and was elected to the Commons in a bye-election a month later).

Briefly, Lloyd George, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, presented a Budget in 1909 which included, amongst other things, a proposal to tax land values. The House of Lords, where the Tories had had an inbuilt majority for almost 200 years after Queen Anne had created new peerages to enable the Treaty of Utrecht to be passed which ended the Spanish Succession War in 1713, consisted of many large landowners who would be affected by this and they therefore decided to veto the Finance Bill in defiance of constitutional convention.

This also suited the Conservative Party, led by Balfour, who was Leader of the Opposition in the Commons (he had been Prime Minister from 1902-5 before resigning in favour of the Liberals in December 1905 after his party had becoming badly split over whether or not to impose import duties). The Liberals had won by a landslide in 1906 winning 400 out of 670 seats to the Conservatives' 157 - the rest were won by the new Labour Party and the Irish Nationalists - the whole of Ireland returned MPs to Westminster- who generally supported the Liberals and in those days there didn't need to be another election until 1913.

However the economy was in recession and the Liberal Government was unpopular and an election, even if Balfour couldn't win it, would help reunify his party which had been badly split in government. After the Lords rejected the budget Asquith sought the agreement of the King, then Edward VII, to create enough extra peers (around 300) to push the budget through. Edward, who was much more sympathetic to the Conservatives, preferred the two leaders to compromise rather than alter the composition of the Lords which he believed was a vital check on the potential democratic excesses of the Commons, especially now a socialist party had emerged. However he agreed to ennoble Asquith's nominations only on condition that there was an election first (which Asquith didn't want).

Asquith nevertheless agreed to call an election in January 1910 in which the Liberals' majority was wiped out as they won 275 seats to the Conservatives' 273 and they were reliant on Labour (40 seats) and the Irish Nationalists (82) to keep them in power. This also had significance because, in return for the Irish Nationalists' support, the Government had to agree to introduce a Home Rule Bill for Ireland which was to dominate British politics in the remaining years before the outbreak of WWI in 1914.

The situation had now gone beyond simple passage of the 1909 Budget and Asquith was determined to bring in a bill to enshrine the convention that the Lords could not veto or amend money bills i.e. bills involving either the levying of taxation or the expenditure of public funds as well as limit the Lords' general power to reject Commons' bills. A further complication arose, however, when Edward VII died suddenly in May 1910. Asquith told his son, George V, of the pledge his father had given him to create extra peers if he was returned to power at the election.

George V, who held similar political views as his father, was as equally keen not to use his powers of patronage not only to alter the composition of the Lords but also to reduce its powers and told Asquith, with some reason, that just as one Parliament could not bind its successor, so he could not be bound by his father's promise and there would have to be another election which there duly was in December 1910 when there was an almost identical result to the one in January with both the Liberals and Conservatives on 272 each, Labour on 42 and the Nationalists on 84 - after bye-election losses and until it disintegrated amidst the crisis of the Dardanelles and shell shortages in WWI the Liberals provided a minority government having less seats than the principal opposition party.

Meanwhile Balfour's "wheeze" (in a famous speech Lloyd George had described the House of Lord's as "Mr Balfour's Poodle") had rather backfired and the Conservatives had become divided between the "Hedgers" who preferred to lose the Lords' veto in return for maintaining the inbuilt Tory majority (which at least would enable them to revise bills) and the "Ditchers" who wanted to fight the reforms to "the last ditch".

Balfour headed the first group and, thanks to abstentions, Asquith's bill was passed removing the Lords' veto from money bills (as certified by the Speaker of the Commons), limiting the veto on other bills to two years (later reduced to one by the Labour Government in 1949) and, as a concession to the Conservatives, reducing the maximum life of a Parliament from 7 to 5 years which is what it is now. This result came as a great relief to George V who did not have to use his power of peerage creation (Asquith had compiled a list of Liberal supporters willing to become hereditary peers which included the Peter Pan author, J.M.Barrie and Winston Churchill's stockbroker brother).

Despite the fact that Balfour had demolished the Liberals' majority and preserved the Tory majority in the Lords his climbdown as well as failure to win either of the two elections in 1910 affected his standing in the party and in November 1911 he resigned the Tory leadership after a sustained campaign of criticism from within the party (opponents wore badges on their lapel in imitation of American election campaign buttons with 'BMG' - Balfour Must Go - inscribed on them).

Balfour was the first leader of the Conservative Party (which had only had three previous leaders since its foundation after the old Tory Party had split over Peel's Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846) to be ousted in this manner. He nevertheless went on to have a distinguished ministerial career and was even offered the Premiership again after Asquith was forced to resign in December 1916 but turned it down in favour of Lloyd George.

The irony of the whole affair was that the 1911 Parliament Act probably served to prolong the life of the House of Lords despite its preamble mentioning the long-term solution of "a popularly elected assembly" since governments of both parties (including Labour which replaced the Liberals as the principal left-wing party after WWI) found the Lords convenient for amending legislation out of the public spotlight and potential opposition ridicule as well as the patronage it gave the Prime Minister to both reward and remove long-serving backbenchers and appoint outsiders into government without the necessity of a bye-election.

In 1958 Harold Macmillan further legitimised the chamber by introducing the Life Peerages Act which allowed the Prime Minister to appoint non-hereditary peers who now, apart from a small hereditary element elected amongst themselves, are the bulk of the present House of Lords.

ummmm . . ..

Savouring every word?

[PeterCS]

I don't like the look or sound of Abbott. Sounds a bit like a chip-on-the-shoulder nutter who's struck it lucky!

Of course there's no such thing as climate change, Tone. I believe everything you say.

[bodyline]

Fairfax backing labor - News backing Libs (except for 'Tiser in Adeliade who are backing the Mao's daughter).

[bodyline]

All politics is local. The bookies might have this wrong as well. They've got that kid as favourite in Longman. I mean think back to when you were twenty. Would you have voted for yourself.

Though to give the kid credit he did admit his passions were video games and Victoria Secrets catalogues. That kind of statement, whilst dumb, shows he's not a deceptive qunt.

After the Labor member basically farked up yesterday it is no wonder the kid is favourite - Sullivan knifed himself at a forum yesterday.

[Mick Sawyer]

My prediction:

Labor 80, Coalition 66, Independents 3, Greens 1.

The country needs that sheety.

[G.Wood]

My prediction:

Labor 80, Coalition 66, Independents 3, Greens 1.

The country needs that sheety.

I'd like to see what would happen if the loopylittleguys held the balance of power in both houses.

Who knows, we could get legal hooch and trev could get married.

[Paul Keating]

earlier in the week i was thinking labor would just limp over the line. But now i am not so sure.

Here is hoping the latest newspoll is similar to the 2004 election. Where it was 50-50 on the day and howard went on to win power in the senate.

Does anyone know whickham poll has been most successful in past elections?

[bodyline]

My prediction:

Labor 80, Coalition 66, Independents 3, Greens 1.

The country needs that sheety.

I'd like to see what would happen if the loopylittleguys held the balance of power in both houses.

Who knows, we could get legal hooch and trev could get married.

And the sarong would become our national dress.

[bodyline]

earlier in the week i was thinking labor would just limp over the line. But now i am not so sure.

Here is hoping the latest newspoll is similar to the 2004 election. Where it was 50-50 on the day and howard went on to win power in the senate.

Does anyone know whickham poll has been most successful in past elections?

That would be an average of the last couple of polls (I believe they have a rolling average) which means labor is slipping.

Internal polling says they will scrap in.

[bodyline]

Her mantra on AM this morning chanting Workchoices has alot of people commenting that the Government is "desparate".

[JGK]

Fark it, was going to put some more on the Big Eared Qunt last night at 3.65 but went to the pub instead.

Now they are 2.75.

I've got a BAAAAAADDDDD feeling about this. Could the country be so stoopid?

[JGK]

All politics is local. The bookies might have this wrong as well. They've got that kid as favourite in Longman. I mean think back to when you were twenty. Would you have voted for yourself.

Though to give the kid credit he did admit his passions were video games and Victoria Secrets catalogues. That kind of statement, whilst dumb, shows he's not a deceptive qunt.

After the Labor member basically farked up yesterday it is no wonder the kid is favourite - Sullivan knifed himself at a forum yesterday.

wyatt is paying 2.45. Thanks for the tip.

[skully]

Fark it, was going to put some more on the Big Eared Qunt last night at 3.65 but went to the pub instead.

Now they are 2.75.

I've got a BAAAAAADDDDD feeling about this. Could the country be so stoopid?

There's two ways of looking at that, JGK.

Still, I think you can relax. I'm confident the pinkos will scrape in by up to 10 seats.

[JGK]

Fairfax backing labor - News backing Libs (except for 'Tiser in Adeliade who are backing the Mao's daughter).

Except those clueless qunts at the Fin.

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