willedoo

I see where the ABC has called the lower house seat of Ngadjuri for One Nation with a TPP estimate of 56.9% over Labor's 43.1%. It was a Liberal seat loss. The ABC are usually fairly conservative on their calls, so they must think the numbers stack up. It's the first time One Nation has won a lower house seat outside of Queensland.

The problem with the council amalgmation was that the smaller councils were generally more efficient and debt free with money in the black. The larger councils were way more inefficient, more corrupt, broke and in massive debt. To balance the debt, the smaller councils were amalgamated into the bigger ones, along with their cash which on the books bailed the bigger ones out. The end result was ratepayers and residents pay more for less service. It was grand theft by any measure. A broke state government coming up with a scheme to bail out the worst of the bigger councils.

We have a big problem with councils here in Queensland and it got a lot worse when they amalgamated them into less but much larger councils. They're the weak link in the government chain and it would be good if the state government could rein them in. Over time they have gone from being servants of the public to thinking they are our masters and a law unto themselves. Our state governments over time have handed them way too much autonomy. In other states, the state government still has a fair bit of control over local government, but here they've just handed councils the keys to the lolly shop and turned a blind eye. They spend more time checking satellite images to try and extort revenue from ratepayers for some silly minor bylaw infringement than they do providing services. You always know when the rate bill is about to come out (every six months) as it's the only time they slash the road verge, twice a year two weeks before you get the rate bill. A lot of people are looking forward to the next local government elections to kick the deadbeats out. We have four year terms here now so it's a long wait. There's a bloke here who ran for mayor last time and just missed out. He's a local, and well known and liked community member and calls a spade a spade, so we're hoping he'll get in next time. I knew him back in the days when he was a pub bouncer. He'll be more value than the rest of the clowns put together.

octave, I built my own place in 1996 when I was in my early 40's and I'm thankful I did it then and not now. Looking at some of those beams I got up there on my own gets me trying to remember what it was like to be young and physically capable. The deepest stump hole was up to almost the top of my head and too tight for a jackhammer, so I levelled out a punching pad in the rock base with a crowbar. I used it like a percussion drill, letting the hand pressure off just as it hit the rock so it would twist a bit like a drill and chip a little bit out at a time. It was a bit claustrophobic down there. I dug all the stump holes with a shovel, crowbar and jackhammer. As far as raising bearers and beams, it's amazing what you can do with pulleys and temporary gin poles. To raise and place the poles in the holes I had pulleys and ropes set up at different points so I could tie the rope onto the 4WD and just drive away and watch the pole stand up in the rear vision mirror. It was hard work but a lot of fun and I'm glad I did it. All the 4x2 wall studs, king posts and collar ties, the 6x2 rafters and verandah joists and the 10x2 ridge board are all recycled ironbark from when they pulled down the old Maroochydore RSL. I bought a whole truckload of it from a demolition mate. Great seasoned timber but as hard as your mother in law's heart. You can't drive a clout into it without pre drilling.

I like South Australia. I spent a fair bit of my working life in oil and gas exploration from the Flinders Range up to the Queensland border. Haven't had much to do with the city apart from transiting by air through there and the occasional overnight stopover, but from what I've seen of Adelaide I like it. We even almost speak the same language. They say darnce and charnce and we say dance and chance like the Yanks and Scots. A couple of workmates were from Oodnadatta and they used to call soft drinks cool drinks. I don't know if that's a general SA term or an Aboriginal one as they grew up with mainly Aboriginals. But yes, fond memories of South Australia.

It started earlier than that Marty. In Australia it appeared in the goldfields in the 1850's. I've got one of Frank Weston's Wizard Oil bottles I found out in the desert. He came out here from the US in 1864 and started a travelling medicine show selling his wizard oil. At one stage he got into strife with the government for having an opioid in it and had to remove it from the recipe.

I think you meant to write shouldn't pay tax.

I don't know enough about proportional representation systems to make any judgement on them. Preferential voting and first past the post are easy to understand but the various PR systems can be a bit complicated and need a bit of research to understand fully I would think.

Litey, I hope you're not saying he's a fool for favouring proportional representation. If that was the logic, then there's hundreds of millions of fools around the world. New Zealand, most of South and Central America, a big slab of Europe, a heap of African countries, Turkey, Indonesia, Cambodia, Iceland, pacific Island nations, Sri Lanka, Tasmania, Ireland - that would add up to a lot of fools.

There was a fair bit of talk last night during the election broadcasts about the federal effect of One Nation getting a high primary vote even if they don't get seats. Much talk of it influencing both Labor and the Coalition. Labor are not stupid and they know they are losing votes to ON as well, just not as many as the other side is. The job for Labor is to estimate what percentage they will lose and what their response should be. If they lose votes to the Greens, they will recover a lot in preferences, but if they lose votes to ON, those preferences might not come back their way. So in that regard, even though ON might not get a SA lower house seat, the large state wide primary vote they received will have a big flow on effect on politics in the immediate future.

octave, you can see that in action now with Labor acting tough on ISIS brides and jumping straight in with support for Trump over Iran. If there wasn't so much backlash from the right and the community in general over Bondi, I think they wouldn't have needed to do that little wiggle to the right.

The latest ABC poll results using an ABC estimate of preferences has One Nation as a likely win in Ngadjuri, a comfortable lead in Hammond, and a small lead in Narunnga and MacKillop. Apparently they can't use the electoral commission preference estimate as it was calculated on the Liberals getting a larger vote than One Nation and not the other way around which is what happened. I think the official preference distribution happens next weekend. Some are saying the postal votes are expected to favour the Liberals over One Nation.

If you were joking I apologise. The reason it wasn't obvious to me was because of your past history of bagging threads and posts you're not interested in. Who knows, you might have always been joking in that regard, but the printed word doesn't often convey that sentiment. Bear in mind Nev, you don't like football and you've made that well known before now. So if you see a post in a football thread and go there and post, logic says you are doing it to stir the pot. This time you got stirred back.

So that's my thoughts on it. Please tell me if you were joking, and I'll apologise. But the way I read it was otherwise.

I'd like to expect better from you also Nev. We know you don't like football so why would you go to a football thread and bag the posts. Why would you do that? You don't have to be so negative and nasty. You've been told before at times on this forum, if you don't like a thread topic, stay away from it and let others enjoy it. You're a real sad sack at times.

There's an old saying - only boring people get bored. There's some truth in it..

We all know you don't lke sport, so be negative on another thread please.

You don't need to tell us Nev, we know you are.

An NRL update : footy season is in full swing with a couple of big things standing out. One is the incessant rule changes that irritate everyone except the NRL management geniuses. It would be good if they'd let the ink dry on the rulebook for a coupe of years and just let them play footy. I get it that they want to speed the game up, but it's now reached a peak where any more will turn the game into an unrecognisable rabble. It risks losing structure. The other thing is the acrobatics that have become part of the game, starting a couple of years ago. At first it was just a couple of players doing it, but now a lot are doing it in training with gymnastic type mats. Some of the physical things they are doing around the try line would have been unthinkable only a few short years ago, but are now rapidly becoming the norm. Next year will be a big year with the Perth Bears entering the NRL competition. Big Mal Meninga has gone over there as their coach. The Bears are still recruiting, but they have the core of the team sorted so far.

Nev, the only other option is an amalgamation, but I can't see the federal Nats agreeing to that. It worked in Queensland as the Nats were always the much stronger party of the two and it was a no-brainer for the Qld. Libs to enter into it, otherwise they would have faded away. Federally, the shoe is on the other foot and the Nats would feel they were having to make too many concessions to the Libs in an amalgamation. Maybe if the Libs went solo they could develop policies to gain some middle ground back from Labor and have a future where government would be a possibility again. The only other option is to sit tight and wait for Labor to lose, but that could take a while.

The South Australian federal MP on one of the election coverage panels last night was downplaying One Nation's significant primary vote regarding it's federal implications. He frequently said he thought the state of the SA Libs in recent times was a big factor. Time will tell, but there might be a bit more to it than that. The interesting part of the SA election regarding One Nation is that it did well in a state where most of the seats are urban, city based seats. In Queensland which has traditionally been One Nation's heartland, there are a lot of rural and regional seats where ON traditionally does well, but in SA, they have very few rural seats. If One Nation continues to grow, they'll need to organise better and function like a proper party to avoid the past habit of self destruction.

She seems like quite a capable leader and young enough to stick around for a fair while. You never know, she might be premier one day in the future, leading a rebuilt Liberal party. That's the job ahead for people like her, to bring the party back to relevance. It will take a long time but everything goes round in cycles eventually, and I don't believe we're stuck with a one party system forever. The question is, will the Liberals successfully rebuild, or will they fade away and be replaced by a new party. Either way will take a long time.

There's quite a big difference when you look across the seats. Labor had swings against them in eight seats and a lot of them were big swings. Where there were swings to Labor, the swings were mostly small, but a couple of big ones in there to Labor. Labor seats had much more swinging to them than against.

The way I look at it, Labor is lucky to have the Greens on their left. That 10% Green vote is quite a significant number of preferences that mostly flow to Labor. In that regard Labor has more benefit than threat on their left so it allows them to occupy a fairly comfortable space on the spectrum.

Preferential voting sure provides a much different result than first past the post. In SA for example, first past the post , depending on the final count, might have delivered One Nation quite a few lower house seats. As it stands with preferences, they might get one, possibly two, or none at all.