willedoo

Here's a totally ficticious and theoretical scenario, given the demise of the Liberal Party and the reality it could take years to rebuild: It's becoming obvious traditional politics as we always knew it under the two party dominance system has changed, possibly forever. So at some stage in the future, could we see a three party system, ie: the left of the Labor party merges with the Greens as one party, the Labor right and the Liberal centre merge, and the third party is made up of the coalition right and One Nation merging. Three parties - left, centre and right.

One of the TV commentators during the election coverage last night made an obvious point. That was that the big challenge for One Nation to live up to their growing popularity is to address the traditional problems in their party structure and management. That included better candidate vetting, one area that has often let them down in the past. The party organisation has been hit and miss in the past and they will need a good management team going forward. It's only my opinion, but I think as popular as Pauline is among the voters, before too long she will have to take a step back from the front line and take on more of a party president, party elder statesman type of role. She's had a long time faithful sidekick in Malcolm Roberts, but his strength is in social media and not in real time speaking and interviews. At the moment she's got Barnby there sharing a lot of the spotlight, so that takes the pressure off her a bit. At times you could be forgiven for thinking that the only time Barnaby opens his mouth is to change feet, but he does have his moments and he resonates with a lot of voters.

I can understand how some people would feel a bit awkward only taking one how to vote card and ignoring the others , or ignoring the lot of them. It stems from basic Australian politeness. I can remember when I first went to S.E. Asia how hard it was to learn to ignore the street hawkers. Totally ignoring someone who is in your face is not easy in our culture but over there you have to or it would take all day to get anywhere. The only time I ignore anyone here is with the chuggers outside the supermarkets. Edit: election time how to vote cards as well.

Two seats in the House ome, you forgot about Barnaby. Only two seats but one of them is an ex National Party leader, ex Deputy Prime Minister and a seasoned politician. So as one commentator said, it's not as if the new member will be wandering lost around Parliament House wondering where the coffee machine is, he'll be well chaperoned.

By-elections are often a very different breed than general elections. Mainly due to a lot of local electorate issues, combined with the fact a certain amount of voters feel it's safe to cast a protest vote against the status quo in a by-election. In a general election, those same voters might play safe and stick with the majors. Water is one issue in Farrer, but along with some other local issues, a lot of voters saw the Libs promising to fix things in an electorate that's been held by them for decades. I can understand how a lot of them would feel neglected and think about giving someone else a go. I don't think the poor coalition result is a reflection on their candidates. Both Liberal and National candidates were top knotch candidates, but incumbency worked against them, as well as the problems in Canberra.

It's certainly interesting politics in this country lately. What we've just seen is One Nation take a traditionally safe Coalition seat, but not just any seat, the seat of the former opposition leader and leader of the Liberal party. What hurt the Liberals was the swing against them in the last federal election which knocked their safe margin down to 6%. The big lesson there is that it doesn't matter how many seats you have, it's the seat margins going into the next election that counts. If you have a big majority made up of a lot of marginal seats, the switch can quite easily flick the other way next election. The reason I had to edit this post is a sticky 'a' key on the laptop. If I don't proofread, I have to go back with an edit and add a heap of a's.

I think Labor reasoned that they had no hope of winning so by not running a candidate the Labor vote would go to the independent to help her beat One Nation. Only problem was a fair bit of it would have gone to One Nation. Regardless, the One Nation primary vote was too strong for the independent to have any hope of beating. Not running a candidate might have saved Labor the embarrassment of a swing away from them to ON, but that's just theoretical speculation on my part.

Grumpy, Labor didn't run a candidate. In the last federal election they ran one and got 15% of the vote. Where that 15% went this time is not clear, but certainly not to the Greens who had a swing away from them. Most likely it was split between One nation and the independent.

It's interesting watching the live coverage of Farrer. One Nation are partying hard in their campaign HQ celebrating what looks like a very comfortable win. It would be a big night in Albury; the leading campaigns, ON, independant, Nats and Libs are all having their functions in the same street, only about 100 metres from each other.

The Farrer by-election count is still in early stages but it's looking like a One Nation win over the independent. She might pick up a bit with the Albury booths coming in, but she's got a battle on her hands against the strong ON primary vote. The Liberal vote has crashed, particularly facing both One Nation and National candidates. The big question will be whether the Nats outpoll the Libs as both are fairly close at this stage.

It seems funny hearing people refer to 4% as high interest rates. It was 17.5% when I took out a variable rate loan to buy my place, and the loan peaked at around 20%. My father was paying around 22% on his business loan at it's peak.

Even though election analyst Antony Green has retired from election night broadcasts, he still crunches numbers and runs his election blog. He comes up with some interesting stats. On his blog he was breaking down the S.A. Labor government's votes and swings and found that in safe Labor seats with a margin of 15% or more, there was a predominately large swing away from Labor, and in Labor seats with a margin less than 15%, there was a swing to Labor.

I tried the beer when I was up in the country, but it was hard to get, warm and tasted like the worst home brew you'd ever tried. Rotten egg gas smell when you opened them and no two bottles were the same. Apart from right hand drive cars driving on the right, another oddity was a couple of years later when Ne Win introduced new currency based on his lucky number 9. He also demonetized three existing notes which rendered 75% of the country's cash invalid. It wiped out most people's savings in a country that relied heavily on black market cash and hammered the economy. The military government was a bit crazy. In the first place I stayed there was a window between floors in the stairwell. In the distance seen out of the window was a big red building, and on the wall a poster with a stern government warning not to look at the big red building. I imagine in the big red building there would have been a government agent with the job of looking through a telescope to see if any foreigners were looking at the big red building. I wouldn't have even noticed the big red building if I hadn't seen the warning sign, so of course the natural response on reading the sign is to look out the window at the big red building.

It was a crazy place back then, probably still is. It was fairly hard to find a safe place to eat in Rangoon from what I remember. We used to eat at the Strand for British food and the Karachi for Indian. Back then the Strand hotel was still like something from the days of British rule. The most far up north I got was Pagan, never made it as far as Mandalay. It surprised me how dry it was in that area, almost semi-arid with a lot of eucalypt plantations. The gum trees were a welcome smell having been away for a long time. My first impression of Burma was landing there on a Bangladesh Biman flight and getting a taxi into town. The taxi was a big yank tank from the late 50's, right hand drive and driving on the right side of the road. It's still like that, some left hand drive vehicles but predominantly right hand drive vehicles driving on the right.

When I was in Burma in 1985, about the only reminder of the war was a lot of psp used for rural fencing once you got out of Rangooon into the countryside.

I think that inland rail project was originally heading to Toowoomba. They talked about plans to have a big transport hub at Wellcamp,just west of Toowoomba with the Wellcamp airport, the Toowoomba Range road bypass and the inland rail all meeting up there.

A pantech.

I've seen that chain trick done before, real desperation. Also ran into a bloke who'd had that many flats he'd run out of spares and was running on mostly single wheels after taking off the blown tyres and bolting the bare rims back on. The biggest cause of flats on dirt roads is running over bolts that have shaken out of trailers on the corrugated roads. The wheel runs over them, flips them up and they puncture the tyre. You need good eyesight to spot them.

Given the right (or wrong) conditions, that is.

The most prone to swaying is the middle trailer on a conventional triple. They can get a sway up with the front and rear trailers fighting against it, not unlike a dutch roll in an aircraft.

ome, by short roadtrain, I'm assuming you're referring to B-doubles.

It's interesting seeing how preferences pan out. The Victorian Liberals retained the seat of Nepean in yesterday's by-election. They had a primary vote of 38.5% and a swing of 9.6% away from them (most likely to One Nation). After preferences were allocated they ended up with 63.5% which translated to a +6.8% swing. One Nation was in second place with 24.7% primary vote which could account for a fair bit of the Liberal preference gain. Third place was the Independent on 21.3 primary and in fourth place the Greens on 9.3 primary. That's the two candidate preferred final percentage figures estimated on the Independent polling in the top two. It might change slightly due to One Nation ending up in place.

How's this one for an example Nev. I'm only about 77kg but can't shake the belly fat no matter what I do. While not huge, it's not ideal either. I don't drink alcohol, the only animal protein I eat is seafood, don't have dairy products, gluten, sugar or any sugary foods or drinks. I eat almost no processed, packaged food and never eat junk food. Diet consists mainly of grains, fruit and vegetables. I get quite a bit of exercise for someone my age, partly targeted, the rest from physical work. Every day I do heaps of gut related exercise, sit ups etc., yet still maintain belly fat. There hardly any fat on my body, just around the midriff. There's nothing left to cut out of my diet, zero saturated fat and zero sugar, only the natural sugar found in fruit. There's a lot of people around like that who have the same issue. Also too many who eat all that stuff you listed.

I heard on the radio a couple of days ago the median house rent in Brisbane is $780 p/w and $650 for units. It makes you wonder about the top end content in those median prices and how many affordable places are still out there. It would be interesting to see numbers of houses in various price ranges that result in those averages.

A lot of physiotherapists live in a dream world. Standing on two feet with your eyes closed is a pretty good effort for anyone in their eighties, one foot is unneccessary risk taking in my opinion. Most people aim to do it on one foot with eyes open.The only physio I've ever been to that knew what she was doing was a young lady who migrated here from Mumbai. All her assessments and advice were practical, common sense and effective. And it was all verbal with some written take home instructions, very old school. Most of them these days are all about box ticking. They take your money and send you home with an exercise programme where you have to log in every day to their site and tick boxes saying you've done the exercises. Not worth two bob. There's heaps of physio mobs jumping on the bandwagon to hoover up medicare dollars via care plans using BS like that. It's a license to print money.