Eric sez: Screw You, Hippie!
But wait: It's not Eric Cartman; rather, lunar-Right Tassie senator Eric Abetz going after Bob Brown. His ravings must be put under the microscope, however.In the upper house election in Western Australia, the Greens vote went backwards from 8 per cent in the 2001 state election to 7.44 per cent on February 26. In the lower house, the Greens only marginally increased their vote from 7.27 per cent in 2001 to 7.38 per cent in 2005.
Well OK - but One Nation went down by 8% since the last WA election, and the Coalition were only up 4.5%. ALP were up 5.2%. So really, I think that's the pot calling the kettle fat re: bad election results (particularly when you're getting all huffy about the Democrats vote being up for grabs in the '04 federal election).
By keeping quiet, it seems Brown has learned from the farcical situation on October 9 when he jubilantly introduced "senator-elect" Christine Milne to the media – despite the fact that Milne had less than 0.9 of a quota on primary votes at the time and was ultimately the final senator elected for Tasmania.
Yes, but dear, she IS a senator now. Deal with it.
Remember when before the federal election Brown famously claimed the Greens would poll 1 million votes in the House of Representatives? Well, they ended up with just 841,734, or 7.19 per cent of the vote.OK, a little bit off, but not heaps. Don't forget, this was in the face of a ruthless Murdoch media machine working in conjunction with the Libs to bring them down with lies, gross exaggerations and hysterical, "The Greenies want to legally roger your babies in their cribs after they've shot 'em up with smack" type of "journalism".
"In Tasmania at the 2004 federal election, the Liberals' sensible and balanced forest policy (pffffwhahahaha) saw a swing to the Liberals in every lower house seat and a massive 7.34 per cent swing in the Senate, while the votes of the Greens, ALP and the Democrats all went backwards."
Did you know? In 2004 THE GREENS PRIMARY VOTE IN EVERY SINGLE FEDERAL ELECTORATE BAR 4 WENT UP. The four in which they went down was only by a margin of less than 1%. In safe Labor seats like Sydney and Grayndler their primary vote was up by 7-8%, while in safe Liberal seats like Berowra and Bradfield it was up by 4.5%, not to mention the 12.5% increase Andrew Wilkie scored for the Green primary vote in Howard's Bennelong seat.
But such increases weren't just in inner Sydney: The Greens had notable improvements in western Sydney, country NSW (including Newcastle and especially Wollongong/south coast), Melbourne, Hobart - so in fact Eric's just plain wrong to claim that the Greens went "backwards" there when in fact they scored a 4% rise in Denison - the Gold Coast, western Brisbane and the ACT.
Bob might have got a bit carried away on the night, but that's not to say the Greens didn't do very well in 2004 - as I'm sure they will in 2007, even when the machine is really trying to mow them down.
posted by Sam @ Wednesday, March 09, 2005
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