Saturday 21 August 2010

Election day

It was a glorious day in Queensland today -- crisp breeze, bright blue sky, sunshine and early spring blossoms. It was all quite at odds with the dark gloom that enveloped our house. Election day of perhaps the closest and most impossible to call election in Australia's history. I decided not to wear my bright pink sweatshirt as it seemed inappropriate to the seriousness of voting.

Going out the door in navy blue and dark glasses I was contemplating whether we'd need to stock up on liquor to survive the evening of excruciating counting. Having just decided that an entire Dorie Greenspan-recipe apple brown sugar cheesecake would be enough to sustain us through the evening and assuage potential misery, I noticed Blithe Boy's shorts were on back to front.

Remedying the situation, I discovered that he had also forgotten undies. Suddenly a pink sweatshirt didn't seem so bad.

Polls close in 20 minutes. I'll let you know how much cheesecake was required.

N.B. If one is going to expire from cheesecake related excess then this is the recipe by which to do so.

2 comments:

joe MN said...

What's the local view of when this will be decided? Last I heard Gillard was gaining support from some of the independents. Is it better than having the supreme court essentially decide an election like in the US?

Blithe said...

Well Gillard has 2 of the five independents now. It's all still so up in the air though. The remaining 3 independents are expected to announce something this weekend. And one of the guys affiliated with the Coalition is announcing that he's not really in the Coalition so I'm not sure what that means.

Whomever gets the numbers, you have to subtract one for speaker of the house who doesn't get to vote so really you need 77 in hand to run the government (and yes I just learnt that!)

I don't know if it is better or worse than having the Supreme Court decide but it's certainly been more interesting! In our case, I think the final decision would come down to the Governor General as the Queen's representative in Australia. And she has had to seek legal advice because her son-in-law is a Labor member of parliament! It's been decided that she could make a decision if necessary but it all adds to the theatrics.

The general view is that we should know something by Monday but the general view also said that we'd know by the end of August...