Election 2007 kicked off for me at 5am on Saturday morning with a day of election filmmaking duties ahead, and finished up nearly 24 hours later when I collapsed into bed in a reasonable state of inebriation and exhaustion. I would’ve had roughly the same itinerary if there was a Liberal victory although the Great Ruddslide ‘07 made the day one of immense joy and jubilation. Bridgit Gread has already written a brilliant wrap of the RWDB reaction to Australia Decides ‘07 so here’s the rest as seen through GrodsCorp’s eyes.

Summary
Everyone knows what happened thanks to tonnes of proper election analysis in the MSM and the blogosphere so I might just mention a single point that especially makes me smile: Family First have gone from strength-to-strength with their national primary vote climbing -0.04% to the massive total of 1.97%, while their nemesis, the “extreme” Greens, grew their vote by 0.4% to 7.59%.

Suck shit, Steve Fielding. There’s now absolutely no doubt that once that stain on democracy is removed from the Senate in 2010 we’ll never have Family First make either chamber look untidy again.

How the candidates went
Let’s check out those aspiring politicians to whom GrodsCorp paid attention during the campaign (all figures are from AEC website at 5:50pm, 26 November 2007.)

Stuart Ulrich, independent for Charlton, scored 2.29% of the primary vote which he can partly attribute to scoring first place on the ballet (sic) paper. (Read this if you want to understand the “ballet” joke.) Still a not-totally-shite result despite the donkey vote.

Jemma Tribe, Family First for Cunningham, polled half a percentage point less than her party’s national average with 1.48% of the primary vote. If she was Steve Fielding, and with numbers like that, she’d be sitting in Parliament right now.

Stewart Glass, independent for the Senate in South Australia, has built a solid base for another tilt in 2010 with 65 votes, or 0.01% of the primary vote. Maybe his campaign was a hammer and the election was a wood screw? (As John Surname said when he saw Stewart’s YouTube video: “Buy a screwdriver.”)

Zane Alcorn (AKA MC Doc Fruit), Socialist Alliance for Wills, scored 0.73% of the primary; Margarita Windisch, Socialist Alliance for the Senate in Victoria, managed 0.08%.

Philip Nitschke, independent for Menzies, gathered a respectable 3.91% of the primary vote in a blue-ribbon Liberal seat against the (ex) minister for immigration, Kevin Andrews. Here’s hoping he can boost that percentage up to 4% with absentees and postals to get his deposit back.

Lachlan Connor
Look, I’ll be honest with you. We were all ready to shoot two episodes of Lachlan Connor, Independent during the GrodsElectionParty but when things started to go oh-so-right we started to get oh-so-drunk. There was no chance that we were going to tear ourselves away from the telly long enough to turn the camera on, and even if we did get the camera turned on we probably would’ve pointed it the wrong way and forgot to put a tape in. So Lachlan will appear in an epilogue episode this week and that’ll have to do.

Disgraceful behaviour
Some of you may be aware of the allegation that Kevin Andrews tore down the posters of an opposing candidate on election day. Andrew denies that he committed this offence with a spokesperson from his office saying, “It’s not true, it’s absolute rubbish.” Well, I can say that I was rather closely involved with the whole incident on Saturday and I have no choice but to declare that Kevin Andrews is a lying liar who lies.

The Liberal Party
Decimated. Pure and simple. I hope with every fibre of my being that Tony Abbott is elected leader so that it implodes just a little bit more.

In conclusion
John Howard, you are a national embarrassment. May you never have another chance to fuck this country up in any capacity ever again. Good riddance.

After GrodsCorp (along with Jeremy, Bruce and AV) linked to a horrid YouTube video of Family First candidate Jemma Tribe the other day, director Josh Reid’s YouTube channel’s hits went up 1000% as viewers took part in the democratic process by engaging with Jemma’s stated policies and values through the comments feature. A couple of hours ago when I checked there were about ten comments, most of which were negative about Family First and Jemma Tribe’s policies. Upon checking just now there were only two comments — both of which were positive — plus embedding and rating had been disabled.

Never accuse Family First of being unable to deal with criticism.

UPDATE (25/10): After reading this post and being confronted with his free speech-hating ways, Josh Reid has deleted the two fawning comments on the video from Family First staffers.

Lachlan Connor, eat your heart out. Check out this corker of a video from Family First candidate Jemma Tribe. Think of every amateur, home-movies video production technique possible and director Josh Reid (says Josh: “Hope to be a full time film director one day”) has used it. Everything, that is, except for a page-turn transition which would have been the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake. You can’t have everything, but.

I’m a bit confused about whether Jemma’s standing for the lower or upper house because she says she’s the candidate for Cunningham (lower house seat based around Wollongong) but keeps referring to the need for Family First representation in the Senate.

UPDATE: I should be careful what I wish for. I bitch about director Josh Reid’s failure to use page-turn transitions and BAM! he comes through with page-turns, star wipes, and every other hideous transition known to the human race.

UPDATE II (25/10): Josh Reid has disabled embedding of the video because Family First can’t hack the criticism. Click here to watch it instead.