From WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange to a larger-than-life billionaire who is rebuilding the Titanic, the Australian election boasts a cast of unlikely candidates who are shaking up the political scene.
When Australians go to the polls on Saturday, a mandatory exercise for all adults, they will have 1,717 candidates from more than 50 parties to choose from.
They include the usual sprinkling of former sports stars, far-right fringe groups and everything from the Animal Justice Party to the Smokers’ Rights Party and The No Carbon Tax Climate Sceptics Party.
From Ecuador’s embassy in London, Australian-born Assange leads a party that hopes to bring “transparency, accountability and justice,” and potentially become a global movement.
Assange, who has been living inside the embassy since June last year as he fights extradition from Britain to Sweden, has been unable to campaign, but has got into the spirit with a spoof video.
Sporting a blond mullet wig — short on top, but long at the back — and with Australian rock star John Farnham’s 1986 hit You’re the Voice playing, Assange sings of making things “leak so we can get much bolder.”
The WikiLeaks Party, the lyrics say, is “the light that the world’s demanding, make it bright and make things clear.”
The 42-year-old, the frontman of the whistleblowing Web site which dumped hundreds of thousands of US military and diplomatic documents online, says his chance of winning a seat in the Senate are promising.
“There’s many Australians who support us,” his father, John Shipton, who helped form the party, said at a recent Sydney fundraiser. “The Senate of Australia is one of the world’s finest political institutions. It’s a house of review and has, despite the two major parties trying to fill it up with cabbage heads from time to time, had an excellent influence on politics generally. So we wish to extend that influence... and bring accountability and transparency, and thus justice to issues.”
Playing on deep dissatisfaction with the major players — the ruling center-left Labor Party led by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the conservative opposition Liberal/National coalition headed by Tony Abbott — new parties have emerged to take their share of the vote.
“They are so boring those guys,” said Clive Palmer, the flamboyant businessman best known for his project to rebuild the ill-fated luxury liner the Titanic. He is standing for a seat in the lower house of parliament.
“You’ve got Kevin Rudd that is more concerned about his hair than the benefit of the Australian people and Tony ‘Rabbit,’ who just doesn’t want to talk at all,” he said, using his nickname for opposition leader Abbott, the election frontrunner. “Everyone knows they’re boring and everyone now is searching for a solution, and we’ve got that solution.”
His fledgling Palmer United Party is standing a candidate in each of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate as it spreads its populist message, which includes changing company tax rules.
Another renegade is Bob Katter, a 10-gallon-hat-wearing rancher from far north Queensland who has been in parliament for more than a decade as an independent, but who formed his own party in 2011.
“I know how to play this game and we will play it with a fair degree of ruthlessness,” Katter, who champions rural issues, said recently.
Pauline Hanson, founder of the anti-immigration One Nation party who rose to prominence in the 1990s, has also thrown herself back in the ring, saying Australians deserve better than “selfish, dysfunctional, egotistical political parties.”
Rob Manwaring, a lecturer in politics at Flinders University in South Australia, said there was “no chance of any significant vote breakthrough” for WikiLeaks and that the smaller parties would struggle for any influence, though he added a caveat.
“In general, the share of the vote for minor parties has been increasing for a number of years... so we are seeing a shift in voting behavior,” Manwaring said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS