My writing week 3 (33)

Hi all,

Civilisation has not ended yet, there is still hope that the fascist Tony Abbott and his hopelessly self-serving underlings won't form the next government of Australia. At least there was hope at 12 noon today (Monday) when I watched the ABC news, which had the vote at 73 Labour, 70 Liberal, 3 independents, 1 Green and 3 seats in doubt. I didn't really think there were that many rich white Christian males in Australia. Anyone else who voted for them probably reads the crap in the Murdoch press or believes the crap on commercial television news.

I worked at the Rutherglen polling booth in north-east Victoria on Saturday. Our local member - opposition spokesperson for science and innovation and practicing luddite - Liberal Sophie Merribella easily won the booth but, interestingly, the Senate vote was much closer. This could mean that for the House of Reps a lot of voters were convinced by Sophie's media advertising campaign and/or the low quality of the Labour candidate, or voters were concerned with what the Liberals might do if they control the Senate.

I just read in The Age that professional writers in Australia earn on average $4000 a year, so most of them, if they have kept themselves informed on politics, would be hoping for a Labour rather than a Liberal government. Abbott will hoe into the poor and blame them for their plight if he manages to form a government. A few of his last minute policies included cutting 1.5 billion from schemes aimed at helping the poor to get to university and from schemes to improve poor schools.

And of course nothing will be done about climate change if Abbott gets in as he will be too busy cutting money from climate change programs because of the GREAT BIG LABOUR DEBT (that will be his government's often repeated line for the next term). If Labour forms a minority government they will be even more scared of a mining company campaign if they try to do anything about climate change.

With Obama's democratic party about to be wrecked in mid-term elections in the US, the world's main hope for something occurring on climate change is the Chinese, who are doing things such as shutting thousands of polluting factories and becoming the biggest user of renewable energy in the world.

I think society is in for a very hard time over the next century unless science comes up with a timely answer to climate change - bring on nano-technology and genetic engineering. Any future generations - assuming some survive the environment's destruction and wars over water and food - will look back at us with hatred. We are so selfish. Ignorance is no excuse.

About the only positive is that a world ravaged by global warming makes excellent material for apocalyptic science fiction.

In among all my angst about the results of the election and completing online training for it I did a bit more writing of my novella. It is still nowhere near finished.

And yaaaa there are only ten more sleeps to Aussicon.


Graham.