The People have Spoken and in the next excruciating episode of So You Think You Can Be Prime Minister, contestants Julia and Tony will be frantically scurrying around trying to tell us what we just said.

Having suffered through the whole hung parliament thing in Tasmania earlier this year, I should probably warn you that if you think the bullshit flowed thick and fast during the election campaign, you ain’t seen nothing yet. However, once all the shouting about the popular vote, who got the most number of seats and non-existent mandates is over, it will of course boil down to the only vote that really matters, which is who can muster a majority of votes on the floor of the House of Reps and convince the GG that it wasn’t a fluke.

While I am sure that the suddenly remarkably popular independents will mention the national interest more than once in the ensuing bargaining period, it’s Christmas for their respective electorates, and as a resident of  The Electorate Formerly Known As We’re-Taking-You-For-Granted (aka Denison), I for one can’t wait for my pressies.

Of course, if neither side manages to bully, bribe, blackmail or buy their way to 76 votes, it’s back to the polls we go, and if either Julia or Tony is in any doubt as to what the People Spake last night, I think it’s something along the lines of “stop treating us like idiots”, which is not to say that politicians don’t always treat us like idiots, it’s just that this time around it was so clumsily done that we finally noticed.

It’s possible you’ve been wondering why our pollies have been banging on about the catastrophic effects of voting for the other guy (or gal) for what feels like years, and yet the official “launches” only occurred just recently. Perhaps the delayed launches are meant to deliver some sort of subliminal message about stopping the boats, but the cynic in me suspects that it’s got more to do with the subject of the admittedly incredibly expository cartoon above.

Yep, until the election campaign is officially “launched”, the travelling circus designed to deliver power to our politicians and spit to the cheeks of babies in marginal electorates is on our dime. Tony’s launch was a week earlier than Julia’s, so maybe that’s what he means by “ending the waste”.

Anyway, next time a politician picks up one of your kids for a snog, I recommend buggering off to the pub to get a couple of hours’ childcare out of it.

I can’t wait for stage 3. Should make for a cracking debate.

Julia gets all the breaks.

what just happened?

Quite liked this rough. It got bumped for something with fewer words. I have a tendency for cartoon wordiness which can sometimes defeat the purpose of the 1000 word equivalence thing. You see? There I go again…

A rough I quite liked. Mostly for giving me the opportunity to subtly work in the budgie smugglers.

I’d be going with Twitter myself.

I was kicking around an idea for a pocket cartoon last year when binge drinking was said to be four standard drinks. I do like the occasional beverage and in my crazy hedonistic youth, four beers of an evening wasn’t an entirely unheard of event. I’m all for responsible consumption of alcohol , but the day four beers is a binge is the day the wowsers have won.

Sadly, the story got bumped off the front, so in the spirit of recycling I stuck it up on Redbubble as a t-shirt. So far, it’s outsold everything else by miles, with most sales going to the UK. Bloody pissheads.