Driving Miss Appropriation

Sorry Mike, the potential for scandal overload looks like becoming dangerously terminal.

mikevotes (Born at the Crest of the Empire) is among the few regulars who comment on this blog, and one of the very few who does so publicly – take note you cowardly email responders.

This has to be one of the strangest Decembers in my memory. I noted on November 10, privately, that it was the ill anniversary of an ill fated election bid back in 1977.

Always being on the foolhardy side, I contested the Federal seat of Bass, in Tasmania.

Each year, without realizing why, the looming date still fills me with a mix of anticipation and dread. It was a great experience, but one I was never tempted to repeat.

The December which followed the campaign was spent tidying up the election debris. The debris included electoral expenses returns and, appropriately enough, my own mini scandal.

Back then there was a $1000 spending limit on election campaigns. It had been in place for many years and was woefully inadequate. I didn’t have a big problem with it, we ran a very colourful, dollar shop campaign, and spent $1100. What to do? Declare it of course. If I spent that on my cut price campaign, surely the big parties spent far more.

When the returns where published, spurred by my declaration of overspending, it turns out that the two major spent; $0 and $110 in that electorate. For the most part candidates ignored the reporting requirement entirely, as no one had ever been prosecuted for that breach.

Well, it was a storm in a tea cup. During the next parliament the duly elected members miraculously agreed to abandon the pesky spending limit altogether. Why should they, after all, have to account for everything they must do to become a noble elected representative?

I note that, in the same spirit of noble endeavour, parliament is to vote to lift the ‘undisclosed’ cap on corporate donations. Well as the Classical Greeks were wont to say; ‘bad laws are made to entrap the lawmakers’. It will come to pass.

But I digress (it’s Friday), back to this December. We are used to the media winding down this time of the year. Christmas advertising is diminished by diverting news stories, and advertising is the engine which drives the media.

But here in Canada we have an election campaign. The US and Australia are embroiled in the fallout of the Iraqi adventure. Not only that, the US lawmakers seem to be taking ‘friendly fire’ from domestic corruption on top of their adventurism.

Of course that dreaded ‘political correctness’ has a role to play in creating an ‘around the calendar’ news feast. We stopped calling it Christmas because of some misguided idea that the name suggested a religious holiday. Adopting the ‘festive season’ nomenclature has simply opened the floodgates to a further corruption of our R&R season.

It’s hardly fair, either, on those who traditionally use the media ‘silly season’ to gain their 15 minutes of fame, to have the whole year dominated by professional publicity hounds. Besides, we have become accustomed to this idle period, the eventual yearning for some real news to break the spell of nonsense. Ahhh for the good old days!

Meanwhile, I am doing follow up on a series of stories in the Melbourne Age on even more revelations of corruption in the Iraq saga. US queried over $20b war spoils. There is also the story on David Hicks, the harebrained Australian detainee at Guantanamo Bay. The only westerner left in detention and the only one totally ignored by the government of his own country. Even Hick’s American Defense Counsel thinks it somewhat odd that a country would not speak out for one of its citizens. He obviously doesn’t know Australia very well.

The Australian inquiry (whitewash) into the UNScam is about to get underway, and things are looking very interesting in Britain. No silly season here for a while.