Last night the Chaser did their election wrap up show. During the show they aired the clip below. The sad thing about the comedy in the skit is that the message is quite true. Depending on the final count Australia may have elected its first ever indigenous politician. New Zealand elected its first indigenous MP in 1868 and since then has had over 80 Maori MPs (20 in the current Parliament). It is good to finally see some progress in Australian politics, they are only 140 years behind NZ. One can only hope that the rest of the barriers of racism and oppression will fall and Australia will embrace their cultural roots as much as NZ does.

From around 6pm AEST tonight I will be live blogging the Australian Election results in this post.

Updates will be added to the post as the results come in.

My commentary will be from a Kiwi’s perspective with the focus primarily on New South Wales but also a bit of Queensland and Victoria.

Stay Tuned for more.

5.20pm update – Seven News have exit polls by Roy Morgan. First seat Herbet near Townsville is showing a swing to Labor however exit polls are not accurate and with a sample of only 300 people the result is within the margin of error (which 7 News failed to tell the viewers).

5.30pm – Seven News have their second exit poll. Lindsay to go Liberal with a 15% swing. Again massive swing and most likely because the sample size is so small.

5.40pm – Third exit poll. La Trobe, in Melbourne’s South East. ALP to win with 5% swing.

7pm – 7 News is reporting that the swing is going against Labor but instead of going to Liberal it is going towards the Greens. Still very early days with only around 1% of the votes counted.

7.30pm – It looks like The Greens may pick up their first ever House of Representatives seat by winning the electorate of Melbourne. (This is an early prediction). Predictions also showing ALP have lost two seats nationally, and LNP have gained two, so neck and neck.

8pm – With 3 million votes counted nationally on two party preferred LNP is leading 50.5% to 49.5%, so neck and neck, ALP may lose 13 seats on latest predictions. Election is very much too close to call. Sydney may also go Greens, and possibly Denison in Tasmania. Result may not be known tonight.

8.30pm – Greens have almost definitely won Melbourne. Candidate just gave a victory speech. Nationally with a little over 5 million votes ALP is now leading 50.3% to 49.7%.

9pm – A few victory speeches over the last half hour, but still too close to call in many seats.

9.30pm – Still heading for a hung parliament.

9.50pm – Greens have 12% in the Senate. Looks like 9 senators in the new Parliament. “We are seeing the birth of a new political movement” – Bob Brown, Greens Leader. “It is time we moved to proportional representation”

10pm – 7 News is calling it currently at 73 seats each, below the 76 needed to govern. With 3 independents + 1 Green.

10.15pm – Can a government be formed? Labor + Greens will not be enough to govern without two independents on current predictions.

11.15pm – Gillard takes the stage (before Abbott), “Too close to call”, “Every vote must be counted”

11.30pm – Channel 7′s panel is saying Labor lost the plot when they failed to have a backbone and pass the ETS in March or go to a Double D Election over the issue.

12am – Abbott has addressed the Liberal Party faithful. At end of the night hung parliament with 72 seats Labor, 71 seats LNP declared.

It is rather alarming that New Zealand Prime Minister, John Key is involved in discussions with the Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard over the processing of asylum seekers: (from the NZ Herald)

Ms Gillard said she had also spoken to New Zealand Prime Minister John Key about the possibility of a regional processing centre for asylum seekers.

“John said to me that he would be open to considering this initiative constructively,” she said.

“East Timor and New Zealand are vital countries in this initiative, as they are already signatories to the refugee convention.

“And New Zealand, like Australia, is a key resettlement country.”

Currently the two major political parties in Australia are locked in a battle of who is the biggest bigot and racist. This is not a game that New Zealand wants to join. New Zealand prides itself on its multiculturalism.

Declining asylum applications from people of Afghanistan and Sri Lanka just because they are from those two countries is racist segregation in its most simple form. For any New Zealand politician to support the immigration policies of a country that is happy to endorse racism is political suicide. Crosby|Textor may have done well with John Key so far but this is one push poll that they will lose.

The SMH today is reporting that Inner Party member Conroy is secretly pushing on with plans to filter the Australian internet.

The federal government is hiding controversial plans to force ISPs to store internet activity of all Australian internet users – regardless of whether they have been suspected of wrongdoing – for law-enforcement agencies to access.

The next thing they will try is for everyone in the country to wear a GPS tracker so we always know where people walk, drive, train or cycle so that we can fine them when they jaywalk or fail to indicate.

As every day goes by it seems the Rudd government is becoming more and more successful at achieving the impossible – losing the next election. For me being a computer geek all it means is that I am much more aware of my actions online and wherever possible I am using encryption for data transfer. It is not an argument about having nothing to hide and therefore needing no privacy. It is a matter that the government wants to data mine our every single action, watch our every single step and monitor every little thing we do in our lives.

I have no issue with sharing my browsing habits with people who I opt to share it with; more often than not I opt into anonymous data sharing of software usage. However, this is not what the government intends, what the government intends is complete mind control of its population. This is not censorship, censorship is a public list of banned material and the reason why they are banned which is debatable in court, this is well beyond censorship and amounts of thought control. The government is not telling you what is blocked, why it is blocked, or any way of being able to appeal sites being blocked. All in all it is a very scary idea that you would expect from a mad dictator not a democratically elected government.

I have just spent the last four days on holiday in Cairns and the surrounding area.

During this time I saw, did, and ate:

• Ate Crocodile, Emu, and Kangaroo
• Ate Crocodile Curry
• Went on the Skyrail Rainforest Cableway over the Barron Gorge to Kuranda
• Bought Mango wine
• Went on the Kuranda Scenic Railway back down the Barron Gorge
• Climbed the Red and Blue Arrow Circuits behind Cairns and saw a wild Wallaby
• Went on On The Wallaby tour into the Tablelands visiting a number of waterfalls, cycling about 15km and canoeing down a river where we saw Spiders, a Tree Kangaroo, Platypus, Turtles, and a whole lot of other cool wildlife.
• Went hunting through a riverbed to find rocks that can be used for face painting.

Right now I am very tired to go into anymore details about the trip. However pictures speak a 1,000 words, so here are 21 photos to speak 21,000 words. (Click on a photo to see a larger version).

There is a very unpatriotic opinion article in the Sydney Morning Herald today suggesting that we don’t honour the ANZACs.

While the author, Martin Flanagan, does well to point out some of the history surrounding the Gallipoli campaign his tie in arguments against remembering the dead simply do not stack up.

Gallipoli was a military disaster. We should note that in justice to the young men who died there. Do we owe them less than we owe those who die in bushfires like Black Saturday? We should also note it in justice to future generations. The voices that urged Australia into the invasion of Iraq were of the same character as those that propelled Australia to Gallipoli in 1914.

Flanagan is correct in stating that Gallipoli was a military disaster, one of the primary reasons for this was that the ANZACs landed at the wrong beach. But I do not want to get bogged down in historical arguments. The most offensive and false claim by Flanagan in this statement is comparing the Gallipoli campaign to Iraq. There is a big difference in roles between the two, in Gallipoli the ANZACs were defending, sure they were invading Turkey, however the only reason for doing so was to defend the British Empire and end the war, they did not start the war but their goal was to end it. In Iraq the Australian Army is among the aggressors, they did start the war and they did make the choice to attack.

What the Australians won at Gallipoli was huge respect, including from their enemy. It really is time we started making clear to young Australians that the Anzacs didn’t die protecting Australia from being invaded. Rather, we were invading a country on the other side of the world – to wit, Turkey – with whom we had no difference as a people outside the larger politics of the day.

Surely it is time we owed Turkey, and Turkish Australians, that respect. Look at the respect Turkey shows our dead.

I ask this question most seriously. Does any country in the world – other than Turkey – permit a people who tried to invade it to commemorate the fact of that attempted invasion on their shores each year? I know of not a single one. Imagine if the descendants of the Japanese pilots who bombed Darwin held an emotional service beneath the Japanese flag on the shores of Darwin Harbour each year.

Again there is a massive difference between the attack on Gallipoli and the attack on Darwin. The attack on Gallipoli formed the basis of the ANZAC bond that has seen NZ and Australian troops work together jointly in a number of wars, exercises, rescues, peacekeeping missions, trade and politics over the last 95 years. It also formed the basis of maturing as two nations independent of Great Britain and through the war a bond with Turkey.

The services at Gallipoli are not the celebration of war they are remembering the dead, the dead who died serving their country, defending their country, and believing in their country. They are also about respecting those who fought to give us the freedoms we enjoy today – including the freedom to criticise what they fought for.

The difference with the attack on Darwin is that the scars between the actions of Japan and Australia have never fully healed. The way in which the author compares the attack suggests this. The way in which Japan and Germany among other countries avoid talking about the war also suggests that they are not at a point yet to move on from the past. The attack on Darwin was an attack and only an attack, the Gallipoli campaign was a lot more than just an attack, it was the forming of nations and what is honoured on ANZAC day is those who helped form those nations not those who needless died in a failed campaign.

Great news this morning, Mighty Ape New Zealand’s Best Online Store has swung its way across the ditch to launch in Australia.

Visit the jungle and check out their massive grand opening sale.

They also have a very active community on Facebook and Twitter.

It is time to go Ape!

It is not often I will call a weekend away Paradise, normally awesome, cool, wicked, fun, great, brilliant would suffice but in this case Paradise is the only word that can truly describe just how much fun and enjoyment I had.

I flew to the Gold Coast on Saturday night with a friend, got picked up from the airport and driven the 50km south to Byron. The best thing about Saturday night was the rain, it is still very odd to be living in a country where rain is a rare commodity and when you see it falling you smile.

Sunday was spent hiking in the Nightcap National Park. Initially we were meant to just walk a 7.5km and 4.5 hours on the Minyon Loop Track to the base of the Minyon Falls and back up. Problem was despite stopping for around 30 minutes for lunch we managed to complete the track in two hours.

Minyon Falls

Rather than waiting 2.5 hours for our transport back to Byron we decided to head up to Rummery Park Camp Ground via Boggy Creek Track. This took an hour and once we had stopped again for food and wildlife spotting we decided to head up a fire break to try and spot Cape Byron and its lighthouse.

Cape Byron + Lighthouse

Once we got back to Byron Bay we had a beer and danced at the Byron Beach Hotel where Lisa Hunt’s Forever Soul band was performing covers of many songs from the 60s – 80s. The great thing about the Beach Hotel was it didn’t matter who you were, how old you were or how you were dressed everyone was having a fun time; it was a very relaxed and friendly family environment.

At 5am on Monday I got up to catch the Sunrise over the Tasman Sea. Getting up to see the sunrise is one of the best experiences you can ever have and it is a tradition of mine to do so when I am in the bush or a beautiful country environment. The sunrise over Cape Byron certainly did not disappoint and was well worth getting up so early for.

Monday morning was spent sea kayaking in Byron Bay. Getting out through the surf at Byron Bay was a fun experience as there was around a 2m swell onshore and further out some of the waves on the reef were breaking a lot larger. I was fortunate that I only got tossed out of the kayak once on the way out. Once we got about 2.5km offshore we were able to spot fish jumping, green turtles and a pod of bottle nosed dolphins. It was one of the most fun and spectacular things I have ever done in my life, I may love the mountains but being in a kayak, offshore around 20m from a pod of dolphins is awesome.

Once we got back from our tour we headed into the surf to do some boogie boarding.  The rest of the day was then spent getting a very late lunch and looking through the town. Overall this trip was Paradise. If you plan to go to the Gold Coast do not go to Surfers Paradise, instead head to a real piece of Paradise – Byron Bay.

Byron Bay - Paradise

I have now been living in Sydney for four weeks. Already I am being told that I have lost the sharp edge off my kiwi accent, but that still does not stop at least one daily occurrence where I either can’t understand something simple someone is telling me or vice-versa.

To aide my fellow kiwi’s when they grow wings and come over here too I have been collecting a list of my most interesting and funny situations where kiwi slang/words have been greeted with blank confused stares.

• Blobbing / To Blob Out – This one even has its own entry in Wikitionary, To relax idly and mindlessly.
• Dairy – In Australia known as a Convenience Store.
• Flat (or Student Flat) – In Australia Flat refers to a type of house in particular a granny flat.
• Flatting – This word does not exist in Australia. The closest word with the same meaning would be shared housing. Somehow that doesn’t have the same ring to it as it’s kiwi counterpart. (Also I get the feeling that the whole right of passage going flatting coming of age type situation is different here.)
• Hori – I had a very hard time explain this one. Wikipedia explains it as used for something that is unattractive or shoddy
• I speak good England! – Not really kiwi slang as such, but more when someone says something with either terrible spelling or grammar.
• P – Pure Methamphetamine. In Australia known as just crystal meth.
• Paper – University term for the equivalent of a school subject, in Australia known as a course. Where paper in Australia refers to a research paper.
• Refill pad – This is a British English word, but here is known as a lecture pad or loose lead ruled pad.
• Sweet As – no worries.
• Toying / To Toy With – Messing with, teasing, playing games with.
• Tramping – Hiking or Bush Walking

I have also noticed some interesting differences in styles and behaviour. The three key areas would be:

• Clothing – Take note, black tshirts and jeans are not everyday wear. Shorts are very much in – mostly because it is too hot to get away with jeans all year round.
• Hug/Hugging – It is common to greet and say goodbye to friends in a social setting with a quick hug in New Zealand. I did this to a friend over here and they took three steps back not sure how to react. Looking into the background of this more it seems that this cultural difference stems from a combination of New Zealand’s large Pacific population and Eastern Europeans who both commonly greet with a hug and a kiss to the cheek (although the kissing has never been NZ culture to my knowledge).
• Sunglasses – Almost everyone in New Zealand will wear them whenever they are outside, not as common here.

There are also two good Wikipedia posts on New Zealand English and New Zealand Words.

Just saw this ad on Facebook

Not something you would ever see in New Zealand.