So, what's so exciting about this change of government, especially for me, as I'm not especially pro-Labor/labour or left wing? It has to do with the change in the Aussie character that's set in during the 11 years John Howard and the Liberal Coalition have been in power. All kinds of people say that it's a meaner, more selfish place than it was in the 70s and 80s. More grasping and materialistic, less open to new people, ideas, immigration and the disadvantaged. Spending on education has gone down, pollution has gone up, there's been little investment in public infrastructure. Even the business community has acknowledged the lack of policy development in the country. And, there's Australia's involvement with the Americans in Iraq, and Howard's fervent embrace of George Bush, his "mate." Yuk. In fact, a lot of people agree that Australia's become a lot more like the USA, with the ditch between rich and poor turning into a chasm. It hasn't been a tolerant, forgiving place under Howard's leadership.

Howard has especially been a climate-change denier, right up to his death-bed conversion during the election campaign. The new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, really struck a chord with me when he said last night that he was going to put an end to the old battles, such as the one between "economic growth" and "climate change." He professes a positive, internationalist outlook that will see Australia leading by example rather than sitting back and counting its coins and throwing barriers up on its shores.

So that's why this was so important. We can be proud of being a part of this country when the government really wants to engage positively with issues beyond shipping coal to China. But even in the coal-shipping things will be different: Rudd spent years as a diplomat in China and speaks fluent Mandarin. It won't be perfect, but change is the first step.

The inference is, of course, if you vote Labor federally then the entire country will be a (unionized) workers' paradise. The Commonwealth of Australia is, by the way, debt-free, but part of the reason the States are in debt is due to federal downloading of responsibilities without any corresponding transfer of funds. Sound familiar to Canadians? The difference here is that the States don't have the right to levy their own income taxes or sales taxes, so they get whatever crumbs are tossed to them.

But in an ironic twist, Labor is selling itself to voters as being more fiscally responsible, while the Prime Minister is on a massive spending spree of "middle class welfare" tax reductions and giveaways; the economy is so hot that interest rates have been rising steadily in an attempt to stem inflation, hurting "the battlers" in the Strugglevilles on the outskirts of the big cities -- the lower middle-class voters who've kept Prime Minister Howard in office for 11 years. And in a further kick to the battlers, house prices on the outskirts of Sydney have dropped by 10-15%, while mortgage rates have gone up 5 times in the past 3 years; house prices in the posh eastern and northern suburbs of Sydney are up 20+ percent during the same period. Interest rates are certainly higher here than in North America: it's easy to find a bank term deposit for 3 months at nearly 7%.

It's going to be a tight one. Labor has to win 16 seats to become government. They could win the popular vote but still lose the election. Don't touch that dial ....

-we're getting good rain this morning, ironically just a couple of days after a 60-something guy in western Sydney died in a fight precipitated, no pun intended, by him watering his garden with a hose when he shouldn't have. Apparently a younger man berated him for violating the water restrictions, whereupon the older man turned his hose onto him. Bad move, as it turned out. The younger man is now charged with some variant of murder.

-further evidence of the general weirdness, at least in big-city Sydney, involves an advertising campaign directed at slowing down the hoons (i.e. the fast drivers). In the TV and print ads, an attractive woman holds up her hand, palm forward, and waggles her little finger, which apparently means "you've got a tiny dick, mate," or words to that effect. It apparently struck a chord with one hoon when a woman he'd cut off waggled her pinky at him. He threw a bottle at her car, causing $400 damage, and was subsequently arrested.

-it's the half-way point in the federal election, a.k.a the class war, in Australia. It's still Labour's to lose. The consensus of commentary and conversations with the locals seems to be that it's time for a change: in one newspaper column, the writer said that voters weren't waiting for Prime Minister Howard with baseball bats but felt more like people who sadly had to put down the family pet after 11 years. Although there's a lot of bi-partisanship on some of the big issues, such as aboriginal reconciliation, there are stark divisions on climate change and, especially, on the government's new system called Work Choices, which Labour and its supporters say will strip away workers' rights. Average people I've talked to are really angry about it -- workers' rights goes to the core of Australian values.

As an example of the class war, go to the Liberal Party website and watch the clip called "Who will be in charge in a union dominated Government".

The best set of Labour's ads are on its YouTube site.

As part of the extraordinary new-media slanging, a clip of Labour leader Kevin Rudd allegedly snacking on his ear wax, got posted to YouTube and actually made it onto American late-night TV -- Jay Leno, I think. Rudd laughed it off, saying that he figured all public figures could wish that their behaviour was always exemplary.

The best video to emerge is a piece of satire by Hugh Atkin, a 23-year-old law student at Sydney University, which depicts Kevin Rudd as a Chairman Mao figure in a video styled on Chinese propaganda films. "Rudd impress and frighten Australian person with his earnestness offensive," reads the alleged translation of the Chinese commentary, set to heroic music. "He unnerve decrepit Howard by deploying clever principle of 'similar difference'. Leader Rudd declares swift and violent Education Revolution." The only link to it is off the Sydney Morning Herald site, which I hope will stay up for a while. It's particularly amusing because Rudd is fluent in Mandarin.