Cuddly

I have just rescued a baby brush-tailed possum, well, six months so maybe 'child' not 'baby'. Found her under a tree in the sparse parkland at the corner of Grenfell and East Terrace. Just at that moment, as I was bending down to pick her up, a man walked passed that is a member of Fauna Australia and he gave me a ride to a 'participating' vet. Although by law all vets have to take in native animals and pass them on to a carer organisation.

It had heaps of fleas mind you, I got four of them either off her or off my shirt. Curled up she just fills a double handful. Her main need for the next day is warmth, she was on the way to dying from exposure, but by tomorrow she will be able to take milk (special marsupial milk, not cow milk). (And also banana, rolled oats, stuff like that.) I have raised a few ring-tails in my time, but I have never held a brush-tail before. Fed wild ones a few times.

I am still unemployed. One contract, the better one, is in government and as usual for our wonderful Australian public service, they are not organised and need to delay for a few months. The other I just haven't heard back from the agency about. I have tried calling the consultant, but he hasn't answered yet.

We have to vote tomorrow. I must try not to forget. And I must remind Radar, 'cos he used to forget a lot. The polls are close, the last two that I have seen both said about fifty-fifty, but polls and 'town halls' in the marginal seats show a dissatisfaction with Labor. All the people in the world could vote Labor and I wouldn't care, so long as they live in safe left-wing seats. The way the Australian democracy works it is only a few thousand voters in the dozen marginal seats that matter, the other ten million voters are effectively marginalised.

Still, it is not as bad as the USA where Clinton got elected on forty percent of the vote.

I live in a close seat, the city of Adelaide, i.e. the CBD seat. It has swung a few times, currently red, was blue not long ago and may go blue again this time.

The Democrats, this is a laugh, have discovered that one of their South Australian candidates is a convicted paedophile. By law it is too late to remove him from the ticket. This late revelation should hurt them in the polls; they won't get any lower house seats anyhow, but I wonder if it will cost them an upper house seat or two. SA has always been their stronghold, they only need to lose a couple of seats to lose the balance of power in the Senate.

And just to close off; I regret having left Singapore, I should have taken one of the jobs offered to me there and stuck it out, risen the ranks, studied part time, and above all, not come back to Australia. I so regret this. I miss it so much. I miss my friends there, I miss the culture, it was just a totally better place to be. But if I was there I would still be expected to vote in this election tomorrow. How does that work? I would not reside in any lower house electorate, so how do they do that? I do know that one senator wanted Australia to have a seat for the diaspora, like Italy has two seats for them. I'm going to google how this works.

No, the electoral commission says that it is not compulsory to vote if you are living overseas. Further, if you have been overseas for less than three years and intend to return to Australia within six years then you may register to vote. That makes nine years, and yet if you have been living overseas for more than six years, or you intend to be doing so, then you are meant to be removed from the electoral roll and cannot vote. This would mean that if I moved back to Singapore, as I intend to do, and it is my intention to stay there, as it is, then I will lose the right to vote in Australian elections. I would not gain the right to vote in Singaporean elections until I obtained Singaporean citizenship (of course). This means that Australia disenfranchises its citizens.

Kind of similar to the health care situation if you live overseas. If you ever return to Australia you will be 'fined' every year for not having been paying for private medical coverage in Australia during that period that you were not in Australia. How stupid is that?

What the electoral commission doesn't elucidate upon is who are you voting for? If I am living overseas and still get to vote, then for what lower house seat am I voting? Quick google! According to the Southern Cross Group (advocacy for Australians abroad) you either stay registered where you were last registered or where you have near kin (as a lot are children that turn eighteen whilst living with their parents overseas, so have no previous enrolment in Australia).

There are about two thirds of a million Australians living overseas and old enough to vote; this would be enough for a few electorates on their own. Like Italy or Portugal, Australia could have two or three 'virtual' electorates. I don't see it happening though, principally because most Australians are hostile to anyone that leaves the country for anything more than 'a trip to Bali'. But as it stands it seems that less than two percent of Australian citizens living overseas are allowed to vote. Whilst the government states that ten percent of Australians overseas vote, that is mostly tourists only out of Australia for a short time.

Further more, whilst changes have been made in the last ten years, many long term OS residents have, under both the previous laws and the current laws, permanently lost the right to vote for the country of which they are a citizen. And that kind of sums up the way the Australian government and public service thinks about issues like this.

When Australia does so little for Australians living overseas, why should they do anything for Australia? The Senate enquiry in the Australian Diaspora looked at using Australian residents in other nations as 'ambasadors', but in reality these nearly one million Australians overseas are treated like shit by their own government (both bureaucrats and politicians), so why should they think nice thoughts about their nation?