Campaign brings out the eccentrics

'http://twitpic.com/2de24z“ Christ, I could have actually voted for you”

There must be something about elections which makes the particularly eccentric engaged in this Australian democracy of ours come out of the woodwork. For whatever reasons, whether they like it or not, a sudden light is shone upon them. And so as more and more is revealed, the inevitable chill shoots down a voter’s spine thinking, ‘Christ, I could have actually voted for you.’

In this respect, this election has been exemplary, casting a wide net and coming up with a healthy haul of delusion, narrow-minded bigotry and paranoia. The couple to start us off in this bonkers race to the election, was Labor candidate for Flingers Adrian Schonfelder and Liberal candidate for Ballarat Mark Banwell. The first, Schonfelder, thought it alright to pin suicides on Tony Abbott who he said was “influencing people to take their own lives”. And then Banwell, who thought it was not an exaggeration to compare the consequences of Labor’s education building program to the ‘holocaust.’

Then there was David Barker, then Liberal candidate for Chifley getting disendorsed for his Western Sydney seat of Chifley who said via Facebook and elsewhere that there shouldn’t be any Muslims in parliament, Julia couldn’t be trusted as PM because of her atheism and that Tony Abbott was “the mouthpiece for God.”

The next installation in the looney hall of election horrors has got to be Wendy Francis. Wendy, running for Family First in the Senate, went ahead and aired her views via Twitter and elsewhere about gay marriage. Suffice to say she’s not pro the idea, elaborating that children with two mums, or dads were being emotionally abused and that the consequences of legalising gay marriage would be equivalent to creating a second “stolen generation”. She initially said she was not the author of the tweets, deleted them but then turned around and said she stood by the comments.

One Nation jumped on the anti-Gay bandwagon taking it just a little bit further into narrow-minded bigotry land, with it’s Victorian President chiming in on the social media site to say “U have a backer in me, love to do some Poofter Bashing from time too time [sic]...“

Nice. He has since deleted this tweet and protected his account. But other tweets include calling Prime Minister Gillard a “treatous redheaded b*tch [sic]” and former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull a “jew boy”.

Sticking with a right-wing theme, George Christensen LNP candidate for Dawson is the latest in the list of conservative mishaps. It was revealed that in his student days he edited and wrote a pamphlet which included charmers such as “My thoughts: the truth is women are stupid and that's that.” And this fun little joke:

“A homosexual walks into the Doctor’s office, sobbing. ‘Doctor, Doctor’, he says ‘I think I’ve got AIDS. ‘Well,’ replied the Doctor, shocked “Who gave it to you? “I dunno,” says the homosexual. “I haven’t got eyes in the back of my head.”

This guy is somehow not getting disendorsed, Abbott excusing the remarks as “silly” adolescent behaviour. But all the same, he’ll probably be getting less votes in the marginal Queensland seat.

And then the piece de resistance in this bugged-out ballet, Mark Latham and his weird antics over the latter half of this election period. First accosting Julia on the campaign in his pseudo journalist/60 minutes role and and then defending his actions by saying that she was the one being inappropriate with all her “stroking.”

Gross.

Latham then topped it all off by saying that the only reason veteran journalist Laurie Oakes had spoken out on his behaviour, was because he had revealed Oakes’ nickname “Jabba the Hut” in his book. According to Latham, this was a long-term grudge Oakes had held, pointing to a possible “screw loose.”

Irony much?

It’s worth remembering generally these pollies have just happened to be outed during the course of this campaign, social media probably assisting in this. And generally if you want to tweet your prejudice, knock yourself out, I don’t have to follow you. But these people aren’t just annonymous private citizens, notionally these are people who could be representing the broader community in Australia’s parliaments.

As Oakes said in reply to Latham’s bizarre and personal attack on him, we undoubtedly were very lucky to have “dodged a bullet” in not electing Latham as PM in the 2004 election.

It seems this election, we’ve now dodged a few more.