Just to be clear here, I didn’t get it at the polling booths. I voted on the first day in the first hour that voting opened.
“Have you voted anywhere else before?” asked the guy crossing me off. Gee, I thought, I’d have had to have been quick, but I guess it’s like when they ask you at the airport if you’re planning a terrorist attack. I mean, I don’t know how many people they’ve caught like that but I guess it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Anyway, I picked up Covid somewhere and let me say I’ve felt better in my life. On the other hand, I can see how some people might be saying that locking down over something this mild was a massive over-reaction. Not the ones who died of course.
Which brings me to one of the great inconsistencies of some of the anti-Dan rhetoric we’ve all heard over the last few years. Apparently he was to blame for the 801 deaths which were a result of Covid leaking out of hotel quarantine, but locking down elsewhere wasn’t necessary because so what if a few people die. I found it hard to reconcile the idea that Covid needed the army – which we later learnt wouldn’t have been able to provide security – because it was so dangerous and needed to be contained but not for everyday citizens who should have been allowed to spread it because Freedom.
Whatever, Andrews has been re-elected and the media is talking about the swings against it as though the only thing that matters is the primary vote. Rather like saying Australia won the cricket test by 298 runs but their score in the first innings wasn’t as high as it was last time so they must be really, really concerned about that. As I wrote the other day, I have no idea if the opinion polls will prove correct but it seems as though some in the media are just ignoring them in order to feed a narrative that the election will be close. Yes, it’s always hard to work out exactly what will happen but if you’re just going to presume that the polls mean nothing it’s just as dangerous as presuming a single poll is 100% accurate.
There are all sorts of different factors at play in any election and it helps to create a single story around what happened such as this leader lost the left when he made all those homophobic and racist comments or that leader lost the educated vote with his policy to abolish universities. It’s far too hard to think that this person may have voted for the Liberals because he didn’t like people picking on some Liberals just because they’d been looking at inappropriate images, while the other person may have voted for Labor because he met the local member at the football and he bought him a drink. Similarly, I may have lost the female vote by talking about nothing but men in my examples there.
But the thing is that the narrative, while comforting for analysts, is rarely the actual thing that decides people’s vote. While protesters were complaining about Dictator Dan for trying to make them get vaccinated, many more people were complying and feeling relieved that they were vaccinated when they got Covid.
And getting back to my point about getting my first bout of Covid on Election Day. Yes, that’s thanks to the Premier because I’m sure that if it wasn’t for the lockdowns and the mask mandates and all the other measures then I’d have undoubtedly had Covid before now.
Like I said, everything is a matter of interpretation and all the reasons why people vote a certain way can’t be reduced to a simple narrative.
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