VICTORIAN STATE ELECTION:

Can The Bug answer the question posed above by The Age columnist Shaun Carney a few days back with a simple, no-nonsense, one-word answer?

Yes, we can? Then the answer is No!

Not emphatic enough: How about…

No!

Now admittedly the washed up old hacks who write The Bug, sitting as they are in front of their Amstrad 286s and perched high above the mezzanine level of The Bug’s HQ in Brisbane, are a bloody long way away from the machinations of Spring Street politics in Melbourne, so how can we be so cocksure of our answer without the need to show any of you our cocks first?

Firstly, even from the tyranny of distance, we can see what a lightweight tour de farce Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy is as he leads – if leads is the right word – a Liberal Party rabble that is in even worse shape than its federal counterparts. Sad, but true.

Yep, things are not looking at all good just now for Guy and Co. Admin people are resigning over claims of illegal campaigning, fundo rapturists appear to have the balls of the state Libs in a vicelike grip – even more so than federally – and Guy appears incapable of conjouring up a policy that lasts a 24-hour news cycle.

Fair points, but how else do we know that Victorians are not sick of this bloke called Andrews just yet?

Two online bookmakers this morning – Sportsbet and TAB – have Andrews and Labor at $1.08 to win government on 26 November in their own right. Ah, don’t you just love a truly free market economy? Their odds for Guy, regardless of what his first name will be by polling day, being sworn in as Premier late next month are at $8 and $7.50 respectively.

Still, how about that $1.08, hey? The mad punters among the washed up old hacks at The Bug urge you to grab those odds before they tighten further with another Guy policy-plucked-from-his-arse gaffe.

Put $50,000 on #dictatordan and you’re going to win $4000, if our state school maths is right. Fruit for the sideboard, dear readers.

So, if we know all this and many of you in Bugland know all this and Shaun Carney knows all this, why on earth did he pen this intro: In the lead-up to November’s state election, many voters will be asking themselves a threshold question: am I so tired of Andrews – his face and his voice and his personality – that I want to vote for something else? In other words, after eight years of him as premier, am I sick of the bloke?

We ask simply: Why such a leading “threshold” question? Why one presumably designed to evoke responses from Victorians who believe that to be true? That after eight long years, Andrews sucks, performance wise, personality wise, physically wise.

Why? Why? Why?

Has The Bug ever mentioned before who chairs the organisation that owns The Age?

And with the name Peter Costello in your thoughts, is there anyone out there in Bugland who seriously believes that a masthead with Independent. Always. underneath it will shortly level up Carney’s piece with another columnist asking the question: Why haven’t the Liberals got their act together after eight years in the wilderness?

Anyone?

Did we give that enough emphasis?

ANYONE?

Finally, we note that another journalist at another Nine Entertainment Co. masthead appears to have already decided the winner of the Victorian state election.

The Sun-Herald‘s Lucy Cormack today wrote that if Labor wins next March’s NSW poll, the party would be eyeing “a mainland sweep to govern in every state and territory except Tasmania”.

Reading between the lines, it certainly sounds as if Cormack, in the absence of any clarification as to election timings, has already put Victoria in the Labor column for that to happen. And, really, who could blame her?

So there you have it, Buggers! Why not put a lazy $100,000 on Dan the Man! In these trying economic times and with soaring living costs, a guaranteed $8000 for doing fuck all is money for jam, surely?