Wild cards I can see. Someone at The Age needs to be dosing on fewer films by Peckinpah and more British dramas about politics instead. Anyway, come August the Rudd government will need 7 out of the 8 people below to vote with them to ratify legislation in the Senate. (The Ghost of National Senator Barnaby Joyce is included because he has shown that he will cross the Senate’s floor to vote against the Coalition if he’s persuaded that that is the best course.)
The Age article would have been much better without all the romantic allegories to wooing and Lotharios etc. What Labor needs to gain votes for their legislation is hard-headed bargaining, not soppy seduction strategies, which eventually the writer gets down to laying out:
So how do you simultaneously court a group of environmentalists demanding action on climate change (among other things), a family-values man who wants petrol taxes and bank fees lowered (among other things), a former South Australian MP who wants ATMs banned in gaming venues and help for the Murray River in South Australia (among other things) and a former small-town-accountant-cum Nationals MP who wants the Government to take on the big supermarket chains (among other things)?
How indeed?
The SMH isn’t any better – it refers to the Greens+Xenophon+Fielding as the “Super Seven”.
(In the final section of this (long) article about the end of the Democrats in Federal Parliament)