Labor First and Last.

Got up today to a rather chilly morning - dropped to -1C around these parts. Thankfully a bunch of folk around the late 1800's decided to keep trees here - you really appreciate the frost protection provided by towering gums at times like this. That soccer pitch I passed on the way to work, with its own personal metre-thick blanket of fog, might have fared a little better with a few trees around.

Even more chilling was diving into the ACTU campaign manual the Liberals are busy crowing about. Turns out, there are two marginal seats in Victoria they'll be campaigning heavily on. And I'm in one of them. La Trobe. 5.8%. A margin of 5,176 votes.

Translation: every vote counts. Despite my disdain for the ALP as they stand, in order to ensure the removal of the Howard government, I'm going to have to put them first in the lower house. Maybe it's unprincipled to put Labor first in the Rep's, and last in the Senate, and as much as I hate getting sucked into the lesser evil mentality, I don't see any other choice.

But it'll take some serious wooing for them to get out of last place in the upper house. The will to protest is strong.