The otherwise clever Samantha Maiden and ALP preference decision-makers don't get it.
Gavan O'Connor, the sleazy rat who enjoyed the support of Socialist Left union bosses for his fifteen bludging years in the federal Parliament, has been put behind the Socialist Alliance party but ahead of the Liberal party and Family First.
The fact that O'Connor had the unmitigated chutzpah to complain shows just how low a human being he became leeching off the Geelong community for nearly two decades as a political staffer, factional hack and then time-serving Labor MP.
TOUGH CHOICE: TRAITOR OR PATRIOT?
Labor's preferences are of course irrelevant because they will never be distributed. So it's symbolic. Which meant that he ought to have been last. Presumably the order of the ticket and keeping the ALP How To Vote as simple as possible was also a factor but he ought to have been last anyway.
Is there anyone in the ALP who really believes that Family First or the Liberals would be worse than O'Connor, a man whose immorality oozes out of his rat-sores. O'Connor is clearly a much lower form of life than either of those two candidates, who loyally serve their cause and the people who fight for it.
Unlike those two patriots, O'Connor is unfit for public office and proved it over fifteen shameful years of neglect, deceit and indolence.
THE CARD
O'Connor has been too cowardly to indicate preferences on his How To Vote card, something which will considerably increase the informal vote. It's certainly surprising the Australian Electoral Commission allowed O'Connor to put out a HTV that would have that effect.
THE ERRORIST
O'Connor must be getting quite used to being put last recently, earning the opprobrium of many in the community, not just for his ratting but his recent scandalous remarks that equated brawls outside Geelong nightclubs with the horrors of terrorism in Derry.
O'Connor once made much of the fact that his opponent Labor candidate Richard Marles had maintained a list of ALP members with information scrawled next to their names to help make idle chit-chat with them in the hotly contested preselection contest.
He beat it up - with The Age's help - into a scandal about secret dossiers. It was bizarre, even for them, as any salesperson would tell you, it's smart to record any information you can get about many hundreds of prospects because remembering the footy teams, golf handicaps and hobbies, names of hundreds of pets, kids, spouses and their personal story is impossible unless you're Rain Man or Bill Shorten.
O'CONNOR'S SECRET DOSSIERS EXPOSED
Now, the truth about secret dossiers can be revealed.
Using Electrac software provided by the Labor Party, O'Connor has maintained secret dossiers - not available or disclosed to the public relying on that software. It's not unusual, many MP's do using database software of some kind. But given O'Connor's sweeping condemnation of databases, it's certainly amusing to see just how dependent O'Connor's office is on secret dossiers of his own.
After he ratted on the ALP, the OC understands that O'Connor's lawful entitlement to use the ALP's software terminated immediately.
His office are desperate to maintain access to their secret databases in order to pump out thousands of direct mail letters sent to Corio voters at taxpayers' expense.
An email obtained by the OC indicates (some details obscured to protect the innocent):
-----Original Message-----
From: "Peter Hynes" peter.hynes@aph.gov.au
To:
Cc:
Sent: 2/11/07 15:44
Subject: Enquiry
This is an enquiry e-mail from Peter Hynes (peter.hynes@aph.gov.au) My employer Gavan O'Connor MP is no longer an ALP member and no longer has ALP access to your software Electrac.
My query is
*. Can he purchase an individual licence for access to Electrac for electorate of Corio
Regards Peter Hynes
+++
The software company that developed Electrac for the ALP is understood to have told the rat where to get off. Their response is believed to rhyme with "no cheese for you, rat-boy".
For the rat O'Connor, letting go of his entitlements is clearly very painful. But not as painful as all the doors that will be slammed shut in his face after the election.
Game on.
