Greens MPs

On Monday, Waleed Aly had a superb opinion piece in the SMH which sadly went largely unnoticed. In the piece he argued persuasively that the biggest long-term impacts of major economic crises are the changes to the socio-political terrain that they tend to trigger.

The prime example, of course, is the dramatic shift towards fascism and other forms of xenophobic politics triggered by the Great Depression, not only in Europe but across the globe.

Aly's great fear is that the current economic crisis could well lead to a new xenophobic politics. This is a fear which rang a deep chord within me, as one whose political views were shaped significantly by a Holocaust survivor grandfather.

I'd like to introduce you to our new Greens MP in Queensland - Ronan Lee, the Member for Indooroopilly.

Ronan became Queensland's first Greens MP hours ago when he resigned from the Labor Party, and joined the Queensland Greens.

Ronan has joined the Greens because he feels, as I do, that so much more can be achieved for a greener way of life in Queensland.

We're excited about the launch of a new website - OpenAustralia.

New Matilda published this piece today under the title: 'Be wary, we're in safe hands'.

According to Steve Biddulph, we will be within two electoral cycles, thanks to the twin issues of climate change and peak oil.

The question is, will we live up to the potential?

Can we do it?

With the Senate numbers still to be finalised - and maybe a while off - we do have one milestone we can confirm: achieving the million votes mark in the Senate.

So here we are. It's taken me this long to get through the firewall here and start blogging, but here we go...

You'll have seen the exit polls by now, I imagine. And the numbers are starting to go up on the big board. Not that that matters, anymore, of course, in our online world.

I've been told that we're over 20% in Sydney, Melbourne, Richmond and many more.

So, election day is here at last.

After a great, long campaign, now it's fingernail biting time...
I spent the morning at a rather conservative booth in Canberra. Good to see lots of people coming straight up to us asking for the Greens how-to-vote, and crossing their fingers at us on the way back out again.

Nothing more can be done, really. Just wait and see.

At the 2004 election, some 69,000 Australians voted overseas. That's almost an entire extra electorate voting outside the country.