Australian elections are not what they used to be. The policy debates have been reduced to ten-second audio grabs. The big public rallies have been replaced with pre-packaged and scripted set-piece television events. According to the majority of the contributors to this account of the 2004 election, the passions that Australian voters once carried to the polling booth have been swapped for something much more prosaic. At the last election, our vote was apparently determined largely by interest rates and by mortgage costs. It seems that voters are now less animated by ‘It’s Time’ and more by ‘It’s Mine’.
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