Brendan Nelson 2010 Election Merchandise

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Brendan10 for the win!

Election Results

Here is a shell script to pull the two party preferred vote from the AEC. The data gets updated live every 90 seconds during elections. It requires ncftp and unzip.

An example run using election data from the 2004 election:

kared@minoc:~/election$ ./fetchxml.sh
LNP 54.02
ALP 45.98

# License: MIT http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
# Author: Jared Kells
#
# Simple shell script to pull the latest election results
# from the AEC, configure SERVER to the aec's ftp server
# set TRANS as the transaction ID.

SERVER=mediafeedtest.aec.gov.au
TRANS=13232
FILENAME=`ncftpls ftp://${SERVER}/${TRANS}/Standard/Verbose \
| tail -n 5 \
| head -n 1`

#Clean UP
rm data.xml
rm data.zip
rm -rf xml
rm -rf schema

#Fetch the zip file
ncftpget -VC ftp://${SERVER}/${TRANS}/Standard/Verbose/${FILENAME} \
data.zip 2>&1 > /dev/null

#Unzip
unzip -o data.zip 2>&1 > /dev/null

#Fetch XML file
cp xml/aec-mediafeed-results-standard-verbose-${TRANS}.xml ./data.xml \
2>&1 > /dev/null

#Parse, I only have 32MB Ram so shell xml_grep fails 
cat data.xml | \
sed -n '/<\/Analysis/ p' | \
sed -n '/<\/National/ p' | \
sed -n '/<\/TwoPartyPreferred/ p' | \
awk '{FS="\""} /ShortCode=/ {printf "%s ", $4} /Votes/ { printf "%s\n", $2}'

When did the election campaign start?

Apparently it only started this week!

Politicians and their staff, when they travel on official business, have their fares and living expenses – their travel allowance, or “TA” – picked up by the taxpayer.

After an election is called, this pleasing arrangement is deemed to continue until the parties declare themselves to be in official campaign mode, by means of the ritualistic staging of a “campaign launch”
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/annabel-crabb/2007/11/09/1194329506213.html

The electoral rolls have been in “campaign mode” for weeks already meaning no one can update their details or enroll, locking many young voters out.

Sounds like they want to have it both ways.

Christian Voters

I heard an interesting thing on the radio this morning. Why do Christian voters in particular from pentecostal / charismatic churches support the most socially unjust parties? Just look democracy in the US, I hope we don’t go that way.

I think its about sex and abortion.

Its them that are sick. Obsessed with what people are doing in there bedrooms instead of social justice which is what it should be all about.

Man of Steel