At the moment, Channel 7 says “still too early to call”, but the ABC is declaring a Gallop victory, and it looks to me like they’re right. Incumbent’s advantage stikes again.

In my district, Fran Logan is trouncing everyone else. Super-safe seats can be so boring sometimes … oh wait, make that all the time.

There’s not much TV coverage of the far more interesting matter of the referendum, but the very early results on the WAEC site say that it’s looking good for the no/no case. Perhaps the newspaper polls that reported a big swing from yes/yes opinions to no/no were right after all. Even I have to admit to having been swayed by advertising (and, alas, a bit of WA parochial sentiment) into voting yes/no.

Meanwhile, as cool as the ABC is, I have to say that seeing Kerry O’Brien host a program about WA is really weird, though it’s funny when he mis-pronounces names like Capel and Cheryl Edwardes (heh …). Reminds me of all the trouble that Easterners have reading out donations during 7’s Telethon.

P.S. Ricky, what are you doing randomly commenting on my friend’s blog? Crazy …

P.P.S. In case you were wondering, Host Day last Thursday was awesome. I ran into lots of cool peeps (including Kat and other-Cameron), and my group of first-years are all really cool as well. I even got thanked for not being as sucky as one of my mentees had been expecting. Woohoo!

I’d been thinking lately that my local MP, Fran Logan, hasn’t done much for the people of Cockburn over the last four years. He certainly hasn’t made the impact of good ol’ Norm, who retired at the last election. Yesterday’s West Australian confirms that my MP is just the most convenient bloke that the party room could plonk into a newly-vacated safe seat — he lives in Swanbourne, 30km from us peasant folk. I guess that’s what you get when you live in Labor heartland.

Much more interesting than the election itself, though, is the emergent slanging match between our two main newspapers. First the West Australian accuses the Sunday Times of making up extravagant figures for the cost of Colin Barnett’s canal, apparently in return for the Government granting them the coupon scheme for Gallop’s free Royal Show tickets last year. Now the journo who made the $10 billion claim reckons the Labor Party was spot-on in alleging The West of bias, pointing out that they’ve published 10 anti-Labor front pages during the campaign, but none pro-Labor. And today’s editorial says that Gallop deserves another term.

So we have an independent paper backing the Liberals wholeheartedly, and a Murdoch-owned paper (that often pretends it’s a Murdoch tabloid) gunning for Labor. Strange times, indeed.

So I have just been bored out of my skull by watching Seven’s WA government leaders’ debate. I think I can fairly confidently say that not one word spoken by the pollies in that hour was not already written somewhere in a party press release. Except perhaps for Geoff Gallop’s admission to taking a puff of cannabis and being a major nerd.

Speaking of Gallop, I reckon he was the clear winner, though only because he spoke, dressed, and avoided questions in the true style of a highly seasoned politician. Barnett, meanwhile, needs to get his aides to teach him some TV skills.

I was amused by Barnett’s concern for the health of Cockburn Sound when talking about Labor’s desalination plant, what with his party having been the one that screwed it up in the first place (Jervoise Bay project, anyone?). Also entertaining was when he fumbled over the cost of his water canal to the Kimberly … was that two million dollars? Two billion? Is there a difference?

Barnett was impressive, though, at ripping into Gallop on the power issue. My money has to be on metro electricity supply as the win-or-lose issue in this election, and the Libs have definitely taken a pretty good shot at it.