it’s always interesting to read Federal and State election results for polling booths in Queensland. Every election there are bound to be a few places in up-country Queensland where every vote is cast either for the LNP or for a combination of the LNP and whichever lunar right party is running. However there are no booths where everyone votes Labor or votes either Labor or Greens.

With regard to the former I’m not sure that’s strictly true at least for the last election, and with regard to the latter there are some remote booths that come close. Check out Injinoo in Leichardt.

Whitlam really was a breath of fresh air (notwithstanding my mate Michael and I squirting him in the crutch with water pistols during a Moratorium March down Rundle St – hey! as paid-up members of the Psychedelic Left, that’s what you did.)

However there are no booths where everyone votes Labor or votes either Labor or Greens.

True, Paul, but there used to be some central Queensland mining booths where the Labor Party and Communists would take 80-85% of the vote between them.

I assumed he had been selected as PM after an exhaustive search and that the paper was introducing him to the public.

Reality TV in 1963? Ahead of your time

In the early to mid-1960s my grandfather and his cohorts in the surrounding block of streets treated elections as an occasion for making sure that everyone got out and voted ALP. In the weeks before they would systematically canvass the area knocking on every door and securing commitments not only to vote ALP but to accompany them on their rounds and make donations. They would meet once a week comparing notes on who hadn’t yet been contacted and who needed a follow-up visit and so forth. Then they would take their lists and talk to the local traders insisting they put up ALP posters in the window.

Most elections, they fancied they had about 90% success in our little area of West Ryde and the booth figures seemed to support this. If more people than that were voting Liberal they were going elsewhere to do it.

After I moved to Brisbane in 1988, I was interested to discover that my then-partner’s older sister and brother-in-law, who owned a property in the Beaudesert area, were members of the National Party, despite not obviously having any political convictions of that kind. The explanation was that in those days, in certain parts of Queensland (of which Beaudesert and surrounds was apparently one), anybody who wasn’t a member of the National Party found it very difficult to do business, find employment or get invited to social events in their area

The funny thing was that the teachers in our school were always a pretty stroppy lot when it came to politics, since in a small farming town they were outnumbered 100-1 by conservatives, and the classroom was pretty much the only place they could get away with expressing their left-wing opinions.

Diversity … worthy thing … uniformity … not so worthy … this in not an exclusively left-wing opinion

I do recall the time when the worst thing about communism, according to conservatives, was said to be its inclination to turn everyone into grey indistinguishable zombies capable only of spouting the latest party-line …

Apparently the conservatives wanted that very thing. Perhaps they were jealous?