Some green prudence. The Greens are becoming an increasingly savvy political party when it comes to campaigning. They are getting much better in the money raising department and now in Tasmania they have grasped the importance of being seen as the underdog.

This morning Helen Burnett, the number two on the party ticket for the seat of Denison in this month’s state poll, resisted the temptation to show excitement at the prospect she might actually end up as an MP. While an ABC report on an opinion poll showing the Tasmanian Green vote just a point less than Labor’s tried to suggest that she had been gagged by her party leader Nick McKim, Ms Burnett wisely stuck to the underdog script.

For his part, Mr Mckim similarly played the political straight bat. “We’re not going to get carried away”, he said,” – we need to keep working hard and keep putting out good policies.” Clearly he remembers that at the last election the polls showed the Greens poised to win two of the five seats in Denison and one in the other four only to be disappointed on election day itself.

Hoping my record will be broken. You win some and you lose some if you are involved in politics for long enough but there is one record on my CV that I will be happy enough to lose. Back in 1992 I went through the horror of helping Labor Premier Michael Field lose office with the lowest Labor vote in living memory.

rlfsrecordlow

This morning’s EMR poll published in the Hobart Mercury and the Oz this morning has The Liberals on 30%, Labor on 23%, the Greens 22%, others 2% with 23% undecided. I have distributed the undecideds to come up with the 2010 figure on the graph above and it is within a point of erasing my contribution from the record books.

This is one poll where I hope that the margin of error has worked in Labor’s favour and put the support too high!

Worth a read. An amoral political culture run by a governing class preoccupied with amassing power for itself is how the former anti-corruption commissioner Tony Fitzgerald sees us as being governed. Perhaps he uses slightly too broad a brush but the report in The Australian this morning of his views is well worth a read.

Anyone masochistic enough to tune in to Parliamentary Question Time would find it hard to disagree with this verdict:

“Political debate is often marked by spiteful, juvenile point-scoring and attempts to discredit each other, inevitably discrediting all participants.”

Defending his flock. Kevin Rudd is rather bravely using up a lot of his personal political capital in the way he is steadfastly taking the blame for the insulation policy mess-up. The Prime Minister has now clearly taken over the damage control on this issue which means to me that Peter Garrett is well and truly off the hook.