I was at the tally room on election night, in time to hear Lawrence Springborg’s concession speech and see Anna Bligh claim victory as the first woman to be elected as a State Premier. Not that I’m an election tragic, but we were having a farewell dinner for a friend at Southbank, and the Convention Centre was only short walk away, so we went on to take a look. The tally room itself was a little disappointing as the old days of a gigantic board with manually adjusted vote counts for every seat are gone (or maybe only ever happened at the Federal level). Instead we got a big screen with regularly updated results including (unofficial, I assume) projections of the preference distribution: more informative, but not much different to what we could have got at home.

The result was a much bigger majority for Labor than appeared likely, even though the two-party preferred vote (to the extent that this concept is meaningful when a lot of independent candidates are actually elected) was quite close. One possible interpetation was a highly effective marginal seats strategy, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Given the government’s vulnerabilities and what I thought was a more professional campaign from the Opposition, the result gives some support to the idea that Labor has become the natural party of government in most Australian states. Nevertheless, no party is guaranteed of office, and hopefully a stronger opposition will keep the Bligh government on its toes a bit more than in the past.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner movies

• The Last of the Mohicans psp

• The Hunting Party buy Schizopolis

After a fairly somnolent campaign, the LNP is going into tomorrow’s Queensland state election with a narrow lead in the polls. I haven’t paid much attention, since the capacity of state governments to make a difference, always limited, has been reduced further by the financial crisis. If I could choose an outcome it would probably be a minority Labor government, relying on a Green independent or two for its majority. As regards a change of government, it’s always beneficial to have alternation of power in a democracy. I’m not at all impressed by the apparent quality of the alternative government, but it’s more convincing as a united party than as the chaotic rabble that went under the name “Coalition”. The Bligh government has some reasonably strong performers (Bligh herself and Paul Lucas for example), but there have been plenty of duds or worse. And the involvement of proven disasters like Mike Kaiser in the campaign was a big mistake.