I am declaring today Australia Day. My day started at 4 am to get the Australia election post going, and it was so interesting that I stayed up to read it – if you missed it, check it out. This photo is the other Australia bookend, totally making my day.
I have been assured by our two Aussie BJ peeps who did the live blogging election thread that this is indeed a real photo of people voting. I’ll share it again later this week, with the article that’s the source of the photo, when we get an update on how things are playing out after the election.
It’s not enough that you guys get Democracy Sausages. Nope, you even vote in your swimsuits, and every one of you is more fit than I am and has more shapely legs and a better rear end than I have. I am making a note to remind myself to speak to the manager about that! :-)
Anyway, big thanks to Pete Downunder and Viva CrisVegas for all their time and effort in keeping us informed!
I am almost tempted to change my laptop wallpaper to this image because it makes me smile every time I look at it. I can’t explain why I love it so much; I just do. I will try to restrain myself from making this the sidebar image at some point this week.
Totally open thread.
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Jay
Budgie smugglers up to the task!
suilebhan
I, too, love this photo, and I agree with you about the shapely legs and derrières. Nothing wrong with legs and derrières for democracy, though I do share your need to talk to the manager about my less than shapely ones.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
Go ahead and do it. You’ve earned it!
Viva BrisVegas
In case anyone is wondering, no I was not dressed like this when I voted yesterday.
The photo is from the voting booth near Bondi Beach in Sydney.
Bondi Beach is sort of the closest thing we have to Venice Beach CA.
Kayla Rudbek
@Viva BrisVegas: there’s a YouTube/Facebook channel about some veterinarians in the Bondi Beach area, so I tend to think of them when I see Bondi Beach mentioned. It might be Bondi Vets? One of the vets is young, blond and handsome so it’s like watching a modern version of All Creatures Great and Small, set in modern Australia instead of 1940s Yorkshire.
SiubhanDuinne
There’s no “hereby.” You have to “hereby declare” it or it’s unofficial and invalid.
The Lodger
Does Viva CrisVegas have a sister named Luda?
neabinorb
It looks like they’re marking paper ballots in cardboard voting booths. How quaint.
Pete Downunder
@Kayla Rudbek:
Bondi Vet was real Aussie TV series staring Dr Chris Brown who despite being tall and absurdly good looking is, in fact, a real vet.
Pete Downunder
@neabinorb: That is exactly what is happening. After polls close those paper ballots are hand counted. Polls closed at 6 pm and we had the basic result by 8:30 pm. The ballots will be recounted by the officials and certified in the next few weeks but with a few close exceptions we know who won
Pete Downunder
Duplicate
Ruckus
I’ve had the luck to travel to a lot of the world, thank you USN. One of those places was Australia, And I enjoyed it. It is a beautiful country. Of course there are many beautiful countries and this is one of them.
Ken_L
While the thrashing handed out to the god-bothering reactionaries was a pleasure to witness, I would have preferred a minority Labor government that needed the support of Greens and/or sensible independents. Labor has generally been terrible on climate change and neither major party seems willing to confront the bleedin’ obvious fact that America is no longer a reliable friend and ally (it it ever was). We are locked into an insane deal called AUKUS which presumes the US will love us like a brother in the fucking 2050s and ’60s. THe US can’t even be loyal to Canada!
Ex-prime ministers Keating and Turnbull (one Labor, one Liberal) have been telling the government until they’re hoarse what a stupid deal it is, but Albo doesn’t seem inclined to move.
TS
Wondering when it was taken WG – the booths are very close together, they are much further apart since covid – and where I live they are white cardboard, not brown.
Paper ballots work in Australia because
1. the population is small cf US (also compared with most democracies). We have 18 million voters.
2. Polling officials are well paid & there are usually more than enough for counting first preferences quickly, which as Pete says above, gives a result for most members within a few hours. Close votes can take much longer to determine the result.
Pete Downunder
@Ken_L:
I agree, I would have been happier with a Labor minority for the reasons you state. Albo has caved to every evil special interest including the gambling industry, the fossil fuel industry, and he even gutted an environmental law in order to protect a polluting farmed salmon business that threatens an endangered species in Tasmania. Only consolation is that Dutton would have been far worse.
Omnes Omnibus
Do all the venomous things get to vote? Like with the GOP here.
Pete Downunder
@TS:
I don’t know about election day, but at the prepoll booth I worked the crammed as many stations together as they could because the long Senate ballot took a while to complete and they were trying to get as many people through as they could without having long queues. Queue is a five letter word where all but the first are silent.
Pete Downunder
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes, they are called the Liberal National Party and One Nation. The latter is basically an openly racist party started some years ago by a fish & chip shop owner named Pauline Hanson. We have enough racists to keep the party barely afloat.
frosty
I don’t have height, derrierre, or fitness in common with these voters but I wear their hats. Conner Hats, UPF 50, certified by ARPANSA, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency.
Should be good enough for my dermatologist!
Ken_L
Fun fact: I am registered for automatic postal voting because I live in a small Queensland town more than 30 km from the nearest polling booth. Referenda, local, state and federal election ballot papers get sent to me two weeks before election day, I fill them in and get a neighbor to witness my signature, pop them in the mail and that’s my voting done.
Nobody has ever tried to harvest my vote. It makes me feel worthless.
Pete Downunder
@Ken_L:
The AEC (Australian Electoral Commission) made an extraordinary effort to reach voters in some very remote places, and trust me even some nearby places are pretty remote. Some years ago work took me to a cattle ranch on the Queensland – Northern Territory border. It was about the size of Connecticut. The nearest anything, like a gas station or grocery store, was 230 km away. It was, to my eye, mostly desert but the owner was happy with the 6 blades of grass per acre he seemed to be growing.
Ken_L
@Pete Downunder: I live in Wide Bay, which is Redneck Central, but it has been a joy reading the howls of pain and disbelief on local community Facebook group pages.
Barbara
@Pete Downunder: Dr. Chris, the “pet vet” used to be on the CBS Saturday morning kids’ line up. My favorite was about the duck in the park who had gout from being fed too much unsuitable food by human park visitors. I loved that show.
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
We should check to make sure she didn’t use an autopen.
Baud
@Ruckus:
I visited Australia as a tourist. It was a wonderful country. Really enjoyed it.
Pete Downunder
@Baud:
And even better, survived the creepy crawlies
TS
@Pete Downunder:
Prepolls were much busier than expected – may have added extra booths to handle this where you were. Lots where I lived gave up on the pre-polls because of the queues which were mostly non-existent on Saturday (Moreton)
allium
@Pete Downunder: So what you’re saying is, it’s no Coober Pedy.
m.j.
Robes are a good thing. They’re comforting and in this case not just for you.
Pete Downunder
@allium:
I have been to Coober Pedy. That is one strange town. For those who don’t know it’s an opal mining town in the desert where summer temps exceed 50 C (125F) so the house are built into the hillsides. They essentially live underground.
zhena gogolia
Not a lot of privacy with those booths, though.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: I used to know some Australians when I was in grad school, and they were all such lovely people. So funny too.
Ramalama
I enjoyed the live thread on voting day in OZ. Thanks.
J.
I want to go back to Australia.
(Tagged along with my spouse when he was sent to Sydney/Neutral Bay on a work trip back at the end of 1995. One of my favorite trips ever. We stayed in Kirribilli, right across from the Sydney Opera House, and I explored Sydney while the spouse worked. Then we spent a few days in Coolum, in Queensland, and visited a rain forest. Awesome trip. Sadly, lost all of my pics in Hurricane Ian. Need to go back and make new memories.)
Matt McIrvin
@TS: In Massachusetts, we vote with paper ballots in a manner that looks much like this aside from the way the voters are dressed (the “booths” are typically cardboard partitions stood up on a folding table at a local school), but they’re optical-scan forms counted by machine. At this point, that’s how it works in a large fraction of the US
(Except that I’ve been going the mail-voting route lately, so I fill it out at home and drop an envelope either in the mail or in a drop box outside City Hall.)
VeniceRiley
@Pete Downunder: My wife and I watch Opal Hunters on TV. We also watch the gold miner version. They spend a LOT of time fixing old machinery and mega vehicles. It amused us mostly, but sometimes the finds are impressive. Then they spend the money on improving their kit to find more in a neverending cycle.
Same with Alaskan gold finders and other similar reality shows. The last one we watched being Spanish herring fishers down under. The trouble there was from sharks eating the fish as they reel them in.
lowtechcyclist
I couldn’t help but notice that three of the four swimsuit wearers in the voting photo have messages on their swimsuit butts. Is this a new thing? I haven’t noticed anything like this before, either on the beach on Anna Maria Island in Florida, or on the Chesapeake Bay beaches where I live.
zhena gogolia
@Matt McIrvin: They don’t dress like that in Massachusetts?
zhena gogolia
Since the election, my routine is to bring in the NYT, avert my eyes, and throw out all but the arts and food sections. This morning I couldn’t help but notice that they have two whole Opinion sections devoted to Trump’s crimes against democracy. If I still bothered to write to them, I’d write: “Since it was clear last July that this is what he was planning to do, why couldn’t you have devoted some space to it then? Maybe just 50 articles on how old Biden is would have sufficed instead of 120.”
prostratedragon
Heard on the internet:
zhena gogolia
@zhena gogolia: And the cover on the magazine (one of the few sections I save, because puzzles) manages to be sexist, ageist, and disgusting all at once. They are really such a bad newspaper now.
WTFGhost
I refuse to ask anyone with “girl” in her name about “Democracy Sausages” because it sounds very much like a bad joke with a bum punchline for the one who asks it, but, I’ve always felt that you had wonderfully shapely legs and a rear end that doesn’t bear thinking about, in case the bear turns out to be of the ursine nature, and quite cranky with one’s thoughts.
The key is to use the medium. For example, John Cole writes in much the same way as one might imagine a 4’8″ woman who stands as if 6’8″, with perky breasts and wearing tight shapewear so he doesn’t keep getting the kind of comment about his ass that requires him to physically damage the commentor, assuming said woman had the same life, experiences, and, well, genetics of John Cole, which means she’d probably be “he”, and a big guy, with no perkiness, much less tittiness.
But that’s the point! Or maybe it’s not.
Dorothy A. Winsor
The Dept of Ed has terminated a grant to my DIL’s school district. Here’s what her district says:
Dorothy A. Winsor
Re the pic up top: the old guy in the hat is wearing a puffy vest. Either he’s too warm or the swim suit wearers are too cold
catclub
@neabinorb:
If you have enough polling locations, then counting paper ballots by hand and then reporting up the chain is wonderfully parallel processing.
And don’t have a kajillion items on the ballots.
catclub
@J.:
 
The impression I got from my brother’s long term work stays was: They had an outdoor 50m public swimming pool nearby. wow.
WaterGirl
@WTFGhost: My two sisters got the shapely legs, dammit! They felt it balanced out because I got the boobs, as they used to say, plus I didn’t have to get braces or wear glasses like they did.
chemiclord
I’ve felt compelled to do no small amount of reminding my mutuals in Canada and Australia that their respective countries had been playing footsie with the far right as late as a handful of months ago, and that the only thing that changed their fortunes was first hand seeing the leopards eating faces in the United States.
No country is immune to the siren’s song that conservatives use, and trying to hand wave it away as just “those stupid Americans” is what allows this reactionary line of thought a lifeline.
WaterGirl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I assumed he came from a workplace where they keep it really cold, or he just runs “cold” like some people seem to do after medical treatments.
They Call Me Noni
@lowtechcyclist: I noticed that too. Paid advertising?
chemiclord
The point is that it wasn’t “messaging” that spared Canada or Australia. It wasn’t “clever politics” or strategy. It wasn’t “veering left” or “veering right.” Just like I genuinely don’t think there’s any particular strategy that Starmer and Labour over in the UK could do that would have blunted Reform’s blitz through their local elections.
The only thing that helped the first two countries, and will likely doom the third, was seeing Trumpism in full effect. Canada and Australia said “Oh, hell no.” The UK said, “Fuck yeah, give us that.”
When a country looks at what is happening in the United States, and says, “Ya know, I like how that looks, tell us more Mr. Farage!” I am extremely dubious that a “more progressive economic policy” is going to do much more than fuck all to stem the tide.
WaterGirl
@They Call Me Noni: @lowtechcyclist:
Huh. I assumed that was added to the photograph itself.
MinuteMan
Funny contrast between the swimsuit folks and the guy in the down vest.
Gin & Tonic
@They Call Me Noni: The polling place is at a surf lifesaving club. These people take “going to the beach” very very seriously. I assume “Nets Out Now” is a message related to that.
rikyrah
This picture rocks 👏🏾👏🏾😋
Congratulations Australia 👏🏾
You understood the assignment 🇦🇺
trollhattan
“Somebody spotted a salty at the beach so I said well, why not go vote then pick up some beeahs?”
JoeyJoeJoe
@Pete Downunder: on season two of the TV show The Amazing Race, teams visited Coober Pedy. One of the things teams were doing doing was playing golf in the 130 or so weather (at least they said it felt like it). That was the first I had heard of the place. This was 2001 or 2002.
dnfree
@zhena gogolia: Not in November.
Mai Naem mobile
You’ve got four people in swimsuits but one person needs a jacket? Must be ill or severely anemic I guess.
Matt McIrvin
@chemiclord: Even in the United States, I believe the only thing that EVER keeps the US population as a whole from voting for right-wing horror people is living through a disaster that they directly caused, and it has to be very, very recent because, as I said, we have short memories. Everyone always blames Democratic strategy for a loss but I doubt that much that Democrats do really has anything to do with voter behavior. Most Americans basically want to vote for monsters but sometimes the results are too terrible to swallow.
But we may have fucked it up for good this time because we eliminated the conditions that will allow us to ever vote them out again.
WaterGirl
@Matt McIrvin: None of the BJ peeps vote Dem because we have short memories.
You are talking about 1/3 of the population as if everyone is like that .
Gloria DryGarden
@Kayla Rudbek: oh, I’ve watched him. He’s so caring and thorough in his vet care and yet so utterly hot, stunningly gorgeous..
Whomever
@catclub: Australia has an absurd number of public pools, and they are all 50m Olympic style with diving pools. I think I had about 10 within 30 minutes of me when I was growing up