Assange leads offbeat race to Australian polls

From WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange to a larger-than-life billionaire who is re- building the Titanic, the Australian election boasts a cast of unlikely candidates who are shaking up the political scene.

• MADELEINE COOREY

When Australians go to the polls tomor- row, a mandatory exercise for all adults, they will have 1 717 candidates from more than 50 parties to choose from.

They include the usual sprinkling of former sports stars, far-right fringe groups and everything from the Animal Justice Party to the Smokers’ Rights Party and The No Carbon Tax Climate Sceptics Party.

From Ecuador’s embassy in London, the Australian-born Assange leads a party that hopes to bring “transparency, account- ability and justice” and potentially become a global movement.

Assange, who has been living inside the embassy since June 2012 as he fights extradition from Britain to Sweden, has been unable to campaign Down Under but has got into the spirit with a spoof video.

Sporting a blond mullet wig – short on top but long in the back – and with Australian rock star John Farnham’s 1986 hit ‘You’re The Voice’ playing, Assange sings of making things “leak so we can get much bolder”.

Playing on deep dissatisfaction with the major players – the ruling centre-left Labor Party led by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd

and the conservative opposition Liberal/ National coalition headed by Tony Abbott – new parties have emerged to take their share of the vote.

“They are so boring those guys,” said Clive Palmer, the flamboyant business- man best known for his project to rebuild the ill-fated luxury liner the Titanic. He is standing for a seat in the lower house of parliament.

“You’ve got Kevin Rudd that is more concerned about his hair than the benefit of the Australian people and Tony ‘Rabbit’ who just doesn’t want to talk at all,” he said, using his nickname for opposition leader Abbott, the election frontrunner.

Then there’s Australia’s Hemp Party, which formally launched its election cam- paign on Monday with a call for cannabis to be legalised for personal and medical use, just as it is now for industrial purposes.

The party is fielding 12 Senate candidates from six states.

Another renegade is Bob Katter, a 10-gal- lon-hat-wearing rancher from far north Queensland who has been in parliament for more than a decade as an independent, but who formed his own party in 2011.

Pauline Hanson, founder of the anti- immigration One Nation party who rose to prominence in the 1990s, has also thrown herself back in the ring, saying Australians deserve better than “selfish, dysfunctional, egotistical political parties”.

– Nampa-AFP

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