He has done a lot of good for Australia (responsible economic manager they say), but also a lot of bad. By slavishly toeing America’s line, the international bad image has also rubbed off on us here (although Aussie pride has risen, as much if not more, due to prowess on the global sports fields as Howard’s revisioning of history). He probably did more harm than good for his own the Liberal Party by not handing leadership to the next generation (Peter Costello etal) much sooner. Australia is now in an interesting situation with both federal and state levels of government monopolized by Labor. With the Greens likely to hold the balance of power in the Senate, we might witness a significant ‘correction’ of Howard’s social and environmental agenda long overdue (unless Kevin Rudd is merely a younger Howard as many suggested and Australians have just voted for more of the same)!

Lessons for Thailand? Surely there are many – notably related to corruption (internally lack-off – althrough externally a bit more problematic). If you need to ‘buy votes’, buy them via policies and pork-barrelling (this is catching on already though post-TRT). Of course, as Srithanonchai has noted there are significant structural limits. Most notably is ‘conflict’, as we all know, between the the rural poor who has the votes and the urban middle-classes who provides most of the country’s tax revenues… Actually Australia has something slightly comparable with the rural and suburban ‘mortgage belts’ voting Liberal in the past elections (that I followed)…

Even on such ordinary routine matters as how to carry out a bloodless military coup without spilling a cup of coffee, we have Thai generals aplenty only willing to oblige.

But Republican is already crying a river he gets hysterically incoherent on such moments I have to take my leave hastily before I puke.

BTW who is Kevin Rudd? Never heard of the guy until he won.

That was an utterly ridiculous and naive post by Andrew Walker. I know AW has spent a fair bit of time in Thailand so perhaps the kindest interpretation of this silliness is that he was completely shitfaced when he stuck that graphic up at 1.01am.

The “progressive” political science academics in Thaiand would condemn this as an “electocracy”, or “majority” democracy. Don’t you know that elections are just another way in which the “state” and “capital” in cahoots with “global capital” exploit “the people”? Because you can’t have elections without those terrible, evil people: politicians! Ughhhhhhhh……

And anyway, the people don’t have enough education to vote sensibly. They just give their votes to anyone who might improve their lives. How selfish.

What the academics, their media lackeys, the NGOs and their royalist backers behind the scenes want is to lead a courageous “people’s movement” to fight the “state” and “capital” in order to protect the rights of the “community”.

Well, I guess on the 24th of December you will have a post called ‘How to say no to military coup’ (that might be premature, but let’s hope not).