He knows, and everyone knows he knows, that his and Mike Kelly’s preferences will never be looked at, and won’t matter a jot.

On election night on the first count the booth officials place all the number one votes for the candidates below a card with their name on it, and when all the ballot papers have been apportioned they will count each candidate’s vote.

The next move is to distribute the preferences of the candidate with the lowest score, then the next lowest until all the other candidates’ preferences have been added to the Liberal (Peter Hendy) or the Labor (Mike Kelly) piles.

Those piles are then counted and what you have it the two-party preferred numbers.

Even if Mike Kelly has given the Greens candidate, Tamara Ryan, his second preference it doesn’t matter.

Tamara Ryan’s preferences do matter, and I believe she has numbered Mike Kelly fourth on the “how-to- vote”.

Public debate about the failed, unjust, elitist “trickle down” economics is timely.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, his ministers, MPs and the right wing media are putting every effort into “selling” the Coalition’s “trickle down” economic plan as good for “jobs and growth” and good for “growing the pie”. But whose job, whose growth and whose pie?

Injustice underscores the Coalition’s elitist agenda by prioritising a $50billion corporate tax cut and hoodwinking the public that corporate profits will “trickle down” through the economy.

If “trickle down” works why, over the term of the Abbott/Turnbull government, are wages of middle class/working class people stagnant and living standards declining by 3.5%? Why also should corporations get a tax cut when many of them pay not tax in Australia already?

In Eden-Monaro after three years of the Abbott/Turnbull government, over 17,000 public service jobs have been lost and plans to privatise Medicare with no commitment to needs-based Gonski funding.

Nationally, domestic violence front line services have been cut by millions of dollars.

Suicide rates, particularly in regional areas, have risen due to precarious job insecurity, working rates and conditions. Prof Patrick McGorry says that under the Abbott Turnbull government mental health funding “has gone backwards”.

Of course there is a limit to government funding. But governments have choices. 

Philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky puts it well – “trickle down economics socialises costs and privatises profits”.

The Coalition’s elitist “trickle down” agenda to socialise costs to the public and privatise profits to the private sector is unjust, unsustainable and fails most Australians; leaving more and more people excluded and despairing.

Cried Shorty Bill “this here’s our plan, 

“Fast comes the fatal hour.

“We’ll bribe the bastards to a man

“And spend our way to power.”

“We’ll tempt each Harry, Dick and Tom

“Until we know we’ve got ‘em.” 

And where’s the money coming from?

This pit without a bottom!

But Billy, we’ll be mired in debt

Up to our necks be bathed!

“Well mate, who makes an omelette

“And leaves the egg unscathed?”

“To win this game it’s true we might,

“Just break the bloody nation.

“Leave others then to put things right

“Another generation!”

Now, as for economics Bill,

It’s clear you just don’t pass.  

Nor ever will when you can’t tell

Your elbow from your arse!