Can you tell me who to vote for?

For the second ¹ time in my life, I am unsure how to fill out my lower house ballot sheet.
This time it's more difficult. I want to lay out what I am sure of, and then explain.

1. Green
2. Democrat
3. Assorted other greeny/social democraty micro parties
4. Single issue parties where they're right about the issue; i.e. excluding shooting/fishing etc
5. Independents (who cares what order, alphabetical let's say)
6. Labor or Liberal
7. National
8. Single issue parties where they're wrong about the issue i.e. shooting/fishing etc.
9. Socialists/Communists
10. Family first and other Christian groups
11. Racists, and Right wing conspiracy theorists 2

<sup>I always vote Greens first, Democrats second. I will continue this in the 2010 federal election with much more zest than previously. The acceptability gap between these and the major parties has widened significantly in the past 12 months (due to the intellectual implosion of Labor and Liberal, not because Bob Brown has starting making more sense).

The order difficulty in this case is in fact the only relevant one on the whole ballot. Should I vote Labor or Liberal?

Reasons to vote Liberal</sup>

• I am in the seat of Griffith. It is safe Labor anyway so to an extent the point is moot.
• I personally dislike my local member Kevin Rudd.
• His Liberal challenger is hot, in a Frau Goebbels sort of way. This reason is very minor, but has not gotten more so recently, while both parties have failed dismally on everything else.
• I want to send a message to Labour that I am not a "captured voter," that they can do enough to disgust me out of their camp altogether. The Hotelling law which underlies my whole dillemma may be disrupted by expectations of altruistic punishment. If ice cream sellers know that customers will walk the extra small distance to their competitor, out of frustration with the nearest duopolist's cynicism, they may site their stores more equitably.
• The Labor party is crewed by a bunch of populist opportunists who believe in almost nothing and regularly change sides in a debate as soon as the spin doctors judge it is expedient to do so. Before any interview, we always know exactly what they are going to say, they are not even really pitching to the audience of the interview, but to the people who watch Channel 7's pithy 30 second extract of the interview. They view voters with intellectual contempt which is doubly annoying since they themselves are not smart.

Reasons to Vote Labor

• Tony Abbot's Liberal party is further to the right than Gillard's Labor and I am left wing.
• Tony is a weirdo conservative Catholic and I am an atheist.
• If I vote Green first, and then Liberal, I may be viewed not as a protesting voter, but as a "light green." This may send Labor further to the right on social and economic questions.
• Labor did an OK job on the economic stimulus
• The Liberal party is crewed by a bunch of populist opportunists who believe in almost nothing and regularly change sides in a debate as soon as the spin doctors judge it is expedient to do so. Before any interview, we always know exactly what they are going to say, they are not even really pitching to the audience of the interview, but to the people who watch Channel 7's pithy 30 second extract of the interview. They view voters with intellectual contempt which is doubly annoying since they themselves are not smart.
  

<sup>Can you help me make up my mind internet?

1. The first was in my political youth when I was unsure whether the Socialist Alliance should receive priority over the Liberals or not. Going to a few SA meetings, doing a course on Soviet history and talking with them at political events helped me make up my mind then. As the great man said, "Clowns without power, Monsters with it."
2 who would be lynching black people in the street about an hour after the lights went out and the cops went away. The kind of people who exist only to remind us that humans are murderous, savage apes barely suppressed by social convention and the threat of retributive justice. I count One Nation as being the mildest of these, and the CEC somewhere in the middle."</sup>