willedoo

On the subject of voters no longer listening, it has a two part effect. On the one hand, they no longer trust or believe the incumbents and stop listening to the sales pitch. The other factor is that the only way the majors can dismantle the One Nation juggernaut is to point out the faults and weaknesses of ON. That's where the second part comes in; people stop listenening to that as well and basiclly couldn't care less about the party's faults if it means getting rid of the status quo.

Jerry gets it. What is happening with the swing to One Nation is a movement to burn down the house and start again. The problem for the incumbents is that at some point, people are so fed up that they just stop listening. The federal Labor government has long ago realised that this could hurt them, and not just the Coalition as they initially thought. The government is and will be trying to turn it around, but once people develop a deaf ear to them, the government is done. Maybe it's reached that point now, but if not, it's not far away.

Yes, it could be. I think some of those in denial are hoping the string of One Nation wins are just the result of a few isolated bogan electorates that didn't know what they were doing. They're hoping it will just all go away but I think it might keep repeating all over the country. The test of it will be the Victorian election. That's the state where One Nation would traditionally have the least success, so if they take a swag of seats there, you would think a few heads would finally pull out of the sand.

Among that parade of cars I saw a fairly ordinary old station wagon drive by with a few passengers and a heap of gear in the back. Still not sure whether they were meant to be part of it or just someone like the Griswolds who had taken a wrong turn and got caught up in it all.

I guess with the low initial cost of the bike, it would be an economical thing to mod one like that.

There's a lot of good low mileage second hand Royal Enfields on the market for very cheap prices. The fact that the new price is relatively low has some bearing on their used prices. They usually don't have much on the clock for a couple of reasons. First one is that a lot of people that own them are only occasional riders, and a lot of old blokes get too old for riding and sell them, still with low k's. With second hand 650 Interceptors, it's often the case that someone has bought one and not far down the track realised they're not a speed machine, so they sell to upgrade to something a bit racier. You can pick up Interceptors with 4,000 k's on the clock for half the price of a new one.

I came across this video of a bunch of rat rods at the Beatersville Rod and Custom show in Kentucky. It shows a big variety of contraptions, even some Volkswagens.

All the attention will be on Victoria now. Just under three months to go for that one.

Premier Roger Cook would be glad there's another three years to go before the state election. His neighbouring electorate is a similar demographic, so the way I see his margin, even though it's 12% higher than what Labor had in Secret Harbour, if the same thing happened ie: losing half the vote to ON and ON also picking up a third of the Liberal vote, Cook would be rolled as well. Three years is a good buffer.

I haven't seen any updated figures, but the count as of this morning was 57-42 after preferences with 74.5% of the vote counted. Compared to the last election in 2025, One Nation increased their vote share by around 8,000 votes. 6,000 of those were taken from Labor and 2,000 from the Liberals. Labor's vote roughly halved compared to their last result. It's shown that One Nation can take very safe traditional Labor heartland seats. If you go back to Secret Harbour's former entities of Warnbro and Peel, it's been very safe Labor territoty since 1989.

It's a big call for a party to claim victory when the vote count is still below 50%. What they're basing their confidence on is the fairly large pre-poll booth that's yet to be counted fully. Exit polling at the pre-poll booth showed ON getting a better result than what they received today, so they're assuming the booth will go their way.

One Nation has claimed the seat, finished all the speeches and started the victory party, but Labor hasn't conceded defeat yet, saying it's too close to call. If confirmed, it will be the first seat ON has taken from Labor since the Queensland election in 1998.

A big swing to One Nation in the WA Secret Harbour by-election. ON is on around 35% primary vote, Labour has a 22% swing away from them to give 25% primary vote. It will come down to preferences, currently TPP giving ON 53%, Labor 47%. It will be a bit hard to predict with WA having optional preferential voting.

It's the big brother of the FJ ute we had when I was a kid learning to drive. I've never forgotton the squeaky steering wheel those FJ's had.

Nice old Studebaker. I like the current culture where unrestored or minimally restored cars are as popular as full restorations. It makes it a lot more financially accessable for more people. For too long the main goal was to restore back to as new condition, and that was a very labour intensive and expensive process. It's horses for courses and the full resto people get great satisfaction doing their thing, but it's also nice not to see the history rubbed off or painted away on a lot of these old vehicles. I like the lived in look.