Eden-Monaro Decides: Extract from Campaign Launch Address

Hello readership,

As many of you know, there is a good chance that, on behalf of the United Australia Party, I will take back the bellweather seat of Eden Monaro in the upcoming Federal election. Last night was an important step towards that goal – with a glittery and glamorous bang my campaign was officially launched at the Nelligen petrol station and broadcast live around the nation.

Many of you would already have heard the reportage of this momentous event on the wireless news services, so I will keep this posting brief. Set out below is an extract from my keynote address, highlighting a key policy of mine for this election ‘Real Action on recognising Queanbeyan as the beating political and economic heart of the nation’:

“…but enough now (for the time being) on the many, many similarities between sitting member for Eden Monaro Mike Kelly and Chairman Mao. It is probably now an appropriate time to point out the striking parallels between myself and the founding father of Eden-Monaro, the great Sir Austin Chapman. Like me, Sir Austin was born in the flamboyantly named hamlet of Bong Bong near Bowral and later became an accomplished saddler. It is a little known fact, and one that I do not widely publicise, that I regularly moonlight as the saddler for all Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s racing operations and am highly regarded for my ornate yet surprisingly comfortable Jump Saddles. Obviously both Sir Austin and I are also both recipients of the KCMG.

While our views on the overall benefits of federation diverge, a powerful convergence of Sir Austin’s and my political viewpoints is our passionately shared belief that the national capital should be as near to the Molonglo River as possible – long considered the gateway to the empire. However, unlike Sir Austin, I have never accepted the choice of Canberra as the national capital but rather continue to believe that nearby Queanbeyan, the de facto capital of both Eden-Monaro and Australia in anyone’s language, should be accorded that honour more formally. Queanbeyan has, in my view, everything needed to be the national capital: access to the crucial trade routes of the Molonglo, Queanbeyan and Murrumbidgee Rivers, fantastic cultural institutions: such as the Royal Hotel and Riverside Plaza as well as any number of celebrity residents including David and Terrence Campese, Joe Janiak and my life-long friend and drama pupil George Lazenby.

It is against that background that tonight I announce the third prong in my Eden-Monaro election promise trident. The first two prongs of our election campaign you know well: they are our widely discussed policies of ‘Real Action on bringing the 2042 Winter Olympics to Mount Selwyn’ and ‘Real Action on restocking the dwindling population of that most elegant of piscatorial delicacies, European Carp, in the waters in and around Eden-Monaro’. The third prong of our campaign, and no doubt the clincher for the various fence-sitting ‘undecideds’ in this electorate and the rest of the nation is thus: to have Queanbeyan installed as Australia’s capital city by no later than November 2010. The United Australia Party represents real action on recognising Queanbeyan as the beating political and economic heart of the nation.”