A new PM

Well, ir has been an eventful couple of days for Australia. In a landslide victory, we have overthrown the sitting government and elected a new prime minister, Kevin Rudd. It has to be pretty big news if anything related to Australia makes front page of the NY Times. I watched the election coverage on TV saturday night. It was rather amusing. Voting is mandatory in Australia; if you don't do it, you're fined. To circumvent people with excuses like "I don't have time between 8am, and 6pm on Saturday to vote", you can vote at polling booths in the few days preceeding the election, or you can send in your ballot by mail. On the ballot, you number the candidates in order of your preference. If your first preference doesn't win a certain percentage of the votes, your second preference is counted, and so on. This has the very interesting consequence that a vote for a minor party doesn't detract from a major party's ability to win the election.
There was a gradation of silliness on the network channels in terms of election coverage. ABC, the national company, was the most serious; completely lacking such embellishments as cartwheeling cartoons of candidates as parliament seats were won or the 'tower of power': a projection of the number of seats won by each party onto the tallest building in Melbourne. The networks also vastly disagreed on the early outcomes of the election with one channel declaring Kevin Rudd the winner almost two hours before ABC finally caved.
Because Australia has such a relatively small population, the votes get counted very quickly. For many parliament seats, almost 100% of the votes were counted just 2 hours after the polls closed. It definitely made for much more exciting election coverage.
I'm off to a conference in Perth toward the end of this week and from that point onward life becomes really exciting for a while. First, seeing Perth will be amazing because it's a completely different side (literally) from Australia and I'm excited to present at my first conference. Only a few days after I get back, Becca arrives and we begin a several-week long adventure around Australia and New Zealand (since she convinced me to see NZ with her as well). I am sooooo excited, although from the looks of it the NZ part of the trip is much better planned than the Australian part. I think we will get on alright, though and have some awesome adventures on the great barrier reef and in the outback.