Let's keep it marginal

They were running neck and neck into the final straight, but Janelle Saffin has taken her foot off the brake and given the ALP’s election machine full throttle in the last week of the campaign. The past week has seen about half the cabinet shuffling through Page, with a sprinkling of policy announcements and election promises all designed to keep our marginal rural seat in the Julia Gillard’s still blood stained handsOn Friday it was environment minister Peter Garrett, on Saturday the PM came up with climate change minister Penny Wong and agriculture minister Tony Burke. On Monday education minister Simon Crean was at SCU, while infrastructure minister Anthony Albanese was at the other end of the electorate in Grafton. On Tuesday it was resources minister Martin Ferguson.

To be fair, Janelle is playing with a bigger deck of cards that her Nationals opponent Kevin Hogan, but he did manage to get both Barnaby Joyce and Warren Truss back for their second visits this week.

Gillard arrived with the usual posse of national media snappers and scribes in tow for her announcement about farmers being able to earn and trade carbon credits. Obviously it was aimed at a much wider audience than just our little patch of the carbon-sequestered earth, but there was little prior warning and it caught most of the local media off guard. Echo editor Rudi Maxwell got a text message saying ‘Please call. Julia here’ on Saturday morning at 11.20 and promptly ignored it, because she doesn’t know anybody called Julia. But we diligently trotted out to see what goodies the other cabinet ministers and their opposition counterparts were offering.

And although Janelle has won the race to get the most prominent pollies to Page during the election campaign (9 to 5), the real prize will be decided on Saturday night.

Whatever the result, lets hope it’s a close one because in our hopelessly flawed two-party system, living in a marginal seat is the best hope we have of keeping the bastards accountable and to get a decent share of the finite resources that are divvied up from Canberra.