ELECTION 2013: HOW TO VOTE CARD

Voting is really important. Check carefully to make sure this is a real how-to-vote card. How can I make sure ? Firstly, there should be an enormous amount of confusing and apparently conflicting information. If the item you are holding does not fit this description, it may be a membership application for Costco, or a library card. If it has a picture of a sepia-toned girl with no knickers then it is a naughty French postcard, and if it has a tasteful painting of flowers then it is a birthday card from my mother and I'd like to know what the hell you're doing with it when mine was a day late. You bastard. Right. Back to the three-ring circus. It is useful to remember that democracy is a deeply-flawed concept invented by a bunch of unemployed philosophers wandering around in frocks. I don't want to upset you, I'm just saying.

Now. Voting is not as easy as people think. You have to pay attention. This election campaign has been going on since roughly the time of the Industrial Revolution and we're all a little fatigued. We keep seeing the same faces on the front page day after day. Do Not Be Fooled. These people are not running for office. They are people from football clubs who have been accused of giving their players drugs with unpronounceable names. You cannot vote for them. You cannot even vote for James Hird's hair ( for information about whose hair you may vote for, see below). Do not waste your valuable vote by trying to elect people who are not running for office. Other people who are not running in this particular election are Justin Bieber, Winston Churchill, and that really cute girl who used to be on "Cheers" you know the one whose name you can't remember but she put on a lot of weight.

Can we be brutally frank here. You know it all boils down to voting for the bastard, or voting for the other bastard. Or the really nice and fantastic people who aren't going to win. You just have to make sure you actually correctly perform the act of voting. Okay, you ask, how do I do that ?

It involves a certain amount of furrowing of the brow, scratching the head, and trying to remember what that guy from the Reserve Bank said about interest rates. Then put a number in the little square.

REMEMBER: Cutting your wrists and bleeding over the ballot paper, while perfectly understandable, is not voting. Neither is standing in the booth and screaming loudly in Italian that you are in the seventh circle of hell. And of course waving your penis about and calling it a magic wand is not voting either. Apparently it's just a campaign tactic.

Special stuff to remember this election:

                                                                    

You can if you wish direct lower house preferences to Senator Scott Ludlam's hair, while at the same time voting for Scott himself to retain his Senate seat. This powerful bond between man and hair, Upper and Lower House stands to revolutionise Australian politics as we know it. We live in exciting times.

Finally, a special warning about ninnies and cretins:

  This is Toadsquash Thump, the Nazi Existential Chicken Party Senate candidate for Western Australia. The Wikileaks Party have directed their preferences to this man. And in other electorates, Wikileaks Party preferences have gone to a rock, a smallish penis belonging to an unemployed pastry worker in Albury, and a McDonald's wrapper in a storm water drain in Parramatta . They have done this to fuck with the system, man. To show the Man. That'll work.