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A Song for Australia

With apologies to all those who will be les misérables tomorrow, I give you… One Day More

RUDD:
One day more,
Another day, another destiny,
This never ending road to Calvary.
These men who seem to know my crime
Will surely come a second time,
One day more.

ABBOTT to ELECTORATE:
I did not live until today,
How can I live when we are parted?

RUDD:
One day more.

ABBOTT OR WOULD THIS WORK BETTER AS RUDD and ELECTORATE:
Tomorrow you’ll be worlds away,
And yet with you, my world has started.

GILLARD:
One more day all on my own.

ABBOTT CORRECTION RUDD YES STICKING WITH RUDD HERE and ELECTORATE:
Will we ever meet again?

GILLARD:
One more day with him not caring.

ABBOTT and ELECTORATE:
I was born to be with you!

GILLARD:
What a life I might have known…

ABBOTT and ELECTORATE:
And I swear I will be true!

GILLARD:
…But he never saw me there.

A FLOATING VOTER:
One more day before the storm
At the barricades of freedom
Shall I join my brothers there
When our ranks begin to form?
Do I stay or do I dare?

RUDD:
Will you take your place with me?

ALL:
The time is now!
The day is here!

RUDD:
One day more!

ABBOTT NO WAIT A MINUTE HE OUGHT TO BE LEADING THE REVOLUTION OH NEVER MIND I JUST CAN’T SEE RUDD AS JAVERT:
One more day till revolution,
We will nip it in the bud.
We’ll be ready for these schoolboys,
They will wet themselves with blood.

RUDD:
One day more!

KATTER, PALMER and OTHER BENEFICIARIES OF SECOND PREFERENCE VOTES IN THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE AUSTRALIAN ELECTORAL SYSTEM:
Watch ’em run amuck,
Catch ’em as they fall,
Never know your luck
When there’s a free for all,
Here a little dip
There a little touch,
Most of them are goners
So they won’t miss much.

VOTERS:
One day to a new beginning
Raise the flag of freedom high!
Every man will be a king
There’s a new world for the winning
Do you hear the people sing?

SOMEONE FROM A MINOR PARTY I’M HAVING TROUBLE FITTING INTO THIS ANALOGY:
My place is here,
I fight with you.

I’M LOSING TRACK OF THIS:
One day more!

THIS WOULD WORK BETTER AS RUDD AND THE ELECTORATE I THINK:
I did not live until today…
Tomorrow you’ll be worlds away
And yet with you my world has started

GILLARD:
One more day all on my own.

ABBOTT:
We will join these people’s heroes
We will follow where they go
We will learn their little secrets,
We will know the things they know.

RUDD:
One day more.

KATTER, PALMER, OTHERS ENDING WITH ER:
Watch ’em run amuck
Catch ’em as they fall
Never know your luck
When there’s a free for all

ABBOTT (I LOVE THIS BIT, GO JAVERT!):
One more day to revolution
We will nip it in the bud
We’ll be ready for these schoolboys

RUDD:
Tomorrow we’ll be far away.

RUDD and ABBOTT:
Tomorrow is the judgement day.

ALL:
Tomorrow we’ll discover
What our God in heaven has in store!
One more dawn
One more day
One day more!

UPDATE: I should have guessed I would not be the only one to think of it: Old Owl and 2dogs both pointed out in comments that “Bill Glasson, who is standing against Rudd in his seat of Griffith, has used this song in a video thanking his campaign volunteers.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Got it! I have finally settled on which character from Les Mis best represents Kevin Rudd. Gavroche. We are meant to find him loveable but he is an irritating little brat. He endlessly plays up his proletarian origins and faffs on about “what little people can do”. He denounces Inspector Javert and gets him sent off to be murdered by a People’s Court, setting the example for Children of the Revolution ever since. Then on the barricades, when the revolutionaries are offered the chance to leave, what does he do? He hams it up, sings his little song in a halting, childish treble, and basically dooms the lot of them. Go to the top of the class, little Gavroche! Or preferably go prancing out onto the top of the barricade – go on kid, you know you can’t resist an opportunity to show off – and get yourself slaughtered. Oh, you just did. Good show!

22 comments to A Song for Australia

  • Nick (nice-guy) Gray

    Well, it works for me, though the augeries are predicting a right-wing revolution. Those French know how to have a change-of-government party, don’t they!!! We’ve got boring history here, though some people keep trying to turn the Eureka Stockade into the Bastille.
    Natalie, you do a good line in parodies. Have you thought of doing a parody of Atlas Shrugged? Mine would be Atlas Shirked, where Atlas shirks his job, and the sky starts to fall in while he’s resting in the Bahamas, and he only returns to the job when capitalist engineers build a tower that can replace him forever, so he returns and forestalls the Enlightenment, and men go back to polytheism.

  • 2dogs

    Bill Glasson, who will be taking down Rudd in his own seat tomorrow, is already onto this:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2rTJc36mlU

  • Natalie Solent (Essex)

    Thanks, Nick, though it isn’t really a parody as I did not change the lyrics at all, just the names singing each part. I confess I have never read Atlas Shrugged. I know the plot by cultural osmosis.

  • Old Owl

    Bill Glasson, who is standing against Rudd in his seat of Griffith, has used this song in a video thanking his campaign volunteers. It can be seen at http://youtu.be/z2rTJc36mlU

  • Natalie Solent (Essex)

    So I’m not the first to think of it, Old Owl! I really must complain about the camerawork though – it panned away just at the wrong moment in the “Tackle Ruddy in the Nuddy” bit. UPDATED: Gosh, I see Bill Glasson’s One Day More parody is linked to at one remove by Tim Blair, my guru in all things Australian. I did think of it independently, honest!

    UPDATE: 2dogs, your comment was held up in moderation limbo but I see you pointed out Bill Glasson’s video as well. I’ve hat tipped you both in an update to the post and added a new bonus Mis-themed rant.

  • J.M. Heinrichs

    And then there is this effort

    Cheers

  • Laird

    That Bill Glasson video is the best campaign piece I can ever remember seeing. I’d vote for the man on that basis alone!

  • A cowardly citizen

    The reason why gun control exists.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMYNfQlf1H8

  • Laird

    No, that’s the reason the 2nd Amendment exists. As is this: http://youtu.be/29Mg6Gfh9Co

  • Mr Ed

    Leave it to Mozart and Shickanader, the finale of the Magic Flute, Sarastro the High Priest sings ’Die Strahlen der Sonne vertreiben die Nacht, Zernichtern der Heuchler erschliender Macht’

    ‘The Rays of the Sun banish the Night, Destroying the Swindler’s Crafty Might’ as the Queen of the Night and Monostatos, the villains, are destroyed. And then at 2’ 08” Mozart gives us a musical ‘Up Yours’ that needs no translation.

    http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oQuZZY1Qiag

  • Australian democracy is awesome (although I can’t really support the compulsory voting).

    Also, Antony Green is my hero.

    Shame about Australian politics.

  • Michael: the difference being?…

  • The process of the election is taken incredibly seriously, as are the precise numbers and the details of the (complex and statistically carefully designed) electoral system. There are barbecues and cake stalls at polling stations. The nerds come out in a big way to analyse the numbers. (Antony Green – the voting analyst for the ABC – is currently the champion nerd. He knows more about electoral and voting systems work than you would imagine anyone could possibly know, and when there aren’t any Australian elections on he likes to go to Europe and hang out at the Eurovision Song Contest with the people compiling the votes. (“The magnificent Eurovision database” – his words). Tonight is his big night.

    Once the actual politicians are involved, it gets dreary though.

  • The process of the election is taken incredibly seriously

    Hence the compulsory voting – or is it the other way around? Chickens and eggs?

    Once the actual politicians are involved, it gets dreary though.

    If only we could dispense with those and keep the process – especially the barbie and cake part…

  • Many of the election results are through, and this most astounding election result in Australia I have ever seen. The headline “Abbott defeated Rudd easily” is largely wrong. Abbott is going to find it almost impossible to govern, given the results coming through in the Senate. Everyone knew that Labor was going to lose and the conservative coalition was going to win and this has happened. Given that, this is as bad a result for Abbott as was possible – probably worse than his worst case scenarios.

    I will blog about this later.

  • The Greens appear to have lost a Senate seat in New South Wales to the Liberal Democratic party, who (unlike certain parties with similar names) are actually liberal. If so, this is very good news.

  • Nick (nice-guy) Gray

    Yes, the Liberal Democrats are a libertarian party, and they benefitted from being the first party on the very long Senate Ballot paper. That, and some voters thinking that the Liberal name must mean the conservative Liberal Party. Talkback radio has had many callers complaining about that, saying they were tricked into voting for them. I never knew there were so many people who didn’t bother to read names properly.
    Kevin Rudd has retained his own seat, and is claiming victory- the defeat wasn’t as bad as it would have been under Gillard, you see.

  • Mr Ed

    Nick, you might think that it was ‘dirty tricks’ with party hacks phoning in tomale baseless complaints and to start agitating again, but in the UK in 1994 a chap stood in a Euro MP election as a ‘Literal Democrat’ (against the UK’s third party the Liberal Democrats) and got 10,000 votes, which if they were subtracted from the Liberal Democrats vote, cost them a seat. Here is the victim. This led to a change n the law requiring political parties to register, a convenient pretext.

    http://www.politics.co.uk/reference/adrian-mark-sanders

    I think that on balance there are many people stupid/daft enough to be so misled, after all, many were dumb/vicious enough to vote Liberal Democrat in the first place.

  • The Wobbly Guy

    If this is not evidence against the general stupidity of the electorate and the universal franchise, I don’t know what is.

    C’mon, some people are truly too stupid to vote if they can be taken in by a simple change in spelling. Did they even bother to stay informed of the candidates contesting in their constituency?!?

  • Nick (nice-guy) Gray

    Dear Wobbles, the Senate vote is for the whole State, so it would be very hard to meet all the minor parties in a state-wide constituency.
    I agree, though, that they should have checked the handy how-to-vote pamphlets if they wanted to vote for a particular party.

  • The Wobbly Guy

    And despite all the hoohah, Kevin Rudd still beat Bill Glasson to win his own seat.

    What does that say about the voters? I know I know, Glasson got more primary votes, but when all is said and done, they deemed him not good enough to represent them.

  • Nick (nice-guy) Gray

    Wobbles, perhaps the electorate likes having Rudd in Parlaiment to keep giving the Labor Party indigestion?