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In this federal election, I am voting for Sam Byrne of the Greens in the House of Representatives seat of Grayndler.

In the Senate, for New South Wales, I am giving my first preference to Lee Rhiannon of the Greens in a below-the-line vote which I shall explain separately.

My preferences in both houses lean towards the Labor Party ahead of the Liberals.

Although the Murdoch empire is generally perceived as pursuing a pro-Liberal agenda in this election, this clearly evidences itself only in its loss-leading broadsheet "The Australian". As for the "Daily Telegraph", famously endorsed by Kristina Keneally as "the people's paper" a while back, there is only one over-riding agenda - to make money.

A continuation of my Twitter log of election comments, mostly but not all under the #ausvotes hashtag. Part one of this digest covered the period to Friday 30 July.

Friday, 30 July 2010:

Looks like the Liberal Democratic Party's website isn't quite launched yet. http://www.ldp.org.au/ #ausvotes
Friday, 30 July 2010 11:49:31 PM

It's nine days since I have written a proper blog post about the federal election. It's not that I haven't been paying attention - apart from my abject refusal to watch television (except for video-on-demand). It's just that there hasn't been enough for me to meaningfully comment about.

You know something? Here's some of the best places to go for bloggage about the 2010 federal election, moving forward. That'll stop the boats!

"With just over two weeks left, that’s 16 24-hour media cycles or, in less mathematical phrasing, an eternity."

- Bernard Keane, in a paywalled article for Crikey, 5.8.10

In what is surely the finest use of social media since William Shatner performed the tweets of Sarah Palin on late night television, the 85 year-old cartoon archive of the New Yorker magazine has been revitalised, drawings recaptioned with the dee

News yesterday of a makeover in Julia Gillard's election campaigning style surely contained a typographical error when it referred to "Real Julia". It brought back images, firstly of "Kiss of the Spider Woman" but also of "The Addams Family" (more so its motion picture sequel, "Addams Family Values").

That, in turn, takes us way back to July 2010, when the Australian Workers Union put out an unfunny and not particularly clever attack ad, but which suddenly takes on a whole new relevance:

If this link is broken by the time you read this, it's possibly that the Sunday Telegraph has withdrawn the article on legal advice.

The complete lists of candidates in all House of Representatives seats and Senate contests were released by the Australian Electoral Commission tonight.

Here are the people I will have to choose from, in order as they will appear on the respective ballots, and with hyperlinks to party and candidate pages where known. There are six candidates in Grayndler, while in the Senate there are a bewildering 84 candidates for New South Wales in what appears to be 33 groups.