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Three more items today's collection of Federal Election Youtubes.

The Democrats may well be on the brink of oblivion at this election. Of their four remaining senators, two (Lyn Allison and Andrew Bartlett) are standing for re-election, while the other two (Natasha Stott-Despoja and Andrew Murray) are retiring. It would be a huge shame if Senator Bartlett is lost to federal politics. Meanwhile, the current leader of the party, Lyn Allison, is getting on with the job of issuing policies and making videos, even if no one is paying attention. Here she is campaigning for better support for carers.

Family First's Senator Steve Fielding is not up for re-election this time, but having fluked his way into the senate in 2004 on preferences, he is now trying to get more of his stablemates up. In this video, showing the temerity to seek a second senator in Victoria, he attempts to take on both the Nationals and the Greens on home turf.

And finally, John Howard shows, on Monday night's A Current Affair, how he keeps interest rates so low - he gets them wrong!

Can anyone explain to me why the Treasurer's office is issuing a press release for an announcement which is nothing more than a Liberal Party election policy?

More proof that John Howard Simply Doesn't Get It comes with this insistence on releasing Youtube videos at 5am. Does he think the Intertubes Generation will just be rolling in from the nightclubs and logging on at that hour?

No, a more plausible reason is that 5am is a good time to issue video press releases in time for the brekky TV shows, not to mention his radio buddies such as Neil Mitchell and Belford Parrott. And Youtube, of course, is a free medium for videos less than ten minutes long.

John Howard's blatant abuse of constitutional power came to an end this morning when he visited the Governor General and obtained a dissolution of the House of Representatives, and a federal election on November 24. This is the date that Peter Costello implied at the AFL Grand Final Breakfast last month.

The Prime Minister's election announcement has been purloined by the Liberal Party for use on their Youtube website. Unfortunately the Liberal Party apparatchik responsible for uploading the video has no concept of 16:9 ratios.

I'm normally reticent about United Nations agencies picking up Nobel Peace Prizes. Having said that, I thought the award this year jointly to the IPCC and to Al Gore was spot on - or, more to the point, given for the right reasons.

John Howard and his ministers are making announcements like there's no tomorrow (which, give or take six weeks, is almost certainly correct). Two more legs of his education platform, otherwise known as the Cultural Revolution (registered trademark under licence from the estate of Mao Zedong), have been announced today.

From the Treasurer's office this morning:

"The Federal Government will provide a total of $10 million towards two key projects on Hepburn Avenue, Treasurer Peter Costello announced today.

The Federal funding of $10 million will be allocated as follows :

"Labor believes that supporting executions – even by a nation state – gives justification to all kinds of fanatical lunatics to take the lives of others in pursuit of their own warped ideologies. That is why, at the highest levels Australia’s public comments about the death penalty must be consistent with policy. This is especially the case if we are going to tactfully and successfully drive a regional abolitionist movement."

- Robert McClelland, Wentworth Human Rights Forum, 8.10.07

Yesterday I quoted an unanswered Question In Writing posed in the House of Representatives to John Howard on November 17, 2004 - the second sitting day of the current (and soon-to-be-ex) parliament. The question relates to Government expenditure on corporate boxes at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where Howard and ministers wined, dined and occasionally watched the action as, among other things, Marion Jones cheated her way to victory after victory.

A selection of some of the more interesting unanswered questions in the House of Representatives which have been outstanding for more than twelve months: