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Comedian Austen Tayshus to contest Tony Abbott in Warringah for Australian Sex Party |
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Written by HeraldSun.com.au
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Tuesday, 03 August 2010 19:25 |
Be very afraid, Tony Abbott. Alexander (Sandy) Jacob Gutman is taking the gloves off.
"I'm changing my strategy," he said on Monday.
"So far I've been playing it pretty soft. From today, it'll be the real Austen Tayshus."
Gutman, the stand-up comic whose most famous creation is the provocative Austen Tayshus, is the Australian Sex Party's candidate in Warringah, the opposition leader's northern Sydney seat.
This is the first general election for the Sex Party - a strange combination of serious policy and in-your-face double entendre jokiness. It did run in the Bradfield and Higgins by-elections, winning nearly four per cent of the vote in each - enough to suggest it may have some influence in the Senate results.
Party president and Victorian Senate candidate Fiona Patten admits her party's name "didn't roll off the tongue so easily at first".
But Australian Democrats co-founder Don Chipp once advised her that the toughest thing for a new party was to get the media's attention.
The name got it noticed, including a debate on Sunrise with Wendy Francis of Family First, the Sex Party's polar opposite.
She wouldn't have got the gig with a different name, Ms Patten reckoned. And now, she hopes, the policies will be considered. They include improved sex education for children, the introduction of a national classification scheme for explicit adult material, opposition to the government's proposed internet filter and legalisation of same-sex marriages.
And, generally, taking the mickey out of the "major parties" - in which the Greens are included - for their conservatism.
Ms Patten, in the absence of polling which the party can't afford, is upbeat.
When Senate preference negotiations were going on, the phone never stopped ringing, which showed the party was on everyone's radar. Even Family First wanted a deal.
Ms Patten said the party tried to work out a clever preference strategy, but in the end said "Oh s**t, let's just preference those we support."
That's the Secular Party and the Democrats, with the Greens the first of the "majors" because they're the least bad.
Ms Patten said many people felt the big parties no longer spoke for them and some voters would go to her party.
Other totally disaffected voters might vote for the party as a way of giving two fingers to the whole system.
"We don't care why they vote for us," she said.
Meanwhile, back in the Warringah battleground, Gutman said he'd agreed to run because, as an ex-hippie with a social conscience, the party's agenda appealed.
Then the large, deep-voiced Gutman - or his alter ego - turned menacing as he talked about his door-knocking plans. At midnight, he said. In speedos, or maybe naked.
He added, obscurely, that the citizens of Warringah weren't much into euthanasia, but should be.
Perhaps the voters, rather than Abbott, should be fearful.
Source: HeraldSun.com.au
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