Politics: Down The Hume: A Melbourne Trip.

A road trip to Melbourne is illuminating in some ways. It's not the realisation that there seems to be a Subway in every single town. It's not the fact that finding internet access out of urban areas is really annoying. It's not that every Chinese restaurant out of the city seems to only serve sweet and sour pork and dim sims.

No, it's just how terribly urban-centric most of my views are. I'm a predictably educated, liberal, anti-lots-of-things nerd, who detests how many people are forced into homelessness in the city, and loathes how many live in poverty in the suburbs. I'm unsurprisingly against the perpetuation of ugly urban sprawl, in which cash is thrown like candy to rich bitch bureaucrats with hearts of ice to spend on gross grey buildings. But for all my left-wing wankery, I rarely think about how different things are out of Sydney proper.

Spending time in regional centres like Goulburn, Albury, Wodonga, Dandenong, and elsewhere is a necessary reminder that the issues across Australia are vastly different. Speaking to 'average Aussie battlers' - to join A Current Affair in condescendingly labelling them as such - who work at drought-affected farms or for underpaying industry tells you that most people don't have the time - nevermind the means - to fight battles that aren't their's.

Decrying Australia's vastly spread out population for electing an abomination like John Howard again and again is easy, and probably totally justified. But people vote Dickhead for a reason: they have no choice but to focus on supposed 'economic management' and side with the party aligned with the 'regional representatives,' the Nationals.

When you live in a politically and socially insular place, the exposure to 'big problems' that face Australia and indeed the world just isn't there. For the most part, there just isn't a culture in the vast majority of Australia conducive to looking at the macro instead of the micro, the greater good instead of the personal advantage. Because - shock horror! - most people aren't middle-class, uppity uni students with the time nor inclination to 'fight the good fight.'

Sure, all this is terribly obvious, and pointing it out inevitably produces a sub-text that says 'hey! Farmers and regional people! You suck for voting in Howard! Go to university you bitches! Vote Greens and eat tofu!' Indeed. That's inevitable considering I am an uppity educated, Greens-or-Labor-if-I'm-drunk voting nerd. And I love tofu.

But however obvious it may be, before venturing out on a road trip down the Hume and through shitloads of small towns - with giant sheep and big submarines and all that - I'd forgotten just how ludicrously huge Australia really is. It's massive. And people are everywhere. And they - shock horror! again - generally have very different personal priorities when compared to urban-dwellers. And whilst those who live in the country may be a lot more tolerant and informed than they're usually given credit for, most of them are still going to vote for the Nationals or the Liberals. Again and again. Because they think they have to. Because there's an underlying sense that they're the forgotten people of Australia, doomed to be represented only by Akubra-wearing knobheads in Telstra commercials.

So what? Well, it made me feel a bit better about the Liberal win October. Now, almost, I can see why people would vote in Howard. Almost.

(Originally published in The Brag in the Fear & Loathing column).