Chaucery Blog

There was a suggestion recently in The Australian that the government has been buying votes for the upcoming election by allocating road funding mainly to electorates not held by the opposition Labor party.

Of 89 road grants worth $250 million revealed in the Senate yesterday, 78 are in government or independent electorates. Only 11 are in Labor seats - most of them marginal. ... A total of 22 Liberal electorates were given $119.32 million for 44 projects, six Nationals electorates received $57.24 million for 23 projects and seven Labor seats were awarded $28 million for 11 projects.

Three independent electorates - Calare, Kennedy and New England - all keenly sought by the Government, received $16.61 million for five projects.

The article doesn't actually do the sums to see if Labor actually received less than expected funding based on the proportion of seats held by them in Parliament, so I present that here:

Yep, that looks like a pork barrel.

Posted by James at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Dialecticon is now available in the Chaucery fun section of this site. It was inspired by an old blog entry on Americanisms, and allows anyone to easily see how synonyms vary according to location. For example, how much more common is the term 'sidewalk' in the US compared to the British term 'pavement', and what about in Canada and Australia? Now, go play...

Updated 12 May 2007: I've added some more examples to the dialecticon, including some which demonstrate how to use it to compare the spelling skills of various countries. Did you know that almost half of British web pages containing the word 'dumbbell' spell it incorrectly?

Posted by James at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)