CONVOY CALLS FOR NEW AUSTRALIAN ELECTION?

Trucks, camper vans and SUVs drive through Canberra yesterday. The vehicles festooned with anti-government banners and honking their horns have driven around Australia’s Parliament House in a protest calling for new elections.

CANBERRA, Australia - Trucks blasting their horns as well as camper vans and SUVs festooned with anti-government banners converged on Australia's Parliament House on Monday in a protest calling for new elections.
Police estimated 350 vehicles; mostly trucks in at least three slow-moving convoys motored through the centre of the national capital and past Parliament and Prime Minister Julia Gillard's nearby official residence.

• The cacophony of horns blared across the front lawns of Parliament, where hundreds of protesters carrying signs such as "CO2 is Good Stuff" and "Democracy is Dead" gathered to call for new elections and an end to the government's plan to tax major polluters for every ton of carbon gas they emit.
• Trucks traveling in 11 convoys from around the country were to have converged on Canberra for a far larger rally. An organiser of the so-called Convoy of No-Confidence, Kate Stuart, said more trucks were en route to Canberra although she was unsure how many. Some had traveled for 5,700 km from Port Hedland in the northwest
• The protest was unlikely to lead to fresh elections or force Gillard to change her policies. But it reinforces the popular perception that public opinion has turned strongly against her in the year since she was re-elected with a minority government.
• Transport Minister Anthony Albanese dubbed the protest the "Convoy of No Consequence", telling Parliament it was not supported by mainstream organisations but by political radicals and conspiracists.
• Cattle rancher Rashida Khan and her partner Len Baker joined the Port Hedland convoy in Darwin, and then drove their pick-up truck 4,000 km to spend two days in Canberra before driving home.
• Khan, 23, said she is angry at the carbon tax as well as the government's recent decision to suspend live cattle exports to Indonesia due to concerns about slaughterhouse cruelty.
• "You can get away with a lot with the Australian people, they're very laid back," Khan told The Associated Press. "But after 12 months of this sort of government that's all unstable and upside down and it's terrible," she added.

The protest organised by a truck drivers' group argues that Gillard's government is not legitimate because it has relied since elections on the support of the minority Greens party and independent lawmakers to form a slim majority in the House of Representatives.

Source: AP