Hooray for Silly Season!

Normally political silly season, the period over the Christmas break when media outfits struggle to find enough real news copy to fill their pages, starts in earnest a few days after the last sitting of Parliament for the year. Parliament ends mid week, the next few days are spent raking over the political coals, the first weekend edition of the papers after Parliament winds up signals the green light for those 3000 word essays on “The Year in Review” – and then… nothing.

There is literally nothing to report on the political front.

But nothing is a poor substitute for just about….well, anything – so we get silly season. The power of Julia Gillard’s haircuts, leadership speculation, “what if” scenarios up the wazoo and generally not much at all dressed up as something very substantial indeed.

Now, I don’t know about you lot, but I find the whole thing pretty enjoyable! What better way to wind down the political year than a good, light hearted giggle that runs for about 6 weeks? (although I’m sure plenty of you will say that the light hearted giggle really runs for 52 weeks a year, where the only real difference is the number of Santa Claus images that fill the space between the columns).

This year over at the Curious Snail, the real Dennis kicks off silly season north of the Rio Tweed a week early and reports on a new Galaxy poll running a hypothetical head to head of Rudd/Swan against Howard/Costello.

It found that Rudd and Swan hold a 54/38 lead over Howard/Costello on the question of which team would be preferred on economic leadership – a well timed empirical poke in the eye to Peter van Onselen’s public pash of Peter Costello that appeared over at The Oz a few days ago.

This follows hot on the heels of the latest Essential Report which had Gillard leading Truffles in the Better PM stakes 39/34 with 27% backing Don’t Know.

They also ran a Rudd/Gillard head to head showing Rudd leading 63/14 on the same question.

On a more serious note, the Essential Report vote estimates can be seen over on The Polls page, and they also ran questions on how voters see economic conditions playing out over the next year, what the biggest concerns over the global financial crisis were and a question on job security – worth a look).

So if any of you folks find a cracker of a silly season article over the Christmas period, if you could find the time to drop a link in whatever the latest post is, it would be much appreciated! With so many of them usually running rampant, it’s hard to keep track of them all.