Osama impersonators, the Truck of Truth and phoney pamphlets - it's an Aussie election

Australia goes to the polls tomorrow and, if the polls are right, there could be a new government in place by Monday. It's been an extraordinary election campaign and one where the media has frequently become the story. The woman who could unseat Prime Minister John Howard of the conservative Liberal-National coalition from his own seat - which he has held since 1974 and is in the area where he grew up - is Labor candidate Maxine McKew, a former journalist for public broadcaster the ABC and weekly news magazine the Bulletin. We've had the Queensland police arresting television comedians from ABC satire The Chaser's War on Everything at a Liberal party event in Brisbane - those crazy Chaser boys are the ones responsible for the Osama stunt that caused a major security breach during the Apec summit. And politicians have been lining up to have their photos taken sitting in the "Truck of Truth", the brain child of Sydney mid-market tabloid the Daily Telegraph. And direct mail - if that counts as media - has also come under fire, causing possibly Howard's biggest headache of the entire campaign (apart from a poor showing in the polls of course). The husband of Karen Chijoff, the Liberal candidate for a marginal seat in Western Sydney, and the husband of Jackie Kelly, the outgoing Liberal MP, have been implicated in the distribution of a bogus pamphlet purportedly from the fictional Islamic Australia Federation claiming that Labor supports Muslim terrorists and thanking the party for its support for the Bali bombers. Howard has dissociated himself from this and apparently neither Chijoff nor Kelly knew anything about what their hubbies were up to.