Well, it’s begun! And as we say, “It’s About Time!”
I guess I should start my first blog entry of the campaign by thanking one Premier Anna Bligh for giving us the opportunity to go to the polls and enable – for the first time in 17 years – votes to be cast in favour of the introduction of Daylight Saving in South East Queensland!
On the other hand, it has to be said, that we would have preferred her to have gone later, an October election would of course have been perfect for us. No doubt the Premier now sees us as such a massive strategic political threat that she ruled out an October election – come on, you didn’t really believe all that stuff about going early because of the economy did you! 
Anyway, welcome to my Party Leaders Election Blog. This is all new to me, but my media gurus have informed me that we have to emulate President Obama and capture the ‘Web 2’ way of doing things, so here goes!
My plan for this blog is not so much to sell you on the concept of Daylight Saving for South East Queensland (I am guessing that if you are reading this you are probably already in favour), but really to offer my own perspective on the campaign – from a DS4SEQ point of view of course.
The last week or so has been very frantic for us - lots of activity to get as many candidates in place as possible, in a fairly short time. We effectively have until Monday to get this all finalised. Once that’s in place, the Party’s focus will move to communicating our message, and hopefully I can grab a bit more ‘blogging’ time. On Tuesday we expect to be able to announce all our candidates and the electorates we will be running in – I won’t say how many yet – got to have something to keep the media guessing on – but let’s just say it’s more than one!!
Speaking of the media, I reckon that once we announce our candidates, they will start to take us seriously. So far we have barely got a mention in any of the on-line polls, we appear to be categorised as ‘Other’ – let’s hope that this changes soon. If you see us being ignored like this anywhere, please get on to the website/publication concerned and let them know we have arrived! If enough of us complain, then maybe we can start getting the media coverage we deserve!
Myself and the party executive team keep joking about when the day dawns that we get Daylight Saving in SEQ (note that’s ‘when’, not ‘if’) we are going to approach the publishers of the ‘For Dummies’ series of books and offer to write the ‘How to set up a political party from scratch for Dummies’ book. We are absolutely not seasoned political campaigners; we are just a group of everyday people with a shared passion, and a shared sense of frustration that South East Queenslanders have been ignored on the issue of Daylight Saving for far too long!
We are going through a pretty steep learning curve, that at times leads to moments of frustration, and at other times moments of sheer hilarity!
It’s been a real roller-coaster ride for us so far, and I’m sure, the best is yet to come! Hopefully I can share some of this with you through this blog, over the next few weeks up to the 21st of March.
Please come join us for the journey!
After all, “It’s About Time!”
Jason Furze
DS4SEQ Party Leader