The State of Play

The LNP are on the eve of their first year in office. In terms of performance, how will they be judged? They have shown contempt for the very constituency that elected them in good faith, the Prime Minister has been proven to be a liar of catastrophic proportion, and secrecy has been at the centre of its tenure.

“When a political party deliberately withholds information that the voter needs to make an informed, balanced and reasoned assessment of how it is being governed. It is lying by omission. It is also tantamount to the manipulation of our democracy”. John Lord

They have governed with an ideological intensity not seen in this country for a very long time; every decision seems to have the stamp of American Republicanism. The Treasurer has brought down a budget of incredible unfairness that has received universal disapproval, and on top of that a biography about Joe Hockey reveals he felt it wasn’t tough enough.

So draconian and punitive has been their treatment of those seeking work that they have opened themselves to ridicule.

Try this, for example:

“Miraculous job creation scheme. 100,000 youth producing 40 applications per month means 4 million applications per month. The remaining 620,000 unemployed (20 applications per month) would deliver a further 12.4 million applications each month, giving a grand total of around 16 million applications per month. With those kinds of numbers each month, the private sector and government will urgently need more staff to process, sort and respond to those applications, as well as keep records in case of Centrelink checking on the individual unemployed. It’s a veritable miracle of job creation. We can expect the vacancy rate to increase markedly as these requirements hit the private and public sectors. Furthermore if all applications (or even most) were required to be sent by mail, Australia Post and the pulp & paper industry could be saved overnight! If electronic lodgement was used then that would represent a huge business boost for the NBN. By a stroke of Kevin Andrew’s pen. To review, 16 million applications per month is 192 million applications per year (remember the actual number of vacancies doesn’t matter, what’s important is that there are plenty of unemployed to send applications). If we allow that one person could reasonably review 50 applications per day (less if replies had to be written) or 12,500 per year that would result in a need for over 15,000 people just to process the applications!!! Each of them would need supervision, management, training, quality assurance, safety and human resources leading to total employment of around 25,000!”

It’s simple. If the PM would come good with all the jobs he promised there wouldn’t be any need for the draconian work for the dole measures he is undertaking (sarcasm intended).

In terms of policy implementation their performance has been abysmal. In a corresponding period, Julia Gillard’s hung-parliament passed 127 pieces of legalisation. To date, Abbott’s has passed approximately 8, with much legislation not even written. It has been a Government of punishment and undoing rather than doing.

It has lied about the state of the economy, painting it in terms of a national disaster when in fact it isn’t. To top it off, in an interview last weekend with the New Zealand political current affairs show, The Nation, Joe Hockey had this to say:

“There is no crisis in the Australian economy, nor is it in trouble”.

He also made no mention of the “budget emergency” he and his government refer to when justifying their unpopular budget to Australians:

“The Australian economy is not in trouble.

There’s no crisis at all in the Australian economy”.

All this of course has been reflected in the polls.

Crikey’s “Poll Bludger”, which aggregates all major opinion polls, records that a large and persistent shift in the two-party preference occurred as budget details began leaking in about April this year. It seems clear that voters don’t like the budget. The Abbott government has never explained why the “lifting” must be done by people who are already missing out, while it continues giving tax concessions to wealthy individuals and profitable businesses. Entrepreneurs and economists are calling for the government to tighten these concessions rather than raise the top marginal tax rate – which is effectively what it did with its levy on high-income earners earlier this year.

And as work becomes more insecure – there are now ten jobseekers for every vacancy, and many in work are on casual or short-term contracts – the government intends to impose a strict and punitive regime for the jobless, as if their unemployment is their own fault. Despite its drive to “cut red tape”, the government intends to make Newstart recipients apply for 40 jobs every week on top of their work-for-the-dole obligations. The Business Council of Australia’s new president, Telstra chair Catherine Livingstone, makes the obvious point that this would most likely inundate prospective employers with masses of unwarranted applications. Senator Eric Abetz admitted the same on Lateline last night. – Russell Marks, Politicoz Editor, The Monthly, 29/07/14

What should Labor do?

Where did all the voters go, and why?

Indeed, where did they go? Mysteriously, 3.3 million eligible voters went missing at the last election. That is a whopping 15% more than the previous one.

There is something fundamentally wrong when, despite a huge recruitment drive by the Australian Electoral Commission, 1.22 million citizens failed to enrol to vote, and 400,000, or one third of the non-registrants, were aged 18 to 24. Additionally, 760,000 House of Representatives ballots were informal – about 6 percent – up more than 0.3 percent from the 2010 election.

Who carried the loss? Our democracy did.

Unlike the US and the UK, who both have voluntary voting systems, we have a compulsory one. We shouldn’t need to entice voters to the polling booth, but something has changed. It seems that in increasing numbers our citizens are walking away from their obligation.

Are they just morons who we should ignore anyway, or are there other reasons? I don’t in the least subscribe to that moronic theory. I believe that most of these people made a conscious decision not to vote because they have become disenchanted with the system. Who can blame them?

In 2010, 93% of eligible people voted in Australia. In the US, about 60% of the population vote, and in the UK it is about 65%.

What would happen if the lost voters returned? Recent analysis of the election result suggests that fifteen of the Coalition’s new seats are held on very thin margins. Eleven seats have margins of less than 4000 voters. In essence, the election was a lot tighter than was first suggested. Effectively, this means that it would only take about 30,000 people to change their vote to change the government.

Answering the ‘’what if’’ question may be complex, but simply put, it lies in a worldwide dissatisfaction with the practice of traditional Western politics – left vs right. People who once saw politics as tuff but with an ability to compromise now see it as tuff but indecent. It is now an institution of power that drives self-interest and ignores the common good. If we look around the world, wealth has become the measure of success and the rich are becoming wealther at an alarming rate. In the history of this nation the rich have never been so openly brazen.

Something will have to break or there will be a revolution. Even Americans no longer believe the dream that has been instilled in them since birth, that they all have an equal opportunity of success. It simply doesn’t exist.

Before going further we need to establish why Labor lost the election, but I don’t propose to elaborate on this point. They lost firstly because of infighting over leadership and the perception of dysfunction. Secondly they lost because of a right wing dominated media that was under instructions to get rid of them, and thirdly because the then opposition had the most negatively persuasive liar of a leader the country has ever known.

What should Labor do?

There is no doubt that the Australian political system is in need of repair but it is not beyond it.

Labor has taken a small but important first step in allowing a greater say in the election of its leader,however it still has a reform mountain to climb. Besides internal reform that engages its members, it needs to look at ways of opening our democracy to new ways of doing politics: ways that engage those that are in a political malaise so that they feel part of the decision making process again.

Some examples of this are fixed terms, and the genuine reform of question time with an independent speaker. Mark Latham even advocates (among other things) its elimination in a new book. In fact he has many suggestions of considerable merit.

Labor needs to promote the principle of transparency by advocating things like no advertising in the final month of an election campaign, and policies and costing submitted in the same time frame. You can add reform of the senate into this mix, and perhaps some form of citizen initiated referendum. Also things like implementing marriage equality and a form of a National ICAC. Perhaps even a common good caveat on all legalisation.

Labor has to raise itself above and overcome its preoccupation with faction power struggles. These struggles preoccupy, and erode the ability to be creative. In a future world dependent on innovation it will be ideas that determine government, and not the pursuit of power for power’s sake.

If the Labor party is to convince the lost voters who have left our democracy to return (and I am assuming that most would be Labor), it has to turn its ideology on its head, re-examine it, and then reintroduce it as an enlightened opposite to the tea party politics that conservatism has descended into.

It must promote and vigorously argue the case for action against growing inequality in all its nefarious guises, casting off its socialist tag and seeing policy in common good versus elitist terms. The same fight must also be had for the future of the planet.

It must turn its attention to the young, and have the courage to ask of them that they should go beyond personal desire and aspiration and accomplish not the trivial, but greatness. That they should not allow the morality they have inherited from good folk to be corrupted by the immorality of right wing political indoctrination.

It might even advocate lowering the voting age to sixteen. An article I read recently suggested the teaching of politics from year 8, with eligibility to vote being automatic if you were on the school roll. Debates would be part of the curriculum and voting would be supervised on the school grounds. With an aging population the young would then not feel disenfranchised. Now that’s radical thinking; the sort of thing that commands respect. It might also ensure voters for life.

Why did the voters leave?

How has democracy worldwide become such a basket case? Unequivocally it can be traced to a second rate Hollywood actor, a bad haircut, and in Australia a small bald headed man of little virtue. They all had one thing in common. This can be observed in this statement (paraphrased):

“There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals making their way. The poor shall be looked after by the drip down effect of the rich”.

Since Margaret Thatcher made that statement and the subsequent reins of the three, unregulated capitalism has insinuated its ugliness on Western Society and now we have an absurdly evil growth in corporate and individual wealth and an encroaching destruction of the middle and lower classes.These three have done democracy a great disservice.

Where once bi-partisanship flourished in proud democracies, it has been replaced with the politics of hatred and extremism. Where compromise gets in the way of power, and power rules the world.

3.3 Million Australians have tuned out of politics because of the destabilisation of leadership,corruption on both sides, and the negativity and lies of Tony Abbott. The propaganda of a right wing monopoly owned media and the exploitation of its parliament by Abbott. Somehow the lost voters must be given a reason to return. A reason that is valid and worthwhile. A reason that serves the collective and engages people in the process, and a politic for the social good of all – one that rewards personal initiative but at the same time recognises the basic human right of equality of opportunity.

We need a robust but decent political system that is honest, decent, and transparent, and where respect is the order of the day. A political system where ideas of foresight surpass the politics of greed and disrespect, and truth, respect, civility and trust are part of vigorous debate and not just uninvited words in the process.

“The right to vote is the gift our democracy gives. If political parties (and media barons, for that matter) choose by their actions to destroy the people’s faith in democracy’s principles and conventions then they are in fact destroying the very thing that enables them to exist”. John Lord

The misuse of free speech may have contributed to the decline of our democracy but it is free speech that might ultimately save it.

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