Politics - Haven for the Deceitful and the Inept
Well, as you might have guessed, I don't think much of politics. Why?
Because it largely involves misrepresentation and abuse of power. Politicians
feel they must be seen to be doing something, even something that they know
is useless or wrong. So, for example, they claim to champion freedom of speech,
yet have the OFLC (Office of Film and Literature Censorship, in reality) ban
books and other material. One such book,
Steal This Book,
by Abbie Hoffman (Various publishers), ISBN 1568580533, happens to be
online. While I am no fan of crime, the banning of books is simply wrong.
Let's have a brief look at the Australian political parties:
The Liberals are supposed to be in favour of the rights of individuals
and free enterprise. They will tell you that this is the case, especially
when making sure people have the right not to join a union, for example.
Yet, they are often influenced by religious loonies, and therefore are
quite happy to favour censorship and other measures which reduce personal
freedom. An appropriate motto would be "Freedom for all, so long as
it's not anything we don't approve of."
The worst of the Libs is the "Lyons Forum", a group of despicable
creatures who strongly believe in censorship and the right of the government
(preferably them, of course) to determine what films people are allowed
to see, what books they are allowed to read, etc. They try to inflict
these "standards" on everyone, while the "John Stuart Mill Society"
section of the Libs tries to fend off these dolts and maintain some
semblance of decent freedom.
The Nats are the Libs' coalition partners. Much the same mob.
The Labor party is supposed to champion the common worker and welfare
recipient. The ALP traditionally liked to seem to make plenty of welfare
available, while not wanting to tax enough to pay for it, so just borrowing
like crazy. This was especially true since the union movement basically
controlled ALP policy. In recent years, it's moved towards the Liberal
position on many matters, while giving more lip service to the Greens.
Rather than borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to cover their ineptitude,
their latest technique is to raise lots of revenue via speed cameras,
targeting mostly safe roads whose speed limits should be higher.
Amazingly, the party is trying to water down the union involvement's input and
be a little less corrupt in the candidate selection process.
Their motto should be "Don't worry about the debts. So long as you
are a union member and do as you're told, we'll take care of you."
The party for those who are sick of the major parties. In reality, they
just latch onto any popular, "politically correct" issue they can, and
get pressure groups to write policy for them, knowing that it doesn't
matter how expensive it is or how much it conflicts with other policy,
because they will never be in a position to implement it anyhow.
Suggested motto: "If you're sick of wasting a vote on the major
parties, waste one on us."
Yes, there are "Green" politicians. They basically run around trying to
save the environment, no matter how few people care about the particular
object of their current tirade and how many people would be inconvenienced
if they were somehow successful.
Best summarised by: "We'll save the environment, but we don't
give a shit about anything else."
