No honest knowledgeable person can say that our present government is not corrupt. This present governing system is just not working, it is not favouring the common people. We are stuck between a rock & a hard place, both main parties are corrupt. Australia has been & still is playing it’s part in the Genocide in West Papua, these people were our WW2 allies & helped save many of our WW2 diggers, & yet we have sanctioned their Genocide & we have even helped finance it. Why have the majority of Australians allowed this to happen & continue? Why have we not sacked this government & introduced a new non corrupt system of government?
Keith.
3 Likes
Politics moves slowly, that’s why. It doesn’t help that there’s no direct way for the population to fix the system if nearly all the players are corrupt to some extent.
Going by election results, dissatisfaction with both major parties has been building since the 90s or so. Of particular note is the 2016 federal election which had over 20% of the population vote for anyone who wasn’t Labor/Liberal/National. I’m interested to see if that will increase this time around.
PPAU now has policy on electoral reform that would help to address this issue if we can attract the attention of the bigger parties with it.
If trends continue change will happen eventually, but it’s guesswork as to how long it will take. If you have suggestions on viable ways to speed it up a bit then I’d like to hear them.
3 Likes
Thank you for your reply jed, much appreciated. I doubt there will be any change in my time, & if I had any ideas on how to get the truth across to a majority of people other than using popular media, I would already be doing it.
Thanks again for your input.
Regards, Keith.
If I had to guess why both major parties have maintained the current position over time, I would say it’s because it’s the least bad of a bunch of really awful choices.
We could take a principled stance and publicly object to their behaviour (we did that once), but the consequences of getting offside with the largest and most aggressive military force in the region are not great. Not good for peace, not good for life, and it almost certainly would not actually helpful to the people in West Papua, and of course the obvious … not good for the almighty economy (by which I mean the livelihoods of many thousands of people).
Do you know the old adage, that you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer?
This is the sort of situation where that applies.
We can be all principled about it, but it wouldn’t do anybody any good, and it would so distance them from us that any possibility of influencing change would be totally eliminated. So what do you do in that case?
It’s rather sad, but many aspects of the world are quite fucked up. The more I learn about politics, the more I realise quite how fucked up it really is, but perversely, it seems like the current state of play is apparently less fucked up than it’s ever been. How bad was history? Really fucking bad…
It’s less clear why Britain would be selling them modern weapon systems from their safe perch on the other side of the planet.
We should probably have strong words with them about that.
I appreciate your reply Andrew.
Keith.