The Rant-O-Matic

This country needs a change in how it’s run.  Between the Labor Party being largely useless, jumping from one bandwagon to the next, and the Liberal Party quickly devouring itself the future of our country in completely uncertain.  I don’t believe, for a moment, that Kevin Rudd has lived up to his promises laid down during the 2007 election – never mind that it was really an election that he was never going to lose – or that Malcolm Turnbull (should he actually survive the next couple of days) is a suitable replacement.

The two current party system is failing us.  Both sides of the aisle are too self-absorbed, too complacent, too comfortable in the balance of things.  It’s pretty sad that given one party exists to keep the other in check, how we’ve ended up at this point.  The idea of having two conflicting core ideologies within the political system is to provide checks and balances against the possibility of power being abused.  What we’ve ended up with though, are two parties that are pretty much the same and both utterly useless at governing this country effectively.

What we need is a new party.  A third choice.  One that’s not “left” or “right” leaning.  Not that those terms really mean much any more.  But a party that promotes compromise and balance between ultimate altruism and complete greed.  A party that can deliver what’s right, not what it wants.  My party.

My party is pretty straight forward.  I don’t have an ulterior agenda.  The simple fact is; I’m right and, if you have a fanatical belief in a certain cause, you’re not.  Why? Probably because I’m a natural cynic.  I see people for what they are, not what they want me to perceive them as.  For a start, anyone who has a fanatical belief in any cause (religious, environmental, healthy eating, saving the animals, developing every scrap of land one can lay their bulldozer to) isn’t worth giving the time of day to.  Your one-sided, close minded bullshit isn’t something I’m interested in.  Fuck off.

For a start: global warming.  Yes, our planet is changing.  It’s organic, it’s living, so change is pretty much a given.  People don’t stay exactly the same throughout their lives, do they?  So the deniers can fuck right off now.  But, on the flip side, I’m not convinced that the doomsday scenarios portrayed by the proponents of global warming are totally true either.  I also am not entirely sure that the changes in the climate are totally the fault of our industrialised society.  The earth has been heating up and cooling down for longer than man has walked the earth.

So, what we need to do is stop the knee-jerk reactions to things we can’t prove and look at the longer term.  Forget about trying to curb emissions from things like power plants and heavy industry with silly ideas like carbon trading schemes.  Instead, take all that wasted money and start investing it in the next generation of clean industry.  Get the smart people off thinking and making those discoveries that are going to be more environmentally friendly.  Just making our current industries completely un-viable as businesses isn’t going to solve the problem.  All it’s going to do put millions of people out of work around the world and destroy our economies again.  What’s needed is that next technological break-through.  That next piece of science that’s going to change everything.  You get that by encouraging innovation, not punishment.  So stop wasting money on silly altruistic things and start investing it where it’s going to make a difference.

Also, on the environmental note, can we please stop calling every single large-scale housing development the spawn of Satan?  Here’s the problem: Our population is increasing.  These people are going to need places to live. I don’t want to live in a city where there’s 9 million people crammed into an area the size of my backyard.  While I agree there are certain developments that probably shouldn’t go ahead based on their ecological impact, you can’t stop every single one on environmental grounds.  There needs to be new housing.  It has to go somewhere.  Again, it’s about balance.  Save the areas that are worth saving, but we’re going to have to lose areas where it makes sense.  Putting the environment ahead of everything is equally as stupid as blinding destroying every tree in sight.  There needs to be compromise.  Significant areas of vegetation and bushland should be preserved, but areas where it makes more sense to put houses are going to be lost.

Secondly; the national broadband network.  It needs to be built and it needs to be built fast.  Australia’s lack of a high-speed broadband network is an embarassment for a country that desires, so strongly, to become a leader on the world stage.  The Rudd government has spent the last 12 months wasting millions of dollars on inquiry after inquiry only to reach the obvious conclusion that our telecommunications infrastructure hasn’t been substantially improved on since it was first installed.  The construction of a national fibre-to-the-home network is a sound investment in our technological future.  Construction of this network needs to be ramped up.

The NBN will be run by an autonomous statutory authority.  The rates it charges for access shall be enough to cover ongoing maintenance as well as expanding and improving the network.  It will not be sold off so that some greedy corporate entity can repeat Telstra’s molestation of our current network.

But to make the NBN effective, we also need to invest in more undersea optic-fibre links out of the country.

Further to this, Senator Conroy’s idea of  filtering the entire internet is utterly ludicrous and should never have been tabled as an way to protect children online.  The onus on raising children should be with those that brought them into the world, not society at large.  I refuse to restrict what adults can do online because some people are too stupid to take an interest in what their children are doing.  Money from that brain fart will be channeled into education programs for parents so that they can learn the technology and we don’t have to go through the insane idea of trying to censor the Internet.

Still to come:

• Fixing the states
• The republic debate