02.11
We’re in trouble.
And not the sort of trouble we can talk ourselves out of either. We, as a country, are in deep, deep dog shit. The trouble we’re in is that come the next federal election, regardless of who wins, we lose. Neither of the two Prime Ministerial candidates, together with those that would form their government, are the people that should be running the country. In fact, they’re about as far from ideal as you could get.
On one side, we’ve got the incumbent Labor government, led by the Mandarin speaking Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. A government that’s basically jumped from one bandwagon to the other for most of their policy, while those they have come up with on their own have been so poorly implemented it would have been better if they just hadn’t done anything at all.
In terms of bandwagon policy we’ve seen Mr Rudd jump on the Great Financial Crisis (drink!) and Climate Change bandwagons. His policies in both these areas have been nothing short of rushed, short-sighted and reactionary.
Although the global financial crisis came about only months after Mr Rudd’s coming into office, but he jumped at the chance to show that he was an active Prime Minister, taking now time to start dishing out money left, right and centre to anyone who wanted some. His rash spending accomplished nothing but to rapidly erode the significant budget surplus created over the previous 12 years by the Howard government. The Labor economic package missed the point when it came to making sure that everyone in this country could be as financially safe as possible.
The financial credit crisis was just that a credit crisis. What the government did was throw money at tax-payers – basically in an attempt to shore up their post-election popularity – and encouraged them to spend. What they should have been doing was encouraging people to reduce their credit debt, not create a situation where they may potentially rack up more of it. What they should have should have been doing was teaching people sound financial management – because I can tell you there isn’t a lot of that out in the world at the moment. Teach people about saving, spending and getting the best out of what you have. Teach them that credit cards and pretend money are bad – we’re still one of the nations with the highest amount of credit card debt in the world. Throwing $900 at them and saying “go shopping! Have fun!” isn’t sound fiscal policy. It’s a publicity stunt. It’s bad policy, it didn’t help then and all it’s going to do in the future is cause us worse problems (massive budget deficit anyone?).
As for climate change, well, what do I have to say? Instead of tackling the problem, they decided some sort of bizarre tax/rebate/thing based around the idea of a carbon cap was the best idea. Nuh-uh. What’s the point in taxing existing industry without providing them with any incentives to either improve their pollution output or research brand new technologies in an attempt to eliminate the problem all together? Following The War Against Terror (Yeah, TWAT – fitting in more ways than one, really), the world decided that climate change and CO2 levels would be the next big issue. Kevin happily jumped on that bandwagon as well, signing up to this-than-and-the-other treaties, making promises about carbon targets without so much as a hint as to how or what alternatives he would be proposing. Again, this is simply poor, short sighted policy that’s dangerous not only now, but into the future. What are you going to do, Kevin, when the cost of living rises because you’re taxing industry for merely existing? What?
Then we get to their original policies. You know; the ones that they’ve apparently thought out. Sadly, the highlights of these policies are the mismanaged National Broadband Network and the utterly idiotic internet filter.
So far the government has spent over $70million of the allocated $43billion and achieved absolutely nothing. So multiplying that out…you get the point. The government, though Minister for Communications, Broadband and the Digital Economy Stephen Conroy, has managed to take what should have been a brilliant idea and a great technological leap forward for this country and totally ruin it. Building a national fibre-to-the-home network really shouldn’t have taken this much stuffing around. Instead, the government wasted over half a year trying to get their flawed tendering process to yield results before dumping that idea and deciding that they were going to do it themselves. So far, they’ve built exactly fuck-all of it and there’s no firm timetable for rolling out the rest of it any time soon. I’m going to be old and grey before I get to use my 100mbps internet connection.
Then, our dear Senator Conroy announced that he wanted to censor the internet because in his mind parents are too irresponsible to monitor what their children do online and need government protection from all those nasty terrorphiles out there. The plan is nothing short of a direct assault on the freedom I have as an adult to view content that isn’t suitable for young minds. The fact that some parents aren’t capable/don’t want to know what their children are doing isn’t something that should concern me. You should impinge on my freedoms because of the actions of others. It’s not right. This is without mentioning that EVERY SINGLE technically minded person not only knows that such legislation is pretty much unenforceable but could, without too much effort at all, find out how to bypass it. Furthermore, this proposal won’t filter out the actual peer-to-peer channels where paedophiles trade their child pornography. It’s just stupid. It’s just another ill-conceived, short-sighted, reactionary policy.
The Rudd government, over the two and a half years since they came to office, haven’t made one solid, constructive policy decision that has the potential to actually advance our nation as we move into the future. Instead they’ve been reactionary, bandwagon jumping, not-quite-thought-out-properly fools who really shouldn’t be at the helm any longer than is necessary.
Unfortunately for us, the alternate choice at the next election is the Liberal/National coalition led by the fundamentalist Christian, extreme right-wing, bigot Tony Abbott. You can’t say that, on any level, you’d want him leading the country. If there was any group of people who you’d never want to see in charge of entire country, it’s this lot. Not only have they only recently emerged from a period of internal turmoil to rival that of the NSW state labor government but they’ve managed to so successfully blur the line between church and state that I would be surprised if you had to be a confirmed catholic before you were allowed to be a member of parliament.
Following on from their defeat in the 20097 federal election, the Liberal party descended into complete and utter chaos. It would appear that the iron fist of former Prime Minister John Howard was all that was keeping all the childish factions of the party toeing a single like: his line. After his defeat, and subsequent resignation, the party split along several factional lines. After quite the debate about leadership, the party managed to install Brendan Nelson as their new leader. This didn’t go so well as Nelson really lacked a lot of the bite required to really get stuck into a government that had just been swept to victory in such an emphatic way. After a lot of back-room wheeling and dealing they had a leadership spill and put Malcolm Turnbull in charge. Things then started to look for the Liberals. Turnbull was smart, slick and really looked as though he would be able to make a decent charge for the 2010 election. Sadly, this wasn’t to be. Turnbull committed political suicide during the “Ute-gate” scandal and was finally ousted in another leadership spill.
Their most recent leader is none other than former Howard crony, Tony Abbott. The problem with Tony Abbott is that he’s possibly the single most hated politician currently sitting in parliament. Abbott’s 1950s opinions of sex, marriage and religion are hideously out-dated. Abbott is the single person inside parliament who is incapable of separating his personal beliefs from what a rational person would consider the social good. He’d essentially erase the very important line separating religion and state. A line that should be one of our closest held political beliefs, regardless of which side of the chamber you sit on.
The main problem for the party as a whole during their leadership struggles is that they have completely failed at their task of being an opposition to the government. They haven’t been the counter-argument, alternate proposal that a good opposition should be. Instead they’ve been a collection of whiney school children whose most effect form of rebuttal is to say “nah, you are!” and follow it up by blowing a raspberry and running away. They’ve let the current government have free reign over the land without as much as a pothole to overcome. How could you let a party that can’t even handle being critiquing someone else’s ideas come up with their own; let alone have them be good ones.
The one policy they did manage to eventually come up with – which was announced a week or two ago now – was their own ill-conceived climate change plan. Although different to the governments in ways that I couldn’t be bothered remembering, it still failed to address the problem of increasing the costs of living through rising production costs as manufacturers are taxed for merely existing. Like the government, the Liberals do not look to encourage development of new, cleaner technology; instead they look to just punish industry because they happen to exist. This sort of policy, when compared to the government’s offering, is just a really weak alternative. Both policies miss the same point and both policies will create the same problems.
So, where does that leave us as a country?
Well, in a bit of a bind. With an inept sitting government and a bunch of lunatics as the alternative choice, the only option left to us is to vote into government one of the single issue minor parties. That could never go well. A party that doesn’t have a balanced policy portfolio is always going to struggle to get to grips with the running of a government. They’d be worse than awful. So, what do we do?
Sadly, while the idea is simple in theory, in practise it would prove much harder to implement effectively. The best alternate is to launch a third multi-focus political party. But, I fear such a thing may never happen. The Australian political landscape has remained relatively unchanged since we were granted our independence from the British motherland in 1901. The population is has grown someone comfortable with the binary choice presented to them every 3.x years. The introduction of a third choice in government is an idea that would have to overcome over a century relative political stability as a result of the existing choices available. You could understand why people wouldn’t want to upset the applecart by trying something untested and new.
So brace yourselves. I fear the future, both in the lead up to and after the next election, is going to be more than a little rough.