The Rant-O-Matic

Am I the only person in the country who is absolutely dreading having to go and visit the polling booths for a federal election some time soon? For the first time since I’ve been eligible to vote, I’m absolutely dreading the regular exercise of my democratic right. This is the first time that I’ve actually put serious thought into lodging an informal vote. The reason for this is pretty simple. It is, my opinion, that neither the incumbent Labor government nor the Liberal/National opposition are the sort of people that I want running the country.

Whoever wins, we lose.

The problem I have with both choices is that they’re both pandering to the same audience. Now, this audience is not one that I identify with and I’m starting to find it quite disturbing that not only to do they have both “sides” (and we’ll come to this later) of politics appealing to their hearts and minds, we also have most of the commercial media spewing out article after article feeding this particular set of views and opinions.

The way democracy works is by having a selection of different views and opinions available to choose from when it comes time to vote, obviously with the one that most people identifying with coming out on top. When it falls apart, however, is when that variety evaporates in order to chase votes from some arbitrary group who somehow seems to have become massively important in the eyes of politicians.

It’s bitterly disappointing to see such a group gain so much power essentially by default. More to the point, it’s disappointing that it’s a group who’s ideas about where we should go as a country are so old, incorrect, regressive and, on certain issues, downright racist and xenophobic. For a country with such a multicultural history it’s downright embarrassing that this is what we’ve become.

From climate change, to the internet, to refugees both the government and the opposition have done nothing but demonstrate that they’re not interested in addressing these issues on their merits. Instead they’re competing in a race to the bottom to see who can can appeal best to the most moronic and loathsome sections of the population. A population that’s only increasing in numbers thanks to the fear campaigns that are working overtime in both the major newspaper publishers (Fairfax and News Corp are pretty much equally bad) and gutter-trash “current affairs” programs (Today Tonight, A Current Affair – that’s you).

Side note; not much point wasting money on “building the education revolution” if they’re all going to grow up being informed by this garbage. May as well save the money and use it to do something they’d actually derive benefit from…like buy them 3D TVs so they can get right into middle of the action on the football field.

So what do we do? Surely any rational person can see just how wrong this is? Surely there’s more of us then there are these bottom-of-the-barrel xenophobes that are getting all the attention and air time?

Do we have a hope? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? For the moment, I doubt it.

This is the problem we’ve had since the demise of the Australian Democrats a couple of years back. There’s a massive hole in the Australian political landscape that’s yet to be filled. After Labor and Liberal, the next biggest party is The Greens, and they’re clearly not ready to govern – being a party that really still has only a single policy platform…given away by their name.

It’s a shame really, because over the last couple of years, we’ve found ourselves in a position to lead the world on a number of fronts politically, environmentally. But we’ve only seen this potential squandered. Time will tell if that’s going to come back to bite us.

It’s a shame we don’t have any decent choices when it comes to the next election. We need one. It’s not hard to see this country taking a very severe turn for the worse if things continue the way that they are…and I don’t think anyone wants that.