A Wealth of Despair

Well the name of this website was originally a joke, referring to my despair over the ludicrous performance that I went through to transfer my email service to a new provider. Especially as I found out afterwards that I need not have done most of it.

And I could relate that name also to the struggle that it took to recover the use of my mobile phone – blocked accidentally – my despairing appeals for help disregarded by Google, Samsung, and the supplier, Kogan. I won’t bore you with the details of what I did during the TWO MONTHS that it has just taken me to find a solution – but you can be damn sure that neither Google, nor Samsung, nor Kogan will ever see another cent of my money.

But I do like to comment on the governance of our lives by those who apparently assume that they are superior beings, placed on earth to rule us. And anyone who is following Australian politics today will understand my despair of both the sanity and the worth of those beings.

I had meant to resume developing my thesis about the failure of politics in a general sense. I hardly expected those morons to present me with a tailor made case study – but they have.

I long ago gave up voting for any party. Voting for parties is first mistake we make. And I have come to realise that the whole problem with politics consists to just two factors.

1. The ridiculous shortness for the period for which we elect people – so that they can neither achieve much nor are they there to take the responsibility for the results of their actions.

2. The existence of the professional politician. This person MUST get elected – and re-elected – in order to have a job, and therefore an income. Being only human, they will therefore do or say anything at all that will increase the likelihood of that happening.

This is exacerbated by the party system, whereby gaining the party nomination for a seat hugely increases the likelihood of election but requires slavish obedience to so called ‘power brokers’ within that party.

Nobody in politics gives a damn about what you or I may want; unless there is some chance of profit or preferment coming their way as a result of doing what we would like. Worse still, many of those with power see it only as a means of furthering their own ambitions and increasing their wealth, with complete disregard for the good of the nation.

What we have seen today in Australia is someone who sees a chance at the top job – with its attendant lifetime perks – and is prepared to divide his party and destroy the credibility of the Prime Minister and his government in order to grab it.

Never mind that policies and legislation of crucial importance to the rest of us get kicked into the dustbin and we’ll probably end up with the utterly disastrous opposition party winning the next election and plunging us back into the dark ages, as we are milked to pay off its supporters. All he can see is the laurel wreath descending on his brow and the loot flowing into his offshore bank account.

Or so I suppose.

We really do have the most uninspiring bunch vying to ‘lead’ this country. Most of them couldn’t lead a broken down horse to the knacker’s yard.

John Howard was the last Prime Minister to survive a ‘full term’ of 3 years. (I have already given my view of the inadequacy of such a term.) His most notable achievement was to destroy the prospect of a Republic by a cunningly worded referendum on the subject.

I forget the precise wording but the referendum in effect asked ‘Do you want a Republic with a President chosen by me?’ Not much chance of a ‘yes’ response to that one. I think we all knew who that would be.

Then we had Kevin Rudd.

Macbeth ponders ‘Would there were an art to see the mind’s construction in the face’.

Well in my opinion it was all there in ole Kev’s face for anyone to see. Arrogant, Peevish, Petty, Aggressive, Intolerant – well I guess they are all facets of the same thing. Selfishness.

And didn’t he prove it!

Dumped when his arrogance and incompetence became too much for even his supporters to bear, he devoted all of his undoubted energy into destroying the work of the far better person who took his place and then succeeded in acquiring the opportunity to add to his previous disasters.

(He was of course then shuffled off into a sinecure where he continues to thrive at considerable public expense – or so I believe.)

And so we received a Liberal/National party coalition government.

And they set out to show that they could behave as dysfunctionally as the opposition.

Finally we were given Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister – the nearest thing to a sane man that I have ever encountered in politics. (Well there was Winston Churchill but he was before I was quite old enough to vote.)

And the bloody imbeciles in the coalition are about to destroy Turnbull and so hand over government to the disastrous Bill Shorten and the Labor Party. (Yes, I can spell – they can’t.)

Now I don’t know who looks the most ludicrous in a high-visibility vest and a hard hat, Bill Shorten or Gina Reinhart, but I could easily imagine either of them as a concentration camp commandant. Gina however appears, according to reports in the press, to be a threat only to anyone whose money she thinks she has a chance to get her hands on. Bill is a threat to our survival as a nation – or at least as a nation able to live above subsistence level in a competitive world.

And all this is unlikely to change as long as government is in the hands of political parties, because it is obviously in their interests to maintain the current system. The first thing therefore is NOT to vote for party members. This may result in a few oddballs getting into parliament but we have to hope that, in time, responsible people will see a prospect of being elected and come forward.

Then we can elect a parliament for, say, 10 years, at the end of which time half the members will return to live in the society that they have created. They will have the same superannuation entitlements as any other working person and nothing else, whatever their ministerial rank.

We will elect replacements for those who have departed and these will serve for 10 years. In five years time the remainder of the original members will retire and their replacements will serve for 10 years. Now we will have a parliament of people who have 10 years in which to achieve something and absolutely no incentive to court popularity. And there will always be continuity of half the parliament.

The creation of the actual government will be the responsibility of the parliament and they won’t be able to blame their bad decisions on the electorate.

There was something like it, centuries ago, where capable people came forward and took their share of responsibility for the affairs of the nation for a period, before returning to their private lives.

It was later referred to as Democracy. Few words have suffered greater abuse – and few, if any, politicians can even grasp the concept. To the Left of politics it is of course totally incomprehensible.

Ain’t gonna happen is it!

Well if all we can do is tinker with the existing system there are still some worthwhile patches we could put on it.

Apparently the author of the present lunacy has been feathering his nest with a good slice of commonwealth funding, via a child care business owned by himself and his wife – or so it seems from news reports. ($5,000,000 was mentioned.) Now the Supreme Court is going to pronounce on whether this is naughty enough to make him ineligible to hold a seat in Parliament. The Supreme Court should have less obvious concerns to occupy its time. I won’t start on the inanities of lawyers and courts or we’ll be here all day.

Making it a criminal offence for any Member of Parliament to receive any form of payment other than his Parliamentary Salary and approved expenses would be a good patch to start with.

(Yet I recall that some time ago a young MP drew an overnight lodging allowance and paid it to his mother – with whom he stayed the night, He was promptly hounded out of politics altogether for that. Why, for God’s sake? The allowance for for lodging; he lodged at his mother’s home. I expect that, like most mothers, she immediately spent the lot in the local economy, laying on special meals and treats for him. That to me is MY money being well spent. Handouts to people who have the power to influence the handout process stink.)

Another of our problems is that, although we are technically and legally a Monarchy, our de-facto head of state is the Prime Minister. It is the Prime Minister who represents us at the highest level meetings Internationally but WE DON”T ELECT HIM OR HER as Prime Minister – we simply assume that the leader of the party which forms government will become Prime Minister. And even if that person is given the post, that party, as we have seen all too often recently, can remove him or her from it whenever they please – and substitute anyone they please, regardless of that person’s ability or suitability to lead the nation..

That seems a good case for a Republic – but which Republic do you see as a shining example for us to follow? The USA would seem to be the best model as far as the maintenance of a semblance of democracy goes but many people might be inclined to reconsider that in the light of recent events there. And we are very small. But we now have 25,000,000 population – WOW! Yeah, right! That’d be about two thirds of the number of people living in Tokyo or maybe half the number in Mexico City. We should model on somewhere small then – Haiti? Cuba? The Phillipines? plenty to choose from.

I doubt whether it matters. Any system is only as good as the people in it and I can only surmise that most of my fellow Australians feel that our present, crackbrained system of 9 governments – 6 State, 2 Territory, and one Federal – to rule two thirds of the population of Tokyo – is the best in the world and cannot be improved. Apparently they have no concerns about a system whereby some portion of their vote, if their chosen candidate is unsuccessful, can be passed on to some third party not of their choice – apparently in order that control of the nation always remains in the hands of one of two anointed political parties. This is the so-called ‘Two Party Preferred’ system and recent events have shown us exactly what there is to choose between our two preferred parties.

Perhaps there is hope. If both major parties continue their current antics even the Australian public could perhaps begin to see that an alternative arrangement might be an improvement. Some comments heard on the radio give me hope – but others show a number of people so stuck in the mud of their fixed opinions – or wedded to the furtherance of their own greed and to hell with all else – that change in my lifetime is extremely unlikely.

For some time now I have had things of greater value than politics to occupy my time and my thoughts. When I began to write this I was reacting angrily to current events and did not look back at my earlier posts; as a result, some of the above is simply a repetition of the points made in those. For that I apologise; yet I suppose it does indicate a consistency in my thoughts and feelings on the rather loathsome topic of politics in general.

In Gilbert and Sullvan’s ‘Iolanthe’ they sing that for the past 20 years ‘The House of Peers did nothing much, and did it very well’. It is a policy that many governments would do well to adopt. Most people can adapt perfectly well to stability, whatever its nature. Constant mindless tinkering and disruption cause immeasurable harm, filling people’s lives with worry and uncertainty.