I can’t remember when life became so busy/demanding/intimidating or whatever that I stopped posting to this blog. I did however continue writing for a while and I saved those items. Recently I noticed them and decided to concatenate them and publish them in one go. And now I have finally got around to it. Some of them reference the ‘recent’ elections; they are of course no longer recent.

Commentary1, Justice.

I had meant to write a daily commentary on life in general and make a few suggestions for its improvement but illness gave me an excuse to procrastinate and I might well have gone on doing so, despite my recovery, had I not been infuriated by a ‘minor’ news item. Minor in the sense that it was reported with no great emphasis or comment. To my mind a blatant example of the spiteful and ludicrous behaviour of those who manage to be set in authority over us and whom we ought not to tolerate for an instant.

It was simply this. A young woman let her hormones get the better of her and she had sex with her 16 year old stepson. For this she has been jailed. Jailed! For a minor peccadillo that did no harm except to her own relationships.

I had been intending to write a little about the habit of politicians, in particular our own dear Prime Minister and her delightfully modest Treasurer (yes that is intentional irony) when they speak of the large sums of money that they graciously propose to gift to those persons and causes best calculated to result in votes for their particular political flavour. The second most important innovation that I think we ought to introduce into our political system (I’ll mention the first later) is that all such pronouncements should be required by law to contain the phrase ‘Your Money’. ‘Your Government (yes Julia it isn’t ‘your’ government it’s ours, despite being not what most of us would choose) intends to spend x billion dollars of YOUR money on (insert title of latest crack-brained scheme).

But then I realized that little if any attention is given to the constant squandering of OUR money on maniacal behaviour by the teeming host of petty fonctionnaires that we carry on our backs like giant vermin. How many people were involved in dragging this unfortunate girl into jail, simply so that they can exercise their lust for dominance over other people. A whole horde of police, magistrates, lawyers and judges gleefully indulging in their peculiar fetishes at OUR expense. Fun and money – all dressed up to look like some sort of moral salvation – and a young woman’s life ruined for their satisfaction. For there is certainly no benefit to us. Louts who assault and even kill people are allowed to go free or are given some nominal sentence, probably suspended. If they have enough political clout they can break people’s arms or even run them down, kill them and run away without punishment, especially in South Australia, if the press reports are to be believed. And you may be sure that more vast quantities of OUR money would be expended on suing the reporters if they were inaccurate.

It would pose no threat to my safety or my money, nor to yours, if this girl went free.

How many people do you suppose took part in this travesty? How many were allowed to rudely mistreat this girl? How many were fantasising in their minds over the incident involved, mentally drooling whilst acting the part of the moral saviours of mankind? Most, of course, just went through the motions of the police/legal machine, devoid of moral consideration or courage. They MUST all, surely, know that this is WRONG. And not one of them had the guts to say so.

At the time when I heard of this I happened to be visiting friends in Tasmania, where it was reported that the police were setting up a new, special unit to ‘Fight Crime’. Well what the hell have they been doing up until now? Apart that is from arresting and charging young girls for mildly deplorable behaviour. I naively thought that fighting crime was their job; the job that they are paid with OUR MONEY to do. Apparently the various chapters of the wicked motorcycle gangs have been TALKING TO EACH OTHER and coordinating their activities; something that the various police units have apparently not thought of doing themselves. Judging from the numbers of police throughout the country deployed with ‘booze buses’, lurking in hedgerows with radar guns, or employed on other such fund raising activities, it is hardly surprising if Fighting Crime is seen as a novel and unexpected use for their time. You may be sure, however, that it will now be an excuse for wanting to be given more of OUR MONEY – in order to do what we were already paying them to do .

To be fair, the police have very little incentive to Fight Crime. The so-called justice system is clearly modelled on the concepts in George Orwell’s ‘1984’, where he predicted the use of names describing the exact opposite of the function actually performed by institutions, such as ‘Ministry of Love’ for the former ‘Ministry of War’. If police performance is measured and rewarded by successful prosecution, and it is easier to successfully prosecute and jail an inoffensive young girl than a thug or murderer, why would they Fight Crime? With lawyers and court officials unburdened by any personal morality or commitment to actual justice why should the police be the only ones to care? And no-one is so committed, are they? Would any underling stand up and say ‘This is monstrous. Stop it at once; I will take no part in this travesty of justice!’ No. Neither when this young girl is so brutally treated nor when some political lout walks free after doing serious physical harm to one of the people whom he is supposed to serve and protect.

Would I, if my job were a part of that system? When I was young and responsible for no-one but myself, quite possibly. Later, probably not. Institutional injustice rests on the fact that most people dare not risk their livelihood to speak out against it. Their need to keep a job and put the interests of their family first are exploited to control them and blunt their finer instincts. And court behaviour is structured and imposed in a way specifically designed to prevent interference by anyone possessed of a social conscience or any commitment to actual justice.

Most of us have a very simple concept of what is basically right.

People who cause physical harm by an act intended to harm should be punished severely. So should those who deliberately deprive anyone of their money or possessions against their will. These are criminal acts. No amount of legal wriggling should result in any deviation from this. Everything else is a question of social convenience and should attract lesser punishment. And anyone engaged in a criminal act should be considered to have forfeited the right to legal protection. Nothing that occurs to anyone engaged in such an act should give recourse in law.

The so-called justice system has little if any relationship to this concept.

This would be very simple to correct. And it would then be very easy to know what is the right thing to do, and doing the wrong thing would clearly be a deliberate act. That it is not corrected clearly indicates a vested interest in the existing system. This is partly financial; a lot of lawyers make a lot of money out of playing about with other people’s lives. And it is partly the wish that far too many people have to rule the lives of others. Exercising power over other people’s liberty clearly gives some mental deviants a thrill, as does playing lady bountiful with other people’s money. Fairness and tolerance have no place in the thinking of these people.

A final note. The courts should not be a lottery. No-one should be awarded money that they have not earned – although of course the court should order that people be paid money that they are owed, when it is not paid as it should be. If it is desired to financially assist a physically injured person then by all means arrange to pay for whatever services or other aids are required (although a comprehensive Health Service would render this unnecessary). If a person’s reputation is damaged then let it be publicly restored and the perpetrator punished. But no one should expect to use the courts to make money that they have not earned. If they want money they can work for it.

I have quite a lot to say about the detail of punishment but this is not the place for it.

I also have things to say about the relationships of lawyers and politicians.

And a third, related theme, Unions.

These themes will be discussed in later commentaries.

Commentary 2, Political Change.

Winston Churchill once said that ‘our’ system of democracy is far from perfect but it is easily the best system that we’ve devised so far. I think that he was quite right but that is no reason not to try and improve on it. After all, it took until he was 62 years old for him to become Prime Minister and the world might have been saved much grief if that had happened a few years earlier. As it was, his warnings that Germany was intent on war and that there was an urgent need to build an adequate defence against it were ignored until it was almost too late.

The other significant comment was written by the librettist W S Gilbert in the Opera ‘Iolanthe’.

Referring to the actions of the upper house of the British parliament over the preceding 20 years the tenor sings ‘The House of Peers did nothing much and did it very well.’ A sentiment that should resonate with the American Republicans, who claim to consider that less government is better government. Unfortunately their performance in government falls far short of succeeding in this noble aim.

My point is that governments should govern. Not rule. Government was invented precisely to replace rule by individuals. And governing should consist of creating conditions in which we can each live our lives as we wish, subject only to the restraint that we interfere as little as possible with the right of others to do the same.

Of course the greatest impediment to change is the existing politicians, the removal of many of whom would be essential to any improvement.

Commentary 3, Discrimination.

A different area of politics today – discrimination.

When I was young, people reaching the age of 21 were stated to have ‘Reached the age of discrimination’. This had absolutely nothing to do with bad behaviour toward people of different skin tone or religion; on the contrary, it meant that a young person should by that age have acquired the ability to make informed decisions and behave in an adult and responsible way.

I dislike the way that words have their original meaning twisted to suit the dislikes and prejudices of zealots and fanatics. Words were invented to aid communication and they do that best when their meaning is clear and unambiguous. And, as a slight digression from the main subject, I intensely dislike the way in which words invented by people too ignorant to realise that there already exist ones adequate for their purposes are adopted into general speech.

Back to discrimination. Using the word in its present, popular usage, to refer to real or imagined slights or other politically incorrect behaviour against a rapidly growing number of categories or groups of people.

I should first admit to a fairly strong colour prejudice on my own part. Knowing that many people with darker skin tone than mine had been subjected to behaviour ranging from unpleasant to appalling by people whose skin tone resembled my own, I always felt that I should make an extra effort to be pleasant and helpful to any darker skinned people that I met. I realise that that is presumptuous and implies that those people are less able to cope in mixed society, which just isn’t usually true. So I apologise; but I’ll probably keep on doing it. Sorry.

Now, however, the people who don’t have a life have found a new way to pour grit into the smooth running of society. This imbecile proposition is that anyone who chooses to consider themselves insulted IS insulted, regardless of the intentions of the person accused of delivering the insult. And that person is therefore guilty of an offence and should be forced to make reparation.

So far the idea seems to have lost traction but we may be assured that it won’t go away. Unless you have led an extraordinarily sheltered life you will know that there are people who are positively eager to take offence and manufacture insult where none is intended. Just as there are others who scream ‘discrimination’ when the truth is that they are simply NOT equal in some significant area of education, training, or ability, relevant to the situation under consideration.

Now if you want to see a really strong prejudice look no further. I have a policy of zero tolerance toward people who can’t take the everyday bumps and bruises that society routinely and indiscriminately delivers. During my life so far I have, from time to time, been subjected to varying degrees of rudeness and intolerance, unfairness and physical attack. It is my responsibility to handle these as best I can and not scream out for someone else to do it for me, or expect to be recompensed in some way. Unless there is some baseless, deliberate, persistent and inescapable malice at work it is nobody’s problem but mine. And if it happens to you the same applies.

I suppose it is a matter of administrative convenience for some people to class themselves as ‘Black’. Out of all the people whom I have worked with and met, in some 30 or so countries across the world, I have never known one who was actually black. My old friend and colleague of many years ago, Charles, who was originally from Mauritius, had skin of a most attractive, deep purple hue. And I recently saw in the supermarket an extremely tall young man whose skin was extremely dark. Masai perhaps? I have not visited Africa but I understand that the Masai people are very tall and dark. Not black though. My near neighbour, Billy, although an Aboriginal Australian, is no more black than many people to be seen on Mediterranean beaches in summer. Still, ‘white’ people of a certain kind have used to soubriquet ‘blacks’ to lump together large numbers of people who did not necessarily have anything in common other than a strong distribution of melanin in their skin and a totally unjustifiable degree of social inequality. So perhaps those people have adopted the term out of defiance, now that they are gaining enough strength to demand fairness.

For baseless, deliberate, persistent and inescapable malice does still exist to varying degree in most if not all societies. And that includes those in which nobody is ‘white’. And it should concern all of us.

If you know anything about the history of slavery you may know that, contrary to popular perception, the crews of sailing ships did not rush ashore on the west coast of Africa and carry off hundreds of the local people by force. Even had they wanted to, they would have been massively outnumbered by people familiar with their own environment and perfectly competent with their own weapons to defend themselves. No. They went to see the king in one area. The ‘black’ king. And that king’s forces had attacked and overwhelmed their neighbours in order to take their land and goods. An adequate number of the defeated people were retained as slaves for the king and his people and the rest, being surplus to requirements, would have simply been killed, as was the custom in those parts. But these foreign sailors were prepared to buy them as slaves for use in their own country. So the king had them collected and penned up, whilst he entertained the sailors ashore, until there were sufficient to make up a cargo. Then he sold them. And this was good business, so it was repeated, again and again.

In the last century we have had behaviour by ‘black’ people toward other ‘black’ people in Haiti, Liberia, Angola, Rwanda and the Congo that quite equalled and sometimes exceeded the way in which ‘black’ people have been treated by ‘white’ people anywhere.

So we should be very careful when we talk of discrimination in terms of colour.

Then what of gender discrimination?

It exists. Where it exists it is often disgusting and demeaning.

And efforts to stamp it out are in no way helped by people taking extreme positions and indulging in lunatic behaviour. That sort of thing simply gives ammunition to the bigots. If the people claiming to represent those being discriminated against appear to be irresponsible or unhinged, they provide justification for the very discrimination that they purport to oppose. Obviously nobody wants irresponsible or unhinged people in positions of responsibility – although the results of our political selection process seem to defy this statement.

And that, having brought us full circle, will suffice for today.

Commentary 4, Republicanism.

I’m not doing this as well as I might. I ought to have said earlier that I am a migrant. And I feel very strongly that migrants should acknowledge that the place they have migrated to was made the way it is by the people who have already been there a long time. If the migrant thinks it is a better place than the one they left, then they should be grateful. If they think it no better, or worse, they should return whence they came. What they should not do is stay and whine about it. And what they ought not to be allowed to do is attempt to change it into a replica of the shithole that they left.

Isn’t it extraordinary that we make drivers serve a probationary period before they are allowed a full licence, and even then can suspend or cancel it if they misbehave, yet we give migrants full citizenship after a couple of years and let them keep it even if they try to destroy our society; most commonly by inciting others to perform violent criminal acts.

I am embarrassed by having been obliged to take part in elections. I don’t think that I should have been allowed to do so for at least 20 years. I could have spoiled my voting papers but that allows statisticians to count them among the idiot votes; and politicians can do enough damage with accurate statistics; we should not give them false ones to play with as well.

I did not even feel entitled to comment on the political situation until I had been here for 20 years, although I must say that I had begun to form some strong opinions after the first ten.

And now that I’ve got that over and done with we can move on to the topic of the day, Republicanism.

As far as I could judge, the only reason that we failed to become a republic after the last referendum was because of the way in which the monarchist John Howard tied the vote to the method of election. A ‘yes’ vote would have saddled us with a totally unacceptable form of election, so a ‘no’ was inevitable. A simple question ‘Should we have an Australian Head of State’ ought to have produced a ‘yes’ result and probably would have. Messrs Turnbull and Swan please note.

Our present method of pretending to acknowledge the Queen and in reality being represented by a narrowly elected political hack of dubious propriety, selected for the top job by a cabal of self seeking nonentities, ought certainly to be scrapped and the sooner the better. (I might as well call them what they are while I can. If they get their way anyone who so much as criticises them in future will be summarily locked up.)

And here’s a note for Pauline. History tells us that Abraham Lincoln failed as a farmer, failed as a lawyer, and failed in several attempts to be elected to political office. Then he was elected President of the United States of America. So when we do become a republic, give it your best shot, girl. You are already ahead of him in the election stakes. But please don’t follow his subsequent career too closely.

Commentary 5, Election.

Of course it is very difficult to get any improvement in our system of representation because any improvement will result in the ejection of many of those who are currently living well on OUR MONEY and doing little for us in return.

One thought that I had was that lawyers are well over represented in parliament. Although I then discovered that there were 27 pages of them in the Adelaide telephone directory alone, representing a considerable percentage the tiny population of South Australia. God knows how many of them there are today, for that was years ago. And there must be positive hordes of them in NSW, Victoria and Queensland.

Nonetheless there are far too many of them in politics. They would much rather argue than do any good and they are far too good at covering their tracks and devising legalised fiddles for themselves and their pals. So:

Innovation: People should be made to choose between the law and politics. Possession of a law degree should bar a person from election to public office.

I note in passing that whereas people in every other profession are required to hold an appropriate qualification, and even tradesmen are required to be qualified and licensed, any idiot can stand for election and far too many succeed in getting elected.

Innovation: People standing for election should be required to show some proof that they have studied history, philosophy and politics in depth, and demonstrated some capacity for understanding them, such as is required for a degree in any other profession.

It follows logically that politicians actually appointed to office should hold higher degrees, as is expected of people promoted to high positions in any other walk of life. We don’t expect people to walk in off the street and perform brain surgery on us; why should we allow similarly incompetent people to run the nation?

Then there is the question of remuneration. In the hard headed world of business it is axiomatic that if you want good managers you have to pay for them. The saying ‘If you pay peanuts you get monkeys’ comes to mind. Certainly a look at the salaries paid and the people currently in the top political offices of Australia at the moment does little to contradict this saying.

But business generally has a short way with non-performers. A few do manage to get away with a sack of gold at the end of their usefulness but most don’t.

Innovation: We should pay our politicians very well whilst they are doing the job and they should make provision for their later lives out of their salaries, as everyone else has to. There should be no freeloading on OUR MONEY once they are out of parliament. (If they are really such crap that they are unemployable in the real world they shouldn’t have been elected in the first place.)

And why oh why does Australia, with a population slightly less than that of Greater London, require NINE governments, one each for eight piddling little States and Territories and a Federal government sprawling over the top like a skin disease. There cannot possibly be enough competent, ethical, trustworthy people in the entire population to provide the numbers for those governments which, in any case, serve mainly to argue with and obstruct each other. And to create conflicting laws. And to make it necessary to go through the stupid rigmarole of re-registering boats, cars, trailers and God knows what else if you move house a few kilometers down the road. Which naturally requires more of OUR MONEY to be paid out to so-called ‘Public Servants’ to handle these pointless transactions. And to go through the ridiculous charade of ‘extraditing’ a wanted criminal from one State to another – although this of course puts more of OUR MONEY into the pockets of lawyers.

But then if we got rid of all the useless paper shufflers and other people in government-created non-jobs the unemployment statistics would rocket. There is an implication that large numbers of physically and mentally able people are totally unfitted for any form of constructive activity and can only be carried on the backs of those who are. And many who are constructive apparently have a mindset that makes them incapable of changing either their occupation or their physical location, so that they are unable to cope with redundancy and reinvent their lives. The car workers are by no means the only example of this, although they are in the news at the moment.

I would prefer to think that the great majority of my fellow citizens are both capable and flexible, provided that they are given the opportunity to demonstrate these qualities.

But what if there are no ‘real’ jobs?

As someone said recently – and I apologise for failing to note down the name of the speaker – an increase in the number of part-time barmaids does not seriously impact the unemployment situation. Governments do not create useful jobs. They could, however, aid and support entrepreneurs who do. Ours, on the contrary, seem devoted to obstructing job creation in every way possible. It is stupid to:

Tax companies for employing people.

Require every business to waste valuable time and manpower filling out GST returns and other non-constructive bumf.

Use the phrase ‘unfair dismissal’ to prevent employers from perfectly fairly dismissing people whom they can’t profitably employ or who don’t pull their weight.

In this context I recall something said to me many years ago by one of my work colleagues: ‘Management are far less interested in getting rid of people than in finding good people to promote’.

And since managements over the years have shown an irritating habit of wanting to promote me out of whatever cosy rut I was in and into some more challenging position I can only believe he was right.

It is surely obvious that a person is employed because the employer stands to gain by that employment. It is absurd to suggest that anyone be employed at a loss. Someone has to make up that loss and, since no employer has a bottomless pit of cash, that means US again.

I seem to have drifted away from the point a bit but it is all relevant really. The question becomes ‘How do we get rid of the politicians that waste our time and effort in this way and replace them with something better?’

Whether or not we establish the requirement to demonstrate basic competence we could do more to make the selection process reflect our wishes. From actual figures it seems that almost half of the population would like one of the major parties in power and almost half would prefer the other, with a small number desperately trying to introduce some alternatives, however ineffective these may turn out to be in practice.

This basically means that at any one time half the population is disenfranchised.

Given the skewed distribution of votes into basically two groups it would surely be practical to declare anyone gaining 25% or more of the votes cast elected. This would usually result in no more than two candidates being elected and probably not less in most cases. I would prefer it to be 25% of the available vote, so that if nobody voted nobody would be elected but I can imagine considerable resistance to that.

In any case, those elected would now more nearly represent the whole population. They might have difficulty in ‘getting things done’ but that, as you now know, is something that I approve of. It is to be hoped that they would concentrate only on things that absolutely must be done and have no chance of playing around with our lives or introducing half-witted social experiments to our detriment. In that context I would also like to see a ‘sunset clause’ on every bit of legislation, so that politicians would have to concentrate on what mattered most and would have little or no time to introduce frivolous measures.

You will notice that this idea would result in doubling the number elected. However, I am also assuming that we would come to our senses and elect only a National government, with constituency boundaries designed to result in an appropriate number of representatives.

I am rather disappointed in the performance of independent members of parliament, and even more so in the case of the Greens. They have shown themselves so desperate to retain their seats that they are willing to keep a thoroughly unpopular government in power. In the case of the Greens, in Tasmania they reneged on a promise to support the party gaining the most public support, and elsewhere they have urged aggression toward Israel – surely a country more committed to greening the land than any other – and made other lunatic pronouncements. So I do think that some evidence of a professional commitment to learning, which will I hope produce a balanced view of life and perhaps strain out the frivolous and unhinged, would be the best place to start.

Unfortunately I have no idea how to get any of the current array of politicians to support any useful form of change. I am sure they will each defend their place at the trough to the death (of someone else, of course) if need be.

Commentary 6, Parliament.

I watched some of the antics in parliament this afternoon. It really is pure theatre. They behave as if we are idiots and, since we do nothing serious about it, they must be right.

The opposition were baiting the Prime Minister and the Immigration Minister by repeatedly asking when they were each made aware of a glaring security bungle. It was immediately obvious from their flannelling that they had no intention of answering, which was sufficient to tell any intelligent person that the answer was ‘ Far later than I should have been’, unless of course the reality was ‘Immediately it was known but I didn’t bother to do anything about it.’ But this charade went on for almost the whole of question time. Interjections by minor players did nothing but provide comic relief and although the speaker did a good job of disciplining the mob it was evident that she, too, was playing a role. The arrogant and undignified behaviour of the senior government ministers was an insult to the entire electorate.

Parliament is NOT a place where points of view are calmly expressed and carefully weighed and considered by all members. Each party has its own agenda and its members have no intention of having their views swayed by reasoned argument and the presentation of facts. For the most part they are incapable of even listening to an alternative view, let alone being swayed by it. And even if they were, their party would discipline them if they showed any sign of independent thought. The few independents support the party in power in order to retain their own seats, and try to make deals in exchange for their support. The fact that they are mostly unsuccessful does nothing to weaken that support.

Where do we look for people more fitted to the job? The one obviously sincere and honest Labor member, Simon Crean, has been reviled and discredited. Kim Beasley, who has the gravitas to make a good Head of State has been cast aside. There was once even the suggestion that a known thug should be a candidate for Prime Minister but that at least seems to have raised too strong a stench for even committed socialists to tolerate. As for Kevin Rudd, it’s good to know that Julia was capable of one action benefiting the electorate. Pity it looks like being the only one. Her present crew of hangers-on show neither dignity nor presence, nor even much intelligence.

The road to the Lodge is strewn with failed candidates of far greater presence and sincerity than the present incumbent. John Hewson is a good man who failed for no discernible, rational reason; Alexander Downer made a tactless but hardly earth shattering remark and was summarily ejected by the self-elected representatives of political purity.

‘Smirking Pete’ Costello should count himself fortunate to be denied the opportunity to be thrown to the wolves. Tim Fisher could bring some dignity and intelligence to high office but he’s probably better off staying in Italy. The Liberals seem to have worked their way down through the putative leaders in descending order of intelligence and credibility. Tony Abbot is a well-meaning chap but he’s obviously going to be knifed within minutes of a Coalition victory. I doubt that his replacement will be selected on the basis of honesty and capability. And it’s difficult to see any virtue in a party that can tolerate the appalling Ruddock in its ranks.

Note to self – must say something about immigration and the treatment of asylum seekers next.

Tying in with my opinion of the Legal Department (I really can’t stomach referring to it as the Justice Department) it’s interesting that Pauline Hanson was thrown into jail with scant ceremony, simply as a result of a dishonest frame-up by her political opponents. Yet none of those responsible have been charged, yet alone punished, for any part in that extremely serious offence. And that same legal system allowed a single judge to reverse the sentence imposed on a senior magistrate who abused her position by disciplining a member of her staff for failing to support her in a personal vendetta against another staff member. Despite the fact the a jury had found her guilty. This one person was able to say that her behaviour was a permissible exercise of her authority, despite the fact that 12 level headed citizens could quite clearly see that it wasn’t.

So we see the usual interplay between lawyers (I include judges in this category) and politicians, condoning serious offences by their pals and distorting the law to damage their enemies. We are still some way from the conditions in totalitarian countries but we are much closer than we imagine and it’s not at all clear what we can do to stop the rot.

Commentary 7, Personalities.

I am finding this very difficult to write. Not because I don’t like writing; I’ve been doing that for pleasure and profit for very many years. Nor is it lack of subject matter; unfortunately there is no shortage of that when it comes to the greed, arrogance and stupidity of politicians. No, it is just that there are so many pleasanter subjects. And other activities, from music to gardening, are so much more enthralling than thinking about politics. But I will persevere.

I probably ought not to tar all politicians with the same brush. There must be SOME who are simply trying to do their best for their fellow beings. Well actually there are probably a lot but it seems that even a number of those are too arrogant to realise that they are there to represent, not rule. And worse, a number of the electorate believe that the idea is to elect people who will look after their interests by trampling over the interests of other citizens. And of course that is exactly what we see happening.

What is quite clear is that the people who end up in ministerial office are mainly what we would describe in the vernacular of my former country as arse-crawlers. The system requires that they toady up to whoever seems most likely to get the top job, and that appointment is made by spin merchants seeking their own advantage. If no other good comes out of the great Rudd fiasco it has made that fact very clear. Why anyone would want a Prime Minister who, whatever his skill in Mandarin Chinese, can’t speak his own language is beyond my understanding.

Will somebody PLEASE explain to Kevin that ALIBI is NOT a synonym for EXCUSE.

Well I suppose that packing up your office in anticipation of a well-deserved defeat may enable you to say ‘I was somewhere else when you lost the election’ but I don’t really think that is what he meant.

Sorry but that’s been irritating me all day.

I thought Penny Wong had a brain but it looks as if she’s just another hand-puppet. All that she seems capable of is regurgitating the same old mindless and meaningless socialist cliches that I’ve been hearing for over half a century. Peter Beatty was the best of a very bad bunch but his fatal flaw was that, for the benefit of his own conscience, he opposed the right of terminally ill people to terminate their lives painlessly and so condemned them to indefinite suffering. To me, that extreme lack of empathy made him entirely unfit for office. In all other respects he towered over those at present in Federal parliament, yet his party chose to ignore that fact. His successor was probably right to leave the stage at the end of her faultless performance. Anna Bligh said and did all that could have been expected of her, yet forces are already at work undermining her reputation with a smear campaign. So another bright star opts out of our orbit.

Back to Federal parliament, Bill Shorten seems to be tipped as the coming man, despite the amount of TV time that Greg Combet took up before his elevation. I think Shorten’s terse response to an amendment seeking to extend the ludicrous anti-bullying legislation to cover Union bullying ‘The government won’t support that’ was as honest as it was unedifying. I have worked on the land, in factories, in offices, on a construction site, and in the armed forces, and the ONLY bullying that I have ever encountered was Union bullying. The best counter to bullying in the workplace, as to all other work-related unpleasantness, is freedom of choice. If there are other employment opportunities, people can simply leave for another job. And good employers are quick to look after the morale of good employees, by ensuring their safety and comfort as far as conditions in the industry allow. Every petty statute that interferes with an employer’s ability to run his business profitably and fairly reduces the choices available to employees, and socialists just love to pile on petty requirements. As do conservatives; they simply do it in different areas, usually in addition to the load piled on by the other side.

For sheer personality Bob Katter stands out. Unfortunately I hear that he has the same callous attitude to the terminally ill and suffering as does Beatty. A pity, as he is otherwise the one force that might actually bring some improvement to the parliamentary process with his new party.

Tony Abbott will of course obey the dictates of his religion. I doubt that he has the moral strength of Christine Kinneally, who is publicly questioning the entrenched attitudes of her faith that have no basis in Christ’s teaching or behaviour.

So who stands out? Poor Joe Hockey may be a great bloke but he looks exactly like the stereotype of the less reputable used car salesman. Malcolm Turnbull had his day; probably too honest to survive. The other contenders – none seemingly worse than Abbott – have faded from view. Even Julie Bishop, who normally shows signs of greatness, was on TV tonight behaving not a lot better than the rest of them. Please stay out of the mud, Julie, we need you.

Maybe I’ll talk about the great ‘competition’ farce next time, with a side serving on the subject of Julia’s commitment to propping up the not-for-profit car industry with ever-increasing floods of OUR MONEY. (Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to just give money to the workers for doing nothing, instead of giving much greater amounts to Ford’s US owners?)

Or maybe banks and taxes. That is a topic that needs its own space. We’ll see.

Commentary 8, Cars and Unions.

Today we have a new example of the disaster of allowing lawyers and politicians to play around at our expense. Our State premier has introduced stringent budget measures, including swingeing increases in fines and registration charges, to stem a deficit blowout (very laudable) and in the same breath announced that a vast and hideous new palace for lawyers to play in is to be built with OUR MONEY.

Not that OUR MONEY will be used to help generate economic activity that will generate jobs and profits. No; it will be squandered on creating a hideous monstrosity in the middle of Adelaide in which lawyers can squander even more of OUR MONEY on their pointless pantomimes. We already have a foul looking excrescence bolted onto the old law courts, not very long ago, to give these parasites more luxurious ‘working’ conditions. If OUR MONEY had not been squandered on that perhaps it might have been invested in activities that could help keep the state deficit within reasonable bounds or even – perish the thought – bring it into surplus.

If we could bar lawyers from entering politics we could hope to have some politicians willing to control their endless appetite for OUR MONEY. If they can’t cope in their present quarters let there be a reduction in the frivolous and vexatious use of the law to prosecute people for trivialities and hitherto unheard of offences. Of all the projects to cancel or curb this should surely head the list.

And this is the best government we are likely to get in this State. Some years ago we elected the opposition Liberals with a majority so massive that they had the freedom to enact whatever legislation they wished. Their response was to get rid of the Premier who led them to victory and replace him with a man of whom the less said the better. Unfortunately he was not removed until he had bankrupted the State and it is hardly surprising that the voters are not anxious for a repetition. The current Labor administration may do little to inspire but even if positively inept it still looks good in comparison with its main opposition. Despite frequent change the Liberals have failed to produce anyone who could inspire the faintest degree of confidence and optimism.

There MUST be better people. Obviously our present way of doing things doesn’t encourage them to come forward. The one spark of hope is that increasing numbers of voters are starting to think for themselves instead of swallowing party propaganda. If we ever reach a point at which the sheeplike creatures who vote for a party label are outnumbered by those who think for themselves, things may change for the better. I doubt that it will happen in my lifetime though.

And talking of sheep, union membership has fallen to an all time low, with less than 20% of the workforce unionised, we are told. There is an obvious problem for unions. No doubt there are still employers willing and eager to exploit their workers but in the main the great days of fighting for a fair deal are gone. Yet if people are paying union dues they will expect action in return. So to keep their membership – and for the leaders to keep their cushy jobs and perks and maybe a free pass into a government ministry – the unions must be seen to be militant. They have to oppose someone; to demand restrictive rules to be applied to employers; even, perhaps in desperation, to legislate what people can say to each other and to invent behaviours that they can then claim to fight against.

And so far they are remarkably successful. Those 20% of the workforce now have massive representation in parliament. It is to be hoped that the remaining 80% will make their voices known at the next election.

I don’t know what proportion of the remaining union membership is employed in motor manufacturing and its supporting trades. Quite a lot I imagine. And this of course explains our Julia’s determination to prop up never-to-make-a-profit motor manufacturing with unlimited amounts of OUR MONEY.

It’s a strange business. Many years ago British Leyland apparently carried out extensive market research to discover what would be the product likely to sell the most. I don’t know if they employed Homer Simpson to do the research but some of you may recall the Simpson’s episode in which Homer’s long-lost and recently found brother asked Homer, as representative of the common man, to design the next model for his motor manufacturing business. Given Homer’s character the result was a foregone conclusion and his brother was bankrupted. British Leyland produced the P76, an ugly, gas guzzling car that pre-dated Homer’s design by a quarter of a century. But it enjoyed the same success. British Leyland is no more.

I find it fascinating that Mitsubishi’s last act here was to produce a huge, ugly, gas guzzling car, and that the government of the day bought them in quantity. I once found myself following not one but two of them, with government plates, each with a single occupant, through the city one day. About what you would expect. Nor was I surprised when Mitsubishi found the exercise unprofitable and slunk away.

Now Ford, unwilling to produce anything but one of the two iconic Australian gas-guzzlers of all time, is packing its bags. And Holden, belatedly aware of the folly of expecting continued sales of the other guzzler, has at last noticed the horde of smaller and smarter foreign designs flooding the country and begun production of a single competing design. I wonder what their market research says? Something like ‘Just hang in there and the government will keep paying’ perhaps.

If they go will there be enough union members left to help union officials into cushy jobs in government? Obviously Julia is taking no chances.

Given the shrinking number of players in car manufacturing, this seems a good time to segue into some remarks about competition. But it’s getting late so I’ll save them to next time.

Commentary 9, The Farce of Competition.

A little diversion into an area where legislation, if we really must have it, could do some good.

Unfortunately there is any amount of legislation but none of it good.

We are told that competition in business is a GOOD THING. And the government pays a bunch of lawyers – with OUR MONEY remember – to investigate anti-competitive behaviour and do little about it.

But the idea of competition in business is to destroy your competitors and take their business. It is not a game. It is basic survival of the fittest, which means ‘still be around when the rest are dead’.

And so we have a whole mass of apparently separate businesses which are in reality simply arms of the same octopus. And it is something that ought to be made very obvious.

It is not unusual for a company that has been gobbled up by a larger one to continue to operate under its original name. This despite the fact that the new management may cut costs to improve profits by lowering standards, getting rid of skilled workers and generally reducing the quality of its products or services.

A premium is generally paid for the ‘goodwill’ of the business being purchased – ‘taken over’ means much the same thing apart from being generally a less honest transaction. And that goodwill is a reflection of the quality of the goods or services provided by the purchased business. There is no obligation to maintain it however, so customers may be sucked in for some time, until they realise that the business name is no longer an indicator of the quality that they were expecting.

And the government, whilst extolling competition, actively promotes the merger of banks and other large organisations. And it allows near-monopolies to hide behind a facade of bought-up names.

(To be fair to the banks, they don’t seem to do this. They gobble up their competitors alive and leave no trace.)

Now I’m not sure what the best deal for us all is. But monopoly has historically not been regarded a GOOD THING for anyone but the monopolists. Companies that swallow or effectively control other companies should be obliged to put their own name on them. Perhaps retaining the original name for a year or so, to benefit from any goodwill that they have not yet had time to destroy, but then using their own name only, e.g. Wesfarmers.

When only this name appeared on each of the multitude of businesses that this company actually controlled we would at least be made clearly aware of the degree to which it was destroying its competitors and we might choose to support some of them, even at a higher cost to ourselves, in order to keep some choice for ourselves.

And how were the co-operative societies destroyed? Somebody found a way to extract money from them, money that the somebody had done nothing to earn. And the usual gang of lawyers devised ways of breaking into them – and eventually selling any survivors to foreign owners.

It is a very nasty mess and the only clear thing is that those Australians still lucky enough to have employment are working hard to enrich societies other than their own. The only pockets being lined belong to the people who support and enable these things. We won’t see them doing anything to improve matters.

Commentary 10, Cars and Migration.

I have been too busy with serious activities such as reorganising my shed and repairing my daughter’s caravan to spend time commenting on such trivia as politics lately. But I said I would try to keep it up, so here goes.

Today’s hot topic is Holden’s announcement that they need to cut production costs if they are to continue manufacturing cars in Australia. Predictable screeching and hair tearing in the political asylum. And the usual references to billions in ‘government money’ having been paid out to keep this loss making activity going. No. It is OUR MONEY. And Holden’s management tell us that they loose money. Well WHY? If they aren’t making anything out of it why do they bother.

Because of a deep social commitment?

Because they have so much money that they don’t mind losing a bit?

Because someone is forcing them to?

I rather doubt it.

How about because a good slice of the ‘government subsidy’ aka OUR MONEY goes straight into their pockets?

Sound more likely? You betcha.

And the workforce is adamant that they won’t work for less. Meaning that they want US to subsidise their loss-making activities with OUR MONEY, as well as showering the damn stuff over their bosses

I will vote for the first politician to say that people who have worked all their lives at useful and profitable activities should NOT be required to prop up artificial employment for people who are unwilling to get off their arses and find worthwhile work. Especially if he or she also flatly refuses even to consider giving free handouts to established foreign – or even domestic – companies.

And now I will jump to the other hot topic, migration.

Almost all of the non-indigenous people who created modern Australia came from countries that have a history of past invasions and civil wars, autocratic and dictatorial rulers, and religious conflicts. And most of the citizens of those countries stayed, fought and strove to overcome those things and establish free and democratic states. And most succeeded. The migrants to Australia generally came for greater employment or commercial opportunities and a warm climate. And most worked hard for very little financial reward.

Nowadays the world is flooded with people who find it easier to run away from what they don’t like and plonk themselves down elsewhere, expecting to be subsidised and kept until they can find what they consider a comfortable and lucrative source of income, if indeed they bother to look at all. And the politicians of the developed countries seem strangely willing to foster this attitude.

It is very harsh to suggest the people should stay in their own country and rid it from tyranny and violence by their own efforts and sacrifices. But is it not just as harsh to say that people whose ancestors did in that way establish peaceful and economically stable societies in their own countries ought to have their social structures overloaded and destroyed by people who are simply running away from their own problems instead of staying and fixing them?

Australia is not the worst affected, in terms of raw numbers anyway. Most European countries are struggling with a huge influx of people who, far from being grateful for sanctuary, are quite prepared to destroy the established society and behave in the very ways that they claim to have fled from. But Australia has a small population and lacks the resources to support a much larger.

I must also confess to a particular concern; the apparent urge to divisiveness that seems to grip much of the world’s population. Australia is already divided into piddling little states that can’t agree on such simple matters as criminal law. At what point will the new occupants start agitating for complete autonomy and the breakup of federation?

Consider a hypothetical country. This country is populated by two races, each with their own language and customs. All citizens have equal rights. Their two languages have equal official status and to provide complete fairness government business is conducted in a third language that is widely used throughout the world. Intermarriage is not uncommon, racial features are not notably different.

Now suppose that one of these races decides that it should own one half of the country outright, and some of its members decide to kill a few of the other race to convince them that they must concede half of their country. Then there are predictable reprisals, escalation, and 25 years of bloody conflict, random murder of nationals and foreign visitors, failed intercession by neutral forces and eventually a desperate, bloody battle by the forces of a government that has tried every expedient short of giving away half of its territory.

Should such a country exist, one would have to hope that the losing side would not then emigrate en-masse to Australia and start making similar demands there.

Commentary 11, Legislation gone mad.

Another interesting news item. Our sainted government is intending to pass 100 pieces of legislation into law in the final two weeks of this parliament. Why don’t these bloody people get a life? We don’t NEED 100 pieces of legislation EVER. This is all due to lawyers splitting hairs and creating complications so that other lawyers can make a fortune arguing with each other over the exact meaning of some damn petty regulation. WE DO NOT NEED THIS CRAP. All of the necessary legislation was written down 2000 years ago; it’s called the Ten Commandments. Stick with those and society will run perfectly smoothly with no need of statutes or orders in council or other lawyers’ mumbo jumbo.

Commentary 12, Legislation gone madder.

Once again we descend from the general to the specific. I disliked Julia; not just because she was a liar and apparently not too financially honest either but because she would insist in telling us all what Australians want. Well I’m an Australian and mostly they were things that I don’t want and nor do a good many other Australians that I know. But it really does seem a great shame that her one really useful achievement, getting rid of the obnoxious Rudd, should be undone at the last moment.

For the record, I would prefer a whole cabinet of Julias to one Rudd in any position. But I would be much happier with neither option.

Interesting that it was the equally obnoxious Shorten who tipped the scales. And how noble of Penny Wong to hasten into the new cabal ‘For the benefit of the nation’! It would be quite wrong to assume that Ms Wong might gain any personal benefit from this bit of blatant toadying I suppose. There really ought to be an old saying that rats desert a sinking ship much faster when they can claw their way onto another nearby – even though the buoyancy of that one may be rather questionable.

All in all I have been disappointed in the way women have failed to achieve very much in Australian politics. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect them to rise much above the level of mediocrity achieved by their male counterparts but I always imagine that they will, perhaps because my experience is that women in business so often outshine men. No doubt that is because they have to be outstanding in order to progress at all; perhaps getting elected is easier but I would have thought that for a woman to fight her way up through the closed ranks of the political establishment – particularly the neanderthal specimens that populate the leftist ranks of politics – would require far more than ordinary toughness and determination. Perhaps the struggle exhausts them, so they become bereft of ideas – and of ideals.

Heigh-ho, what does it matter? It’s all about rearranging the bloody deckchairs on the Titanic again. We will have an election. Nobody with any different ideas will be elected and even if they were they would not prevail against the stupefying weight of vested interests that our current parliamentarians bring with them. Do they have surgery at birth or is it as WS Gilbert said, they are all born into one ‘side’ of politics or the other?

Now there’s a thought. In a nation obsessed, so it seems, with ‘Sport’ – which really means contests between mostly foreigners, hastily given visas, representing allegedly ‘local’ or even ‘national’ teams – is there actually anyone even interested in original ideas, let alone capable of conceiving them. It is very noticeable that spokesmen – they are never women – of the ‘left’ persuasion are frequently those of distressingly familiar ilk originating from the more northerly parts of the British Isles, from where, presumably, the locals became so nauseated by them that they drove them out. The main characteristic of those on the ‘right’, however, is a remarkable degree of nonentity although in a few cases, of which the despicable Ruddock is the prime example, this is combined with a striking capacity for viciousness.

I must admit that my own opinion of these people is formed only from their public pronouncements on radio and television and, in the case of those elected, their actual behaviour in Parliament. I hope that I have more sense than to be unduly influenced by press reports, which are always partisan, or the idiotic trick questioning employed by radio or TV interviewers. Are those elected the inevitable result of ‘democracy’ of the ‘everyone votes’ persuasion? Watching some people behaving half-wittedly in a car recently, my wife said ‘And they vote’, to which I replied ‘Yes, and it shows’. So if we want at least half-way intelligent politicians perhaps we have to find a way of excluding those electors who are incapable of rational thought. I have the usual problem with this; how can we trust the people who will do the excluding? Of course, we can’t. We just have to hope that the mentally competent will one day be in the majority.

Nothing shows the degree of unbalance among the electorate more clearly than the many opinion polls to which we are treated with such frequency. How on earth can so many people change their likelihood of voting for the same old gangs on an almost daily basis, responding the most trivial incidents or statements regardless that the main parties remain, in the favourite phrase of an old friend of mine, ‘same dog – washed’. Socialists will still carry out lunatic social experiments at our expense – and failing; conservatives will go on trying to enrich the few at the expense of the many – and succeeding. Greens and independents, we now know, will support the least popular party for ever if it means retaining their own seats and screwing a few insignificant favours from those in power. Doesn’t leave many options does it?

Am I doing people an injustice? Perhaps they are really quite consistent and just so disgusted with the intrusiveness of these polls that they change their answers at random. And faced with only unpalatable alternatives why would they want to encourage either? Now a poll that asked ‘Which of them don’t you want a bar of at any cost?’ could be both illuminating and entertaining.

And do people really want this endlessly increasing interference in their lives? Some quango consisting of a bunch of lawyers well overpaid out of OUR MONEY has just decided to fine an Internet company for false advertising because, although they honestly stated the monthly cost of their service, they failed to say that there was a sign-up cost. Well for God’s sake! The customers would have been told about that before they signed up – and it’s a perfectly normal practice. Surely there is plenty of genuinely sneaky advertising and sharp practice that they could have investigated but it’s typical lawyer/politician behaviour to find some way of penalising an unsuspecting citizen or company for something that nobody even suspected was an offence until then.

I’ve spoken before about the police wanting extra sums of OUR MONEY to begin FIGHTING CRIME – presumably because they are spending all of the money that they have already received on more trivial activities. Now we see a sort of pseudo police playing more purposeless games at OUR EXPENSE. What is it that impels this endless striving to find pointless and unprofitable ways of interfering in peoples lives whilst neglecting the obligation to protect them from deliberate and malicious acts?

Innovation. Introduce a law of simple triage.

Ask ‘Was anyone harmed?’

If the answer is ‘nobody’ either dismiss the charge or refer it to minor tribunal to deal with.

If yes, ask ‘How?’

If the answer is ‘Physically’ ask ‘Was it by a deliberate act intended or likely to cause harm?’

If yes, refer to criminal court. If no, refer to accidental injury tribunal.

If the answer was ‘Financially ask ‘How significant was the sum involved in relation to the plaintiff’s circumstances?’

If not very, refer to minor tribunal to deal with.

If yes, refer to Fraud tribunal.

As I have said elsewhere, the courts should not be a lottery.

No playing lady bountiful with other people’s money. Support for injured people should not be conditional on the manner in which they were injured, nor should it consist of cash handouts. A national scheme should provide for all necessary medical expenses and support equipment for as long as necessary, for any injured citizen regardless of how injured.

Other financial powers should be confined to enforcing payment of legally incurred debts and the return of monies wrongly obtained, including reasonable interest. (This latter field DOES offer some scope for action, such as recovering amounts wrongly retained or improperly moved by banks, which are notoriously casual in the ways in which they delay payments and retain monies for their own benefit, to the detriment of their customers.)

And whilst we are on the subject of JUSTICE as opposed to LAW as currently practiced, a word or two about punishment.

Punishment should be equable. A $100 fine for a person whose total income is $400 a week is NOT the same punishment for a person whose income is $4,000 or $40,000 a week. In fact it is impracticable to scale fines to income and by and large courts should not be in the money collecting business anyway. The armed forces have a fine tradition of inflicting inconvenience and discomfort for minor infringements and this method should be employed.

Commentary 13, The Stench Rises.

Why don’t I put this stuff on facebook? Well looking at the behaviour of the Great Unwashed who inhabit that place doesn’t lead me to suppose that thinking is one of their activities, and I am hoping to encourage thinking and constructive criticism by this blog.

Apparently a few million of those screaming loonies rushed to abuse the couple of young people whose joke phone call to a London hospital apparently triggered a tragedy. I say ‘apparently’ because nobody with any sense would anticipate that redirecting a fake call would cause anyone to take their own life. The call MAY have been the final incident that caused the tragedy, although we don’t know that, but it certainly was insignificant compared to whatever caused the unfortunate recipient to feel so desperate. If vilification were appropriate it should be directed at whoever caused or compounded that desperation in the first place.

However, the harm done to those young people by the spite and vindictiveness directed at them clearly IS the fault of the abusers and no-one else. It is certainly enough to make those two contemplate suicide and it seems to me that the abusers should have to answer a charge of deliberate mental cruelty. Bertrand Russell wrote of the innate cruelty in the human race, citing how when a heretic made a particulary spectacular recantation they might be granted the mercy of strangulation before being thrown into the flames, and how the crowd would then become aggressive and threatening because it had been denied the pleasure of seeing the victim writhing in agony as she or he burned to death. No doubt the loonies who wrote to facebook are their direct descendants.

All of which is another digression, as I had meant to say something more about our woefully defective legal system. (By the way, if you want to bet that Eddie Obeid and his pals get off scot free I for one won’t take your money.)

I was actually thinking that it is a pity that nobody ever says ‘What good will this (prosecution or sentence) do? And perhaps even more importantly ‘What harm will it cause?. Well maybe a lot of people do ask those questions but it isn’t the responsibility of anyone with the authority to DO something about it to ask them. Everyone in authority allows the ‘Letter of the Law’ to override decency and good sense. I think moral cowardice may be a formal entry requirement in the Law and Politics

I happened to watch a bit of one of those boring ‘Border Security’ or whatever, programs on TV recently. A young man was being refused entry to Canada because he had at some past time been banned from driving for a while in England. This raises some interesting questions doesn’t it? The punishment for an offence of any kind clearly includes details of that offence to be broadcast to all and sundry so that they can inflict further punishments for the rest of the person’s life. I think the courts should make that clear in each case.

I have always seen the paradox in branding someone a criminal so that no one will then employ them or trust them with capital, thus preventing them from making a living by any honest endeavour as an employee or in business. Obviously once a criminal always a criminal, regardless of any desire to be honest. I can see that people feel that they should be warned about those who have been convicted – even though it is obvious that there are far more dishonest people enjoying the freedom to continue fleecing their neighbours simply because they have enough of their victims’ money to hire the best lawyers and grease the right palms. But publishing details of a motoring offence so that a person can be denied a holiday visit to another country? That simply stinks.

I suppose this is a new thing, as I was allowed to visit Canada, despite having had a couple of speeding fines and a parking ticket in the past. Obviously I won’t be going there again – I don’t want to pay to fly all that way and then get put on the next plane home. In fact I wonder if there are any countries that I could now visit. Or would even want to if that is the way they behave.

Next time I must talk about ‘Reduced to Penury’ which I advocate as an appropriate punishment for crimes of the ‘Bond’ persuasion.

14

OK. Reduced to Penury.

I suppose it was the Alan Bond business that started me thinking of this but it fits very well with my concept of punishments that should inflict appropriate pain on the offender. According to reports, Bond spent, along with other fraudulently obtained sums, the entire contents of the pension funds of the companies of which he gained control. Now the first thing that comes to mind is that the names of every one of the pensioners whom he defrauded should be recorded as the winning syndicate for the successful Americas Cup Challenge by Australia 11. After all, they paid for it.

But the fact remains that Bond, after serving a notional sentence in vestigal custody, was free to take up his activities once more and was reportedly soon living a millionaire lifestyle in London. As far as I know he still is.

And the pensioners whom he had defrauded were sentenced to live out the remainder of their lives in relative poverty.

My contention is that Bond, and any other convicted financial fraudsters, should be sentenced to be Reduced to Penury. By that I mean that they should possess NO financial assets of any kind and have access to no more than the basic age pension. And it should be made very clear that ANYONE attempting to alleviate this by providing him with money, accomodation, or goods would be liable to the same penalty.

In Bond’s case I think ‘for the remainder of his life’ would be appropriate. His passport would be cancelled of course and anyone attempting to aid him in leaving the country would be subject to the same penalty. He would only be sharing the fate of the people he had defrauded, so it’s hardly a harsh punishment.

For other criminals the length of sentence could be reduced if thought necessary, to reflect the gravity of their specific offence. But they should have at least a taste of what they were prepared to inflict on others.

Electronic tagging and a requirement to report to police daily would help to keep track of their lives – with no money they wouldn’t have much to occupy their time anyway.

As far as I know, no action was ever taken against the person who returned Skase’s passport to him, enabling him to take his stolen wealth and flee to Spain – where no doubt a fair bit of it was paid out to enable him to avoid extradition. I think that was a good case for Reduction to Penury and I think any banker found to have transferred funds out of the country for a fugitive would be a good candidate also.

That brings us back to another of my hobby horses, responsibilty and accountability. Decisions are made by individuals; they may scheme to obtain some sort of group decision to protect their hide, in which case the individuals comprising that group – board, committee, council, whatever – should understand that they will all be personally accountable for the decision. And will be each liable to the same punishments for offending behaviour which results from that decision as would apply to an individual making that decision.

And speaking of inequity – which is what I have been doing, in case you didn’t notice – if you are poor and suspected of dishonesty you are rounded up by police and brought before the magistrates, who ignore anything that you say and throw you into prison. Or, if the offence is considered beyond their jurisdiction, they send you before a judge who does the same thing.

If, however, you are rich and politically connected, there is an extremely expensive enquiry, which makes lots of lawyers rich, and THEN, if you are found to be guilty of some skulduggery, a decision is made WHETHER to prosecute you. More lawyers then become rich attempting to prevent this – usually successfully. In the event that they fail, they become even richer performing a farce in court that ends in your eventual release. And even then it only takes a fraction of the money that you have dishonestly obtained.

Should you have trouble believing this I suggest that you follow the Australian news over the next weeks and months, during which the second act of one of these farces will be played out exactly as I have described above. And nobody in authority will stand up and protest at the futility and waste of it.

Now for a quick look at contemporary politics.

Once again the Great Unwashed have spoken. Labor under Julia – BAD! Labor under Billy Bunter – sorry, for younger readers unfamiliar with the unpleasant fat boy of last century’s comic strips, Krudd – WONDERFUL.

OK there is no credible opposition; Abbot says nothing, fluently, and poor old Joe looks more like a used-car salesman every day. The Greens are not so much mentally defective as mentally devoid and the Democrats effectively shot themselves in the foot by basing their attempt at revival on a set of policies from cloud-cuckoo land. The splinter parties have nothing worthwhile to offer except a few parish-pump sweeties for oddballs and the independents have been thoroughly discredited by the actions of those who are now slinking away.

I wonder how long it will take Shortarse to stab Krudd in the back if he wins again – which is regrettably likely. No doubt this time Shortarse will want to take over himself, rather than elect another puppet. His last one wasn’t very biddable after all. I wonder if the Great Unwashed realise this – and whether they even care.

It’s not even good theatre. More like a fifth rate sitcom, suitable for screening at 3am, between Home Shopping and DIY Surgery.

15

Well, well, well, we are to have an election at last. We will be expected to choose between unpalatable alternatives and will NOT have the facility to indicate that none of them are, in our opinion, worth a vote.

My wife and I agree that voting papers should have the provision for abstention to be registered and that the number of abstentions should be published. This would give a useful indication of the degree of confidence that the public have in the candidates. And might encourage some better ones to come forward.

We have been discussing whether our responsibilty as citizens is to refuse to attend the polling station (this is compulsory in Australia) also refuse to pay any fine resulting from this, and therefore go to gaol in order to make our point. After all, better people than we have gone to gaol for their political principles.

We decided that we would be quite willing to do this except for one problem; it appears that a majority of our fellow citizens actually WANT to vote for the bunch of dodgy incompetents that pass for candidates here; so what is the point in making sacrifices to improve the system for them?

The other scheme that I am rather fond of is that anyone who can command over 25% of the available vote – not merely of the votes cast – should gain a seat. It’s unlikely that more than two candidates will achieve this and it does offer the possibility of a spread of views in debate rather than polarisation toward one or another incompatible ideologies.

The ABC has cooked up a scheme for seeing how well people’s preferences accord with the stated intentions of the main parties. That would be quite useful and interesting except for the fact that the parties not only have no obligation to do what they say, once in power, but all have a track record of welshing on their promises as soon as they achieve power. And I don’t mean when they are forced by outside influences to change their plans; they do it whenever it suits them to do so.

Their statements have no purpose beyond the short term aim of gaining votes.

There has been much loose talk about who is the most ‘fair dinkum’. I can’t see myself that there is much to choose between 2% fair dinkum and 3%, which is about as much of any of them is.

16

Job Creation! There’s a popular political tag for you. Every politician and his or her dog claims to be able to create jobs. Let’s think about that for a minute.

We know that due to the preponderance of lawyers in politics there is a constant creation of statutes and regulations that:

a. Are almost incomprehensible, requiring an army of lawyers to interpret them and a second army of lawyers to argue with the first, and

b. Require an army of ‘public servants’ to implement them and impose them upon the public.

If we define ‘job’ as any activity for which the person performing the activity is paid, then this creates jobs – and they are certainly well paid.

If, however, we define ‘job’ as ‘something constructive that contributes to the wealth or wellbeing of society’ we can discount most of the foregoing.

There is still plenty of scope of course, not only in directly constructive activities like agriculture, engineering, manufacturing, mining and construction but also in those areas that support activity, make life easier and provide fun and recreation. Cleaning, shopkeeping, servicing, road-mending, hospitality, hairdressing, transport, communications, entertainment, education, medicine – the list is almost endless. But all the items on this list have one thing in common, they consist of people doing things to benefit other people – either producing something of value or helping to share out the benefits of production between everyone.

But the people on the second list have to carry the enormous burden of entirely supporting those on the first.

Whether entrepreneur, manager, technician, specialist or workman they all have to contribute to the support of this massive collection of drones. And when the government creates more of those non-jobs it simply dilutes the wealth of those performing actual work.

It’s not only the fat salaries and free motor cars and other perks; the expenditure on accommodation for the drones is stupendous. The Australian Tax Office spreads its tentacles across a swathe of first class office accommodation; the so-called ‘Justice’ departments are provided with lavish premises at the expense of the wealth creators. And these are obvious examples. The spreading tentacles of government at all levels act like a wasting disease on society. The wealth created is in fact bled off to such an extent that it is impossible to accumulate capital to fund more wealth creation. So all enterprise has to be funded by bank loans at exorbitant interest. Bank profits are soaring even as the economy crashes in flames.

Jobs are created by entrepreneurs; people who are prepared to risk everything and make enormous efforts for the promise of great reward – eventually. And employers employ people so that they can make more profit than by their own individual effort. It is absurd to expect them to employ people at a loss and ridiculous to suggest that they want to get rid of them when they are making a profit. Oh there will always be a few crappy employers who want to exploit those who work for them. The cure for that is simple; when there are ample employment opportunities an employee who is unhappy with his or her job can simply go elsewhere.

So, how do you create jobs; real jobs?

1. Allow and encourage the accumulation of capital.
2. Provide support for startup enterprises.
3. Allow employers to hire and fire as they see fit.
4. Reduce the manpower needed to comply with regulations to an absolute minimum, by keeping those regulations as few and as simple as possible.
5. Savagely reduce the number of parasites that the creators of wealth are obliged to support.
6. DO NOT support failing enterprises with OUR MONEY. Don’t give it to the owners of inefficient businesses and don’t use it to subsidise freebies for fat cats in the ‘Public Service’, so as to prop up those failing businesses.
7. If you really must have regulations, regulate the degree to which one business may gobble up others. Once a business is sufficiently powerful to distort the market it destroys the very enterprise culture that creates jobs.

Well that’s a start. I have not heard anyone in our political galaxy talk about any of this so far and I very much doubt that I ever will.

I don’t suppose any of them will propose getting rid of our absurdly complicated tax laws either, although there are ludicrously simple alternatives. All of those tax inspectors, tax agents, and tax lawyers would have to get real jobs wouldn’t they? A few weeks mucking out an abbatoir would do them good.

17

I try to be fair and acknowledge that politicians are only people, and could just be a representative sample of humanity, each doing their best according to their ability.

I try. But it’s hard to do when the sample is so fairly representative that it appears to include the idle and the dishonest and the incompetent and the plain greedy in true proportion to their presence in the general population.

Surely there ought to be some mechanism to filter out the least attractive specimens of humanity. Or are these really the best we can come up with?

Just look at the principal players in our current farce here in Australia.

KRudd, the portentous, all knowing saviour of the nation. Actually I kept forgetting ‘portentous’ and in trying to remember came up with other ‘p’ words, such as ‘porcine’, ‘petty’, ‘presumptuous’ , even ‘pestilential’, all of which were valid but none of which encapsulated his air of smug self-satisfaction and superiority as well as ‘portentous.

It seems just possible that other people have belatedly decided that they really don’t like this attribute any more than I do.

Abbott. Well named. There is a bit of the religious freak just under the surface I think. I don’t really dislike him but it would be hard, and probably unwise, to trust him. And the sight of the repellent Ruddock lurking behind him in a recent picture reminds us that his entourage contains some without whom the world would definitely be a better place.

Back to the other side, Albanese looks and acts as if he would be more at home in a Naples back alley with a stiletto in his hand.

The independent Nick Xenephon adds some much needed colour and a degree of integrity to the Senate but his announced decision to direct his ludicrous ‘preferences’ toward the main parties and thus shore up their continuing fortunes is greatly to be regretted.

And these are the main protagonists at the Federal level. South Austalian politicians of both main persuasions are completely colourless but seem to keep their skeletons decently hidden away in the cupboard for the main part. In Victoria and New South Wales politics has become so farcical that it would fail as a sit-com due to lack of credibility. And although in Queensland and Western Australia attention does seem to be paid more toward running the state than backbiting – both between and within the major parties – there is in both States a history of school-yard triviality that is probably festering behind the scenes and liable to break out again at any moment.

I have not mentioned the puppet-masters, crawling hidden behind the scenes and manipulating the public personages to their will. But they are there, and seem to have the capability to pull the strings of both parties, regardless of their own apparent affiliations. This is shown by the rush by both Krudd and Abbott to give large sums of OUR MONEY to the management and shareholders of General Motors and Ford. This is clearly done to appease the Union movement, whose members are apparently incapable of any constructive activity beyond the assembly of motorcars. And those unfortunate members have sacrificed pay and conditions in order to swell the wallets of those heading GM and Ford. These are American companies, in case nobody has noticed, and they require OUR MONEY, and the cut-price efforts of their Australian workers, in order to MAKE A PROFIT. Well fine; that is what business is all about. But it doesn’t take a mathematical genius to work out that if sales minus wages and overheads produces a positive figure, then no support is necessary. If it’s zero or negative then OUR MONEY will be used to fill the hole and provide a pseudo profit for the Americans.

OUR MONEY will NOT buy technology that enables these companies to operate more efficiently, so as to not only make a genuine profit whilst paying decent wages but also ro repay OUR MONEY with appropriate interest. This is obvious from the fact that the money is going to continue to be paid out indefinitely. So every Australian taxpayer will be supporting the economy of the USA for the unforeseeable future. And every Australian business will be dragged down to a level of inefficiency by the need to pour money into American wallets.

Meanwhile, we are reportedly selling our prime agricultural land to foreign companies, whilst bankrupting out own farmers and, in Victoria at least, driving them to suicide.

And the other burning issue is that of ‘boat people’. A lot of misdirected attention is caused by the blanket use of the terms ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers’ when applied to people who may or may not fall within those categories. A simple statement that we will do everything in our power to help and protect people whose lives are at risk through no fault of their own, but will ruthlessly eject anyone posing as a refugee simply to gain a commercial advantage by coming here, would seem appropriate.

I cannot see why there is a wish to grant people full citizenship before they have demonstrated a willingness to behave as responsible citizens. Why throw away the capacity to easily eject fakers, frauds and criminals? Issuing provisional visas that require frequent renewal would ensure that people couldn’t easily disappear into the general population until they had shown themselves fit to be accepted as citizens, and it would no longer be necessary to lock people up indefinitely whilst they awaited ‘processing’. They could be quickly released into the care of support groups, who would have to provide a bond. Support groups who ‘lost’ applicants would first lose their bond and then, if more losses occurred, their support group status. More importantly, they would have both the ability and the incentive to quickly identify and report fakes.

I don’t see any evidence of our representative sample of humanity proposing to deal with these matters. They seem to be obsessed with jeering at each other – and giving away OUR MONEY – to the exclusion of all else.

18

Sorry. Local Australian Politics creeping in again.

Oh dear; I don’t want to become partisan, none of them are worth it, but every time I turn on the TV to see if there is any news being reported – how foolish can you be – I am confronted by the unlovely features of KRudd, slavering before picked audiences of the faithful.

So in the absence of anything more stimulating or useful I will indulge in some comment on our futile and meaningless political manoeuvering.

KRudd has chosen as his most promising target the Paid Parental Leave scheme, proposed by the Liberal/National coalition, that will provide mothers with 26 weeks of paid parental leave. The amount paid will be in proportion to the mother’s wage, capped at $75,000.

Now it should be obvious to anyone that most employed women receive very low wages and therefore the majority will receive nothing like $75,000.

It should also be obvious that millionaires do not as a rule work for wages. Therefore the proportion of their wage that they are entitled to will come to zero.

So I am sick and tired of hearing KRudd banging on about how the scheme will give all women, even millionaires, $75,000. The majority of women who support KRudd’s party wil be lucky to get anything, on the pathetic wages paid to carers, nurses, cleaners, shop workers and other exploited women. But if KRudd has convinced them that they will get $75,000 under a Coalition government I can’t see why they would vote for him. As to his other point, that self-funded retirees will have to help pay for this, I am a self-funded retiree and I’m happy help working women but NOT to subsidise unprofitable car companies in order to enrich their American owners.

As an extra treat I have also been subjected to rants from Shortarse and Penny Wong. The only good thing about these is that they are so predictable and so unbelievable that it’s quite safe not to go on listening to them – as indeed is the case with KRudd. But in the seconds before the TV responds to the kill switch there are a few items that I pick up on.

Shortarse was putting across the standard Utopian vision at the National Press Club. You could have read everything that he said in a Fabian Society pamphlet from the 1920’s. About as controversial as Motherhood and Apple Pie to an American. What he didn’t say was how people who are incapable of organising the installation of roof insulation without getting other people killed were hoping to achieve these wonders in health, education, and social wellbeing.

And then Penny. True, her ability to leap from one sinking ship to another in a single bound must command our admiration. Unfortunately she has few other qualities of this magnitude. She can only drivel on in similar vein to Krudd and Shortarse.

None have explained their apparent incapability to anticipate that the resources boom could not continue forever and their failure to make any provision whatsoever to ameliorate the effects when it ended. They dissipated the large surplus that they inherited from the Coalition and, far from making provision to fund their proposed Utopian society, they have mortgaged our grandchildren’s future and already blown the proceeds on pointless and impractical schemes.

The Coalition may take no comfort from these comments – not that I expect it to see or heed them – it has yet to demonstrate that it has any better qualities or abilities.

The decision by Krudd to use OUR MONEY to give dividends to the American owners of car manufacturing companies, in order to buy ‘jobs’ for people whom they hope will vote for them is understandable. The coalition’s promise to do the same will certainly alienate many voters who object to being taxed for this purpose.

19

As you know, I try not to make smart remarks about the political woes of other countries – we can hardly claim any shining examples of integrity and worth on the Australian political scene. But recent events in the USA have been treated with considerable bias by many commentators and I thought it necessary to try and show them in a more sympathetic light. I don't say that they are right, only that they should be viewed in context and that blame for their imposition should be reserved for those whose antisocial acts give credence to acts of repression.

 

Interestingly there have always been real people determined to kill other people, steal what they have and enslave them. The 'Barbary Pirates' of the Mediterranean were robbing merchant ships , holding the rich to ransom and flogging the non-rich to convert them to Islam, whilst using them as slaves, in the time of Nelson. But that is a modern innovation. The Norsemen were robbing, pillaging and slaying (what the hell is pillaging anyway - must look it up later) in far earlier times and the Romans operated under a similar ethos.

In our own time Hitler's attitude to the 'Untermenchen' was the same. Kill them and take the
spoils for the benefit of the deserving.

You can't fight these people without getting your hands dirty. THEY make the rules. And just to complicate matters, when it comes to nation versus nation or ideology versus ideology, there are some of the same sort of people on each side.

I am not going to introduce a prescription for dealing with this. Far better people than me are trying and failing. If you kill all of the enemies without - and the huge number of non-enemies that will be
inevitably by killed in what is cosily referred to as 'collateral damage' - you will simply be confronted by the enemies within. And they will be relieved of the distraction of outward influences and so able to turn all of their violence upon you.

We keep hoping and kidding ourselves that humanity is growing up and becoming socially responsible. It's not. Some always have been; many never will be.

There was a brief hope that the Internet would have some sort of levelling and educating influence, showing people that their differences were simply cosmetic and that their best chance of the life that they wanted was to work together and settle their differences peacefully.

And who provided the Internet - created the backbone for purely MILITARY purposes and then made it available to the world? The abused, tormented, confused and assaulted USA, that's whom.

It's not the US gummint, whatever their failings and weaknesses, who have filled it with garbage and evil. And if they then choose to search it for clues that enable them to anticipate and ward off evil, why should they not do so? Yes, their own citizens, and those of other countries, will suffer abuse as a result. If detaining me in an airport under rather unpleasant conditions for a few hours is the price of preventing several thousands of citizens, of many countries, being killed and maimed - remember the World Trade Center? - I don't feel that I have cause to complain.

Loss of innocence is something that humans suffer in many ways. Scanning email is just another instance.

The sky won't fall; some religious lunatic will blow us all up into it. Whether they are sincere or only exploit it as a handy excuse, 'belief' is always involved. Belief in God; in a Nation's Destiny; in the Tooth Fairy; what does it matter? Evil will find an excuse to thrive. It's so much easier than working and the rewards are much bigger.

There are better things to fight against than the USA's attempts to defend itself, however inept its behaviour.

20

Today, contrary to my usual preference I am going to venture again into International waters. I have spent time in half of the States of the USA and met great kindness there. (And, in case you should think that this prejudices me unfairly toward Americans, I have spent time in at least 25 other countries – including Turkey, Egypt , Sri Lanka,The Yemen and Israel – and have received similar kindness in all of them.) Although I have serious misgivings about the actions of American politicians in the use of military force throughout the world, and condoning intrusion into the privacy of their own citizens, I believe that insofar as these actions are sanctioned by the American public it is only through fear and desperation. I try not to second-guess the probity or otherwise of American politicians; although the temptation is sometimes great.

Here I give the view of one American citizen and my own response.

This friend, a concerned American citizen who is by no means a committed pacifist, is troubled by acts of aggression by the USA, now and in the not too distant past. In response to my contention, in the previous blog, that the USA is not inherently evil he wrote:

….when and at what point does one become a barbarian, no better
and sometimes worse than one’s enemy.  Agreed about the very real force
that is evil as well…

My response to that, which he urged me to print in this blog, was:

Agreed. One can become worse, if sufficiently desperate. (I have just
slain my ISP. Not actually life-threatening but they eventually angered
me out of all proportion to their misdeeds.)

The point I would like to make is that the blame for evil should be laid
squarely at the feet of those whose behaviour provoked it in the first
place. If you prod a lion with a stick he may attack someone other than
you but that won’t be the lion’s fault, it will be yours.

Similarly, there seems to be no sympathy in the world’s press for the
many Egyptian policemen being murdered as they try to prevent people
from murdering each other. They were not being violent or attacking
anyone when people were going about their normal lives, only after
savage provocation, when their own lives were threatened.

The Egyptian policemen who interviewed me in Port Said when our
temporary crew member left (our sailboat) were polite, kindly and humorous.
I expect that they have all retired by now but am sickened by the
thought that others like them have been slaughtered for simply trying to
do their job.

We often see lesser instances where police are blamed because some
lunatic causes death or injury to innocent – or at least, uninvolved –
bystanders when trying to avoid arrest. The USA was fated to become the
world’s policeman whether or not it wished, simply because of its size
and power. And after enjoying the luxury of criticising the UK in that
role it is now facing the same problems on a larger scale – and making
the same mistakes. It can be greedy, incompetent and overbearing. It can
be very wrong and very stupid. But it is NOT evil. The lion is being
hurt and is lashing out blindly.

The nastiness in Egypt has been caused by the people who used democracy
only to destroy it. They should not be allowed to try and shift the
blame elsewhere. And anyone helping them to try and do so must be at
least partly responsible also. It seems strange that the US has not
unequivocally backed the military who, far from seeking to keep power
for themselves, were trying to restore democratic government as soon as
possible.

Too often diplomacy is an excuse for avoiding responsibility. Dithering
in the Balkans was responsible for thousands of deaths, as it was also
in Sri Lanka. In both cases, strict and decisive action as soon as the
initial terrorism occurred could have protected thousands of innocent
people. Will everyone now stand back and see Egypt torn apart? Just like
Syria? We shall see.

21

We are all pretty used to the concept of a ‘Conscience Vote’; so much so that we never pause to consider the implications of the concept. At least, I didn’t and I doubt if many other people have either. Yet when you do stop to consider it the implications are profound.

If you are as old as me you will have read ‘Pinochio’ as a child. If you are younger you may well remember the Disney version, with the catchy tune ‘Give a Little Whistle’. In either case, you are probably familiar with the line ‘And always let your conscience be your guide’.

The key word here is ‘Always’. Not ‘Sometimes’. Not ‘When it doesn’t interfere with political expediency’. Not ‘Just when it poses no risk to yourself’. Always!

The implication is that you always support what you believe to be right. That’s what ‘conscientious’ means; doing the right thing to the best of your ability. Always! Not just when your political masters graciously permit it.

Now isn’t that interesting! Do you want YOUR elected representatives to be conscientious?

Do you want the people who you elected to govern your country or your state to vote AGAINST what they deeply believe to be right, whenever other members of their party want them to?

Let’s try another sentence:

NEVER let your conscience be your guide unless there is a specific ‘Conscience Vote’.

Doesn’t sound really good, does it? But that’s the system that we have. No doubt there are many instances when voting according to the party line is what conscience dictates anyway. One would hope so.

So perhaps it would change nothing if the normal practise was for elected representatives to vote according to their consciences and for the parties to declare a ‘No Conscience Vote’ whenever they wanted to ensure that all of their members voted according to the party line.

It won’t happen of course. A real shame; I would love to see a party leader standing up and declaring “We are going to impose a ‘No Conscience’ vote on this motion” And when we saw it happening time after time perhaps we would at last realise what a farce the concept of individuals representing their electorates is. And would draw attention to how far the party leaders believed that their chosen course of action might offend the consciences of a significant number of their members.

Of course there are plenty of unthinking people who only vote for a label anyway. That is borne out by the way in which opinion polls fluctuate week by week. If there is a person whom you think would make a good Representative for your constituency why would your opinion of that person rise and fall according to the reported antics of some party leader? Conversely, why would you be prepared to vote for that person despite the fact that he or she appeared to be in some way dishonest or deviant? But they do, don’t they.

There is no debate in Parliaments or their equivalent bodies. Each party member – if he attends the reading of a bill at all – excoriates the views of the opposition and lauds the claims of his own party. No impassioned justification ever dents the impervious shell of party belief. No calmly considered criticism ever moves the opponents to reconsider the virtues of their stance. Claims are made; invective is hurled; and the outcome, having been decided far in advance, is unaffected by anything that is said. It is, said Churchill, the best system that we have been able to come up with. Well over half a century later we have not only failed to improve on it, we have reduced it to a farce.

22

I have commented on the paucity of debate in our political institutions – and the substitution of mindless invective in its place; a process which has advanced to near perfection here in Australia.

The natural corollary to this is abandonment of any pretence of debate or discussion in favour of rubber stamp approval of the will of the majority, unclouded by any alternative view. It seems though that the rituals must still be performed, if only to lull the gullible into unconditional acceptance of the unpalatable reality.

The following words are not mine, although I have made some slight alterations so as to show them applicable to the general case, rather than restricted to the body to which they originally referred.

‘Except for the few minutes it takes to vote, my colleagues and I don’t spend much time on the floor. Most decisions, about what bills to call and when to call them, about how amendments will be handled and how uncooperative members will be made to cooperate, will have been worked out well in advance by the majority leader, the relevant committee chairman, their staffs, and (depending on the degree of controversy involved, and the magnanimity of the opposition member handling the bill) their counterparts on this side.

By the time we reach the floor and the clerk starts calling the roll, each of the members will have determined – in consultation with his or her staff, caucus leader, preferred lobbyists, interest groups, constituent mail, and ideological leanings – just how to position him or herself on the issue.’

(Note that conscience is not consulted here.)

‘It makes for an efficient process, which is much appreciated by the members, who are juggling 12 or 13 hour schedules and want to get back to their offices to meet constituents or return phone calls, or to a nearby hotel to cultivate donors, or to a television studio for a live interview.

If you stick around though, you may see one lone member standing at his desk after the others have left, seeking recognition to deliver a statement on the floor. It may be an explanation of a bill he’s introducing, or it may be a broader commentary on some unmet national challenge. The speaker’s voice may flare with passion; his arguments – about cuts to programs for the poor or obstructionism on judicial appointments, or the need for energy independence – may be soundly constructed. But the speaker will be addressing a near-empty chamber; just the presiding officer, a few staffers, the official reporter and the unblinking eye of the TV camera. The proposer will finish and the statement will be gathered for the official record. Another member may enter as the first departs; stand at her desk, seek recognition, and deliver her statement in the same ritual manner.

In one of the world’s greatest deliberative chambers, no one is listening.’

These words, originally written by Barack Obama in reference to the United States Senate, sum up perfectly the farcical performance that is enacted daily by what are supposedly deliberative gatherings the world over. The pathos of the last line is appropriate to the obituary for the concept of discussion, debate, and above all willingness to listen receptively and learn. To use the argot of the ’60s, Backroom deals rule OK.

The simple fact is that the legislative process overwhelms the legislators for one simple reason only:

THERE IS TOO MUCH LEGISLATION AND TOO LITTLE DEBATE

Contrary to widely held belief, the gummint ought NOT to do anything about most things and there ought NOT to be a Laura Ginnit. Furthermore, ALL legislation should lapse after a period of 10 years at most; preferably five. This should help to ensure that there is no time to keep reviving unnecessary restrictions on the populace and concentrate the minds of their elected representatives on the few issues worthy of their attention. Perhaps then we might see the culture of discussion, cooperation and compromise that produces worthwhile and sustainable results.

23

In the aftermath of yet another underwhelming election, I find that I have a number of reactions, which I would like to sort into some kind of order. Perhaps writing about them will help me to work through them and clarify my own thoughts and conclusions. In no particular order then:

1.Possible (but surely unlikely) resignation of KRudd from the leadership of the Australian Labor Party..

2.Probable (but regrettable) elevation (if that is the correct term for ‘scrabble to top of muck heap’) of B Shortarse.

3.Unsurprising dismay of the entire political cabal at the probable election of a number of Senators, and possibly a Representative or two, who are not of their number.

So:

1. KRudd has allegedly declared ‘No further leadership ambitions’. Is there not a distinct echo here? Surely this was said not a million years before trampling Julia Gillard into the mud. If he’d said ‘I’ll cut her bloody throat the minute I see a chance’ one could sympathise with his anger and even cheer at his success. But he didn’t. In the best political crawler tradition he swore to support her whilst scheming to elbow her aside. I must admit I’ve never liked either of his faces.

Maybe it is just parochialism that stopped the Queensland dominated Labor party from studying what happened in South Australia when a Liberal party given a crushing majority by the electorate responded by dumping the premier who led them to victory and replacing him with a person who effectively bankrupted the State in record time, before sinking in a mire of dishonesty and deceit. Had they thought about that, they might have been less inclined to play leadership games. Unsurprisingly SA still has a Labor administration. People have long memories. Looking on the bright side, perhaps the Coalition will enjoy a similar longevity at Federal level. I can’t say that I like them; I just don’t have the deep-seated loathing of them that their predecessors earned.

1. If reports are to be believed, B Shortarse was principally responsible for wrecking the careers of not one but two Prime Ministers, from his own party. Is this a distinction? Cause for an entry in the Guinness Book of Records mayhap? Even in the dysfunctional world of Australian politics I don’t believe this to have been a common occurrence. Not at Federal level anyway. There does seem to have been an unseemly turnover of State Premiers in Victoria and NSW in recent years but which have been activated by whom is something I have never studied closely. The whole circus seems too trivial to justify the effort. Indeed, the whole idea of dividing the country – which has a population barely adequate for a major capital city elsewhere in the world – into piddling little States has always seemed to me bizarre. Or, rather, retaining this now idiotic structure – I can understand that it was perhaps appropriate in a time of negligible transport and extremely slow communication.

   Getting back to the point, B Shortarse has declared that he is undecided whether to take on the leadership (without the courtesy of waiting until it has been vacated). By the normal standards of his party I understand this to mean that he will grab at it with both hands and cling to it like a leech. Probably appropriate. In fact since I wrote that he has apparently declared his ‘willingness’ to accept the task. There is a certain nauseating inevitability about his progress. In the Union movement, rushing to the top on a sea of upturned faces of the members is, I suppose, regarded as normal career progression. Rushing to the top of politics over the upturned faces of Prime Ministers seems more in tune with the precepts of Machiavelli and the Borgias.

2. Fascinating how the slightest movement toward real democracy – which, for the benefit of anyone who does not already know, consists of actual participation in the processes of governance by ALL citizens – causes shrieks of alarm from politicians of all persuasions. And well it might. If we can inject enough normal people into the Houses of Parliament we might be able to start undoing years of lawyerly obfuscation and mindless regulation and begin to apply standards of honesty in our everyday lives. Even Nick Xenophon, who ought to know better, has joined in the chorus railing against non-politicians gaining seats. True, it has come about by a happy accident. We are told – and would the Establishment lie to us? – that the intention of the people behind many of the parties listed on the Senate voting papers was to direct preferences to one or other main candidate, not to get their named candidate elected. Well I have already given my opinion of the bloody stupid preferences system that nobody really understands. There is no way that I want any fraction of my vote given to anyone that I don’t specifically choose and I can see absolutely no justification for a system which permits that to happen; even though it is apparently the cause of a pleasing outcome this time.

   Tony Abbott won unexpected support from me when he stated that the money that the government disburses is OUR money; and dear old ‘Honest Joe’ Hockey also pointed out that the only money the government has is that which it collects in taxes upon US. Excellent. Then Tony blew away all the goodwill by repeating that old mantra ‘Don’t vote for a minor party or an independent’. Well why, may one ask, are they allowed on the ballot paper then? And what right has Tony Abbott to direct us how to vote? There is a genuine cause for concern when a few independents can play off both sides of parliament in order to push their own – often bizarre – agenda or, worse, prop up a thoroughly disliked and discredited government. Or when, as happened in Tasmania, a minor party acts to put into power a party that obtained less votes than its main opponent, despite having campaigned on a promise to support the party gaining the majority of votes. But this ignores the prospect of putting so many uncommitted people into both houses that NO legislation can pass unless it is approved by a majority of people with no party axe to grind.

   We know that the lawyer-ridden ranks of career politicians are obsessed with the introduction of ever-increasing regulations, of such byzantine complexity that they require an army of well paid, non-productive people to impose them and create a flood of wealth for the lawyers of those people brave enough to contest them. And for the government-employed army of lawyers retained to defeat any such attempts, of course. Just suppose we could stop them from dong that. And then introduce a bill making all regulations void after 5 years. NO more pointless interference with our lives and every member of parliament focused on the few subjects that a majority of normal people agree to be necessary. And a horde of lawyers forced to consider taking up some constructive occupation. We can expect to see a concerted effort by the main parties to see that doesn’t happen. It is time for a concerted effort by us to see that it does.

Summary.

We have seen two Prime Ministers, each confirmed by the electorate in a general election, driven from office by Party backroom plotting led by a Poison Dwarf.

We have seen the electorate’s justifiable anger, at the behaviour of the limited choices from whom they are expected to select people to represent them, reflected in the support of numerous people who are not part of the cosy club of professional politicians.

We have seen the professional politicians hastily unite to oppose any tendency toward actual democratic representation.

Roll on the next election.

24

This is a sorry tale of greed and stupidity but, surprisingly, it is not about politicians.

It doesn’t really belong in this blog but I hope that a bit of light relief from endless comment about politicians and lawyers is acceptable. (Oh dear! Lawyers do get a mention.)

The story begins when our long term Internet Service Supplier (ISP) was bought by another company. Mild deterioration set in at once; tampering with the billing cycle and getting rid of the competent and efficient, Brisbane-based Support team, replacing them with barely coherent, excuse providers based on some mid-Pacific atoll. They also replaced the very good email client with a difficult to use, ‘free’ version, lacking the most useful features of the previous one, such as the ability to filter out junk mail.

Then we received a phone call, suggesting that we might care to contract for a bundled phone/ADSL2+ service, at no greater cost than our current arrangement. The full price was spelt out clearly, together with the promise of ADSL2+ speeds and the costs of the various types of phone call. We agreed to that. This was a failure of due diligence on our part and you may well conclude that everything that followed was our own fault. I won’t disagree with that.

We didn’t notice any great improvement in speed over our previous plain old ADSL but we don’t play war games on the Internet and there are a lot of reasons why some downloads might be no faster, so we didn’t really think about it. Bills continued to be paid automatically from my Visa account, as they had been for the previous 10 years, and I only scanned them casually, mostly to see which phone calls looked expensive. So it wasn’t until 9 months after we had signed up for the service that I noticed an item ‘Account Keeping Charges’ had appeared on the bill. This comprised a fixed charge plus a percentage for use of Visa. It was only a few dollars but it certainly wasn’t something we’d agreed to, so I sent off an email protesting about it. But then I thought to check back and found that this charge had been applied in a rather erratic manner over the preceding 5 months; sometimes only the fixed charge, sometimes the percentage as well, sometimes neither. I emailed again. I received automatic acknowledgement of my emails but never any reply. There were a couple of muddled phone calls that I could make no sense of, so I asked for email communication only. That stopped the phone calls but no emails came, except one that had as an attachment a brochure (dated 7 months after the start of the contract) that listed the disputed charges. I began to get annoyed and contacted the Australian Consumer and Competition Council (ACCC) and the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO). (Well, if we are going to pay for hordes of lawyers out of OUR MONEY we might as well try and get some value for it.) I knew that the ACCC had successfully prosecuted an ISP for no greater sin than advertising (correctly) the cost of their service but failing to mention that there was a set-up fee – which didn’t seem to me to warrant the heavy fine that was imposed. So I thought that an ISP helping themselves to money without any agreement was surely a greater reason to prosecute than their omitting to mention something on the back of a bus. Not so, it seems; which just confirms my already low opinion of the workings of the legal system.

The TIO requires that anyone with a complaint should first contact their ISP to try and resolve it. Well I’d done that, so they began to investigate. This resulted in a renewal of fractured phone calls from the ISP, but from a person who denied all knowledge of my emails. This was curious, as the company only provides one contact email address for complaints. It seemed to me that they were now fudging matters in earnest.

At this point the new owners decided to subsume our original supplier completely into their own organisation. On the website where this information was conveyed there was also a paragraph pointing out that when there is a change of service provider the customer has the right to terminate an existing contract. This seemed to me to be a quick way to cut our losses so I emailed the ISP, quoting their own words and asking to terminate the contract. And that should have been that. I would have paid my outstanding bill – less all of the unauthorised charges – and walked away. But then, and only then, I did what I ought to have done when they first offered the contract; I started looking at other suppliers’ offerings.

I quickly discovered that there was an Internet site that listed the companies that had equipment capable of delivering ADSL2+ located in the various exchanges cross the country. There were also a number of suppliers with advertisements linked to the page giving this information about my local exchange. My ISP was NOT among them, nor did their name appear among those listed as having the appropriate equipment installed. And, most interesting of all, the ISP’s who did have the necessary capability were all offering a better service for about two-thirds of the amount that we were paying.

I emailed our ISP asking them to confirm that they did actually have the equipment installed and had been providing the service that we had been charged for. I made no accusation; all they had to do was say ‘yes’. But they didn’t. By now I was getting really irritated, so I passed on this latest information to both the TIO and the ACCC. The ACCC simply acknowledged the information without comment but the TIO phoned me and we had some discussion of what might be appropriate if, in fact, the service had not been supplied as contracted. I didn’t want to be harsh or vindictive – in fact I would simply have liked the common courtesy of a reply to my emails – but the TIO must have really sunk their teeth into the ISP. They obtained a final resolution that all outstanding charges should be dropped and the contract terminated without penalty.

So what does it all amount to? For the sake of grabbing about $20, and maybe another $60 to come, the ISP has lost the remaining revenue from the contract – about $1,200 – plus an amount due of about $175. And of course they have lost a customer. If they had simply apologised; perhaps asked me to use another method of payment and dropped the fixed charge for the duration of the contract we might even have renewed the service; particularly if they had by then lifted their game and employed a support team capable of intelligent (and intelligible) response to queries.

Of course our new ISP changed our phone number with no warning and then informed us that it would take 10 to 14 days to connect the new Internet service but nobody’s perfect. They did it in 11 days and the Internet is a damn sight faster now! They carefully made us aware of ALL of their charges well in advance, they are responsive and intelligible on the phone and their automated system for setup was very fast and easy to use. Please God don’t let them be bought up by the Turkeys that we’ve just got rid of.

 

 

 

25

 

Back to politics again folks.

While the Poison Dwarf and Mafia Man are fighting it out for control of the losers, and the winners are being criticised for not dumping skill and experience to make way for a random selection of women, there is much hot air being expended on the electorate’s choice of senators. Apparently none of the politicians or media persons voicing their opinions on radio and TV are capable of realising that we don’t slog through the task of ranking 73 – or in other States 110, I believe – candidates unless we have some purpose in doing so.

Our purpose, no matter what eventual result the screwy and unpredictable ‘preferential’ system regurgitates, is to insert some plain old common sense and consideration of OUR interests into the political circus.

Apparently the Sex Party did well.

Yes, and I voted for them in South Australia too – after the Euthanasia party.

I actually care that people suffering agonising and incurable illnesses may choose to end their suffering if they wish. And I would be very pleased if those people who are happy to prolong that suffering in order to appease their own consciences were afflicted with similar agonies – failing which they ought at least to lose the privilege of sitting in parliament.

In case you haven’t noticed, the Sex Party supports voluntary euthanasia too.

There has been a lot of squawking by politicians of all persuasions about how silly it is that these sorts of people are likely to get senate seats; it is somehow beyond their understanding that we WANT these people elected. not so much because of their stated aims but because ANYBODY is likely to be an improvement on the choices that we are presented with by the conventional parties.

We have the Loony Spendthrift Fairy Godmother party (AKA Labor), the Greedy, Screw Everyone party (AKA Liberal/National Coalition) and the Prop up the Loony Spendthrifts and Dabble Mindlessly in International Politics party (AKA Greens). Absolutely ANYBODY has to be a better

choice than any of those. My one regret is that only Clive Palmer looks likely to get a seat in the Lower House, and still that is in the balance. At least Clive, even on his own, is capable of creating some havoc among the establishment. It’s a start.

The idea that legislation should be subjected to the scrutiny of normal, rational beings really delights me. With any luck they will stall the entire process. Then we can move on to clearing out the mass of verbal diarrhoea that is the current legislation. Let’s hear it for the non-lawyers –

Hip hip, Hoooorayyyy

26

The trivia of domestic politics continue to de-liven the news – and if that’s not the opposite of enliven it ought to be and I so declare it. And of course we have the interminable ‘sport’, which has very little to do with any sort of contest and much to do with the private affairs of players, clubs, managers, and anyone else who can by any stretch of the imagination be said to have some connection, however tenuous, with ‘sport’. Perhaps they put that on so that the utterances of politicians and political commentators are not the most tedious things offered to us. But it is, to quote the Duke of Wellington, after Waterloo, ‘A damned close-run thing’.

Meanwhile, in Kenya, there is mass killing. Is this worse than the killing in Syria? Or, once again, in the USA? How true it is that the only counter to a ‘Bad guy with a gun’ is a ‘Good guy with a gun’. And how true also that the good guy can seldom be there in time and can never act until the killing has begun. So the good guy can never eliminate the harm, only hope to bring it to an end with as few deaths and injuries as possible. The only effective course is keeping guns away from bad guys – not easy when a whole economy rests on the production and sale of a continuous outpouring of weapons of all types. And if the bad guy has Sarin instead?

‘Lunatic’ has become an unfashionable word. Insofar as it was applied unfeelingly and arbitrarily to people suffering from a whole range of mental illnesses, that is a good thing. However, as an epithet for the sort of person who thinks it justifiable to randomly take life or, worse, to brainwash, train, and send others to do so, I think it is ideal.

‘Terrorist’ has a sort of shoddy glamour to it, in fact in the eyes of many of those who practise it no doubt it has real glamour – although the cynical and self-serving creatures who organise and control these acts it is just a means of gaining power. If we consider sanity to be a necessary foundation for peaceful co-existence between people then it obviously is something that terrorists don’t have. And nor do people who randomly gun down children, workers, or any other group of people, because of some real or imagined slight. Let’s get rid of the grandiose title and call then all what they are.

They are all one. Lunatics. People who lack the essential sanity to get along and occupy themselves constructively. People who set fire to churches and gun down congregations, people who run amok in shopping malls – or schools, or workplaces. Never mind their imagined motives or self-justifications, their pseudo military organisations or religious pretensions. They are all simply lunatics and should be referred to as such and only that. We may be unable to prevent the killing but we don’t have to stroke their egos every time as well. And we can make it quite clear that we are not fooled into thinking that there is any legitimacy in their actions. Their only proper place in the scheme of things is an institution for the criminally insane.

There seems to be a convention that if enough people are engaged in an activity they can’t all be insane. I disagree. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that people who are devoid of one essential human capacity are incapable of plotting, organising, and managing mass activities, causing death and injury. There is, however, every reason to understand that attempting to reason with them or reach some accommodation must fail. You can’t make them sane by offering concessions. They are lunatics. Understand that they are lunatics. Call them lunatics and treat them as lunatics. No fancy names, no references to founders or leaders names. Lunatics.

Lunatics have attacked people in a shopping mall in Kenya. Lunatics have taken hostages in the Philippines. Lunatics have attacked the congregation of a church in Pakistan. Lunatics attacked the runners in the Boston marathon. A lunatic ran amok in a Washington navy yard. Lunatics have detonated more car bombs in Bagdhad. Let them see that and only that on the media, world-wide. It won’t stop them but it won’t give them star billing either.

And it won’t encourage them to hope that their actions may gain them whatever power they are seeking.

27

Getting back to the purpose of this blog, how do we get away from the present vogue in ‘government’ (usually, though wrongly, prefixed by ‘democratic’) which consists of alternate manipulation by two opposing parties, each solely concerned with benefiting its supporters at the expense of everyone else? Well of course the main motivation is really the desire for personal aggrandisement and the bonus of freeloading on the rest of the population during retirement but in order to achieve these noble objectives it is necessary to attract a notional majority of support, by promising gifts that are recognised as bounty by those whose votes are being sought..

A real worry is the way in which election results are apparently swayed significantly by the promises hastily made by the candidates during the few weeks prior to the election date. Is it possible that so few people are influenced by the earlier behaviour of politicians, whether in government or in opposition? Or by so-called independents, who rarely act independently and are often simply major party members in disguise? Even if these sudden (and usually unfunded) prospects of a brave new world seem attractive, whatever makes anyone think that they will be kept by people with a record of broken promises stretching back through many generations?

I don’t have that bad an opinion of my fellow citizens. I suspect that they accept that any realistic form of representation is just not going to happen, so they vote according to those promises that would benefit them if they were fulfilled, some of which just might be met, even in shrunken form. After all, cynicism is the main product of our current electoral methods.

A difficult bar to improvement is the vested interest that the present regime – whatever the flavour of the month – has in perpetuating the existing system. Forcible attendance at the polls and the lunatic ‘proportional representation’ are designed to give the illusion that candidates selected by the parties with the most money to spend are actually chosen – preferred even – by the electorate. Yet it is obvious that most of the population are of the opinion that none of them are worth the trip to the polling station, else compulsion would be redundant.

It is a well-known canard that if individual views were reflected in the decisions of Parliament very little legislation would be passed. And there is strong propaganda alleging that this is a ‘Bad Thing’.

But it isn’t – except for those people whose nature is to want to interfere in every aspect of others’ activities. I have said it before and I will no doubt say it again many times ‘Less legislation is a Good Thing!’ Legislation not only interferes grossly with our freedom to live as we wish, whilst respecting the wishes of others (there are no ‘Rights’ except those that we declare ourselves) it also provides the lawyer classes with material for endless obfuscation and wastefulness. Simple situations that could be resolved by answering yes or no to two questions:

Was it yours?

Did you have permission to take it?

are blown up into three-ring circuses at enormous public expense by the arguing talents of lawyers over piddling interpretations of minor detail and the connivance of a court system that is controlled by seconded lawyers. (There is probably a very good argument for elected judges who would be disqualified from standing if they had been trained as lawyers but I won’t develop that here.)

This seems an appropriate point to introduce one of my favourite concepts, that of saying ‘What good will it do?’ AND ‘What harm may it do?’ These estimates should be clearly incorporated every bit of legislation that is passed, together with the exact purpose of the legislation. Efforts by police and the courts to impose meanings and purposes on legislation other than those explicitly stated in the legislation should never be permitted and decisions and sentences imposed by the courts should always be supported by answers to those same two questions.

Singling out one individual for excessive punishment ‘As a lesson to others contemplating the same actions’ is abhorrent; as also is singling out an individual for punishment for an offence that no-one realised was an offence prior to that time. These are only the more obvious among many examples of injustice routinely met within our legal system, a system very much on a par with our electoral system. Both are held up as exemplars of good practice; both are seriously flawed and exist not by the nature of any virtue that they possess but by the determined efforts of entrenched privilege that controls all efforts to achieve a better system.

The problem for anyone who wants to be an individual rather than a herd member is that individuals cannot, by definition, combine. Therefore any group prepared to act as a herd can drive out individuals by force. But just suppose that there are many more individuals than herd members. Sheer stubbornness may then exhaust the herd in its efforts to force the individuals to conform. Please create your own blog and make your own flank attacks on the herd; it is the only way I can think of to make our voices heard above their clamour.

28

Now that we have succeeded, against all the odds, in injecting into the senate some people who were not preselected by any of the established political parties, there has been a predictable outcry from those parties to the effect that ‘it din orter be allowed’.

Well why not? ‘Ooh these people might be just anybody. We don’t know how they might vote.’

Damn right you don’t. Nor should you. Parliament is supposed to be a debating chamber – well alright, two chambers – where you persuade people to vote for your proposition by reasoned argument and the presentation of well researched and accurate data. And if you want these new people to support you that is just what you’ll have to do, I hope. Not make shonky deals behind closed doors. Stand up where everybody can see and hear you and convince them that you are right. And perhaps, God forbid, listen to them and allow yourself to be sometimes persuaded that you are wrong. That would be a first for democracy wouldn’t it.

‘But they don’t have any political background.’

I don’t know anything about their background. I do know, however, that whereas my Electrician and my Plumber must be qualified and licensed, YOU, Mr or Ms politician are not required to have any formal qualifications whatsoever. Now I, despite half a lifetime doing my own plumbing and electrical installation in the UK, where such things were lawful, and despite having been Chief Test and Inspection Engineer for a transformer manufacturer, daily operating a test bench capable of delivering 1000 amps and an insulation test bay operating in excess of 400,000 volts, am not allowed in Australia to wire up a light fitting. So why am I ‘represented’ at both State and Federal level by people who do not have Certificate 4 in Political Studies and a licence to practise politics?

The truth is, I don’t mind! I WANT to be able to choose ANYONE to represent me and I don’t want to give any ammunition to their opponents that could result in their exclusion.

The one dubious virtue of the uproar is that some politicians are questioning the utility of the obscure and byzantine ‘proportional representation system’. It is ironic that they have only chosen to question it because it has for once caused a proportion of the electorate who are normally excluded from any representation of their choice to be able to elect – or have elected by others – a few people more to their liking.

As I have said elsewhere, if you want representation in proportion to the number of people making a choice, simply declare anyone who obtains 25% or more of the overall vote (not of the votes cast but of the potential vote for the electorate) elected. And compel nobody to vote. You are very unlikely to get more than two members elected but you will probably get two differing points of view represented. All politicians, and governments, claim that they act for all Australians but of course they don’t. They act for their supporters and to hell with anyone else.

There is an implied belief that serious, adult behaviour by politicians in Parliament is unacceptable to the electorate, who expect something between a gladiatorial contest and a display of infantile tantrums by those representing them. This is unquestionably true of some; perhaps of many. If, however, it represents the view of the majority of electors, perhaps the method of selection is irrelevant; as indeed are the proceedings of Parliament in that case.

29

Another failure to keep up the blog. I am behind with a lot of things and have to pick which to attack next. Also I have been reading up Scott and Shackleton’s expeditions to the Antarctic. The pettiness of our politicians and other would-be masters is quite nauseating enough in itself; by comparison with these giants of willpower and self-sacrifice they are down in the primeval slime. Yet I despair of any of my efforts resulting in their replacement by people of actual worth.

So I have been thinking about the basics of law and politics. It seems a bit like Bertrand Russell’s use of symbolic logic to prove that 1 + 1 = 2, although come to think of it I could probably write a more interesting blog about that. But here goes anyway.

Given any group of people, one will probably be physically dominant. If not, the two or more who are contenders for that position will fight until one emerges as the winner. If they are too evenly matched for that, in the combination of strength, cunning and viciousness, domination of the group will likely pass between them over time, until some are weeded out by sickness, old age, or death.

If they are fairly benign, whether a single one or a number of contenders, the remainder of the group will do their bidding and make sacrifices for their comfort without significant protest. But if they are not, and the group feels that they are carrying a burden and suffering indignities and unfairness, some members will band together to devise a scheme limiting the powers of the dominant by using their own superior numbers.

Historically, in English-speaking countries, this concept reached its peak in the signing of the Magna Carta; the significance of which is so great that it is appreciated in most civilised countries – even though the current English governments seem hell bent on destroying the fundamental liberties that have stemmed from it.

Just how a document that simply restricted the power of a king over some barons came to be synonymous with justice for all is a miracle in itself. The fact that it remained so for hundreds of years is extraordinary. That the population of England is prepared to see the protections built upon it it torn down by cheapskate politicians in a matter of years is far more alarming than the fact that the politicians thought of doing so in the first place.

It remains true that we have politicians and all the paraphernalia of elections, plus lawyers and all the paraphernalia of law courts, simply so that we can’t be bullied by the physically strongest among us into doing whatever benefits them, regardless or our own wellbeing.

Instead, we are bullied by the sly and slimy, the elected politicians and the so-called ‘public servants’, who are their instruments, into doing whatever suits them, in return for the occasional sop to our own lives.

We have no real power to change them. I would probably never vote for Pauline Hanson but the fact that her political enemies were able to conspire and distort the law to the extent of getting her gaoled and, more importantly, that not one of those responsible was held to account for their behaviour even after the conviction was overturned, clearly illustrates that no challenger to the status quo will be tolerated by the major parties. Their frenzied reaction to our getting a few of our own kind into the Senate recently, and their indecent rush to change the rules to prevent us from doing it again, underlines this point.

It would be nice to frame a constitution primarily intended to protect the rights of the individual citizen to free speech, free choice of political representation, and freedom from interference in his or her private life. Let’s try…

Constitution of Australia

Purpose:

The purpose of this document is to provide a legally binding framework that constrains all levels of government in Australia to governing – as distinct from ruling.

Governing requires the minimum interference with the individual citizen consistent with the preservation of civil order and the defence of the country and its allies.

This constitution also determines certain legal constraints that are needed to restrain inconsistencies, excesses, irrationalities and simple dishonesty that are endemic to the linked practices of law and government.

Restrictions:

No part of this constitution may be changed or removed, nor anything added to it unless:

• requested in a petition carrying the signatures of 10,000 registered voters, and
• endorsed by a referendum of all registered voters.

 

Australian Governments shall make no law that is not:

• immediately comprehensible to an ordinary citizen, and
• based upon honesty and fairness

nor any that:

• restricts the right of every full citizen of Australia to assemble peacefully and to express their personal views in speech or writing at any time

except that:

• violence and incitement to violence shall be criminal offences

 

To become law a measure must be approved by at least two thirds of the elected body proposing it and it shall lapse automatically after an 8-year period unless revalidated by at least two thirds of the elected body.

No regulation shall be introduced to circumvent the failure of a Bill to win approval or revalidation.

Every Bill must be preceded by a Statement of Intent and every action taken under that Bill must comply with the Statement of Intent.

Each Statement of Intent, and each application of the law, must address the questions:

What good will this do? And

What harm may it do?

No person who has technically transgressed the law when circumstances require that they do so in order to prevent harm shall be penalised under law.

All laws shall be applied fairly. There shall be no ‘setting an example’ by penalising one offender more than another for the same offence.

A prison sentence shall be mandatory in all convictions for physical assault.

No person shall be committed to prison except those who have committed a deliberate physical assault.

The law shall not be debased by use as a tax collecting mechanism.

Punishments for offences other than physical assault shall involve inconvenience. Home detention, reporting frequently to police, public humiliation, physical hardship ( such as route marches in desert conditions) and, in the case of serious financial misbehaviour, Reduction to Penury (whereby the offender is required to subsist permanently on an income no greater than the age pension and any person attempting to relieve that situation shall be subject to the same penalty) shall apply.

If fines are considered unavoidable they shall ALWAYS be a fixed percentage of the convicted person’s DISPOSABLE income and shall only apply where that income is significant.

Income from fines shall go IN ITS ENTIRETY to compensate the victims of crime.

The penalty (other than Reduction to Penury) for transgressing ANY law shall double for each repeat offence.

 

Definitions

Head of State

The Australian Head of State shall be chosen by a referendum of all registered voters and shall hold office until retirement, at age 70.

Parliament

There shall be a National Parliament elected by a poll of all registered voters. The elected members shall retain their seats for seven years. They may then stand for election, once, for a further seven years. They shall be paid a salary equivalent to the average basic remuneration of middle managers in industry and be entitled to superannuation on the same terms as all other employed persons. They shall receive no other remuneration at any time. They shall elect a Prime Minister and a Speaker from among their number by simple majority and the Prime Minister shall form a government and appoint appropriate Ministers. The Speaker shall not have any affiliation to any political party during his or her term of office.

Other levels of government

The subsidiary levels of government, their electorates and their powers shall be as determined from time to time by the National government. In defining those powers the national government shall apply to each the test ‘What good will it do’ and ‘What harm may it do’ and shall make freely available to ALL citizens its answers to those questions and its justification of those answers.

Electorate

The population shall be divided into national electorates of approximately equal size, corresponding to defined contiguous geographic regions. The method of election defined herein will generally result in the election of two candidates per electorate. Each electorate shall contain approximately 200,000 registered voters and boundaries shall be adjusted between elections to maintain this density as far as practicable.

Elections

Governments at all levels shall reflect as far as practicable the diverse views of the citizens, so to be effective they must strive to achieve a balance of requirements.

Any person who meets the criteria for a registered voter and can show evidence of completing a serious study of political history may, if supported by a petition carrying the signatures of 1000 registered voters, stand as a candidate for any elective office. There shall be no other method of selection.

Any candidate who secures 25% or more of the available vote shall be declared elected, where the available vote is equal to the number of voters registered to vote in that particular election.

Voters may consider more than one candidate to be acceptable and may therefore vote positively for as many as are thought suitable. If a voter considers one or more of the candidates unfit to hold office he or she may cast a negative vote for each such candidate. A candidate’s total vote shall be the sum of the positive and negative votes received by that candidate.

(There is no reason why the total votes cast should not exceed the available figure, nor need a specific number of candidates elected. The numbers will soon settle down to an approximate level and result usually in the election of two candidates in each electorate, each from a different part of the political spectrum.)

Qualifications:

Citizen:

A Full Australian Citizen shall be a person who was:

Born in Australia or

Has been granted Australian Citizenship and has spent a minimum of 10 years physically resident in Australia with no criminal convictions, and

Has not taken part in demonstrations or warlike or terrorist activities against Australia or any country with whom Australia is not at war.

Registered voter:

A registered voter shall be any Full Australian Citizen who is:

• 18 years of age or over,
• not insane,
• not under punishment for physical assault.

Candidate for Head of State:

Candidates for the position of Head of State shall be registered voters. They shall NOT be members of any political party nor support nor endorse any such party or members of such a party.

Candidate for any level of government:

A candidate for Parliament or any lesser body of government shall:

Show proof of a serious study of politics and administration (eg. Degree or TAFE course results) appropriate to the level of government for which he or she is standing.

Have been resident in the area that they represent for not less than five years and guarantee to remain so during their entire period in office.

Present a petition signed by a minimum of 1000 registered voters in the relevant electorate.

Not be under sentence for criminal activity.

Please remember that this is a work in progress. Your comments and improvements would be most welcome. Of course it isn’t easy to write a constitution – that’s obvious from the ones that exist. And having written it there is the necessity of ensuring that it is complied with. And that doesn’t happen in a lot of countries that have constitutions. And where one exists and is mostly complied with there is always the usual gang of lawyers trying to wriggle around it.

The key to me is Government, not Ruling, closely followed by Equity and Justice, not ‘Letter of the Law’ or favours under the Old Pals Act. The power to challenge flawed legal decisions – and eject from the system those responsible for making them – may be of even greater importance than establishing a sensible electoral system.

The work continues…

 

30

This stuff I write is all very well but hardly original thought. As Bertrand Russell pointed out in ‘A History of Western Philosophy’, Marcus Aurelius, in his ‘Meditations’, favoured ‘A polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed’. Which is pretty damn much what I have been advocating.

Well it didn’t work out in ancient Rome, where, at that time at least, the Emperor had considerable power to impose his ideas. So it’s going to be an uphill job now. And the Roman army later developed a habit of popping off the Emperor in order to ensure that the new one saw to their pecuniary interests – before he in turn was popped off to encourage his successor. And while they were too busy doing that to watch their backs, the barbarians got uppity and put paid to the Roman empire.

Seems it’s a good idea to keep the military fully occupied with foreign invasions and suchlike – and probably enriching themselves therefrom, so that they are too busy to interfere in the politics of their own country. That scheme is not so socially acceptable now so our politicians are on shaky ground, whether they realise it or not. Looking at Egypt it seems that it’s just as well sometimes too. Our scheme for democracy is very vulnerable to attack by loonies organised into large groups. When the sane are (inevitably it seems) in the minority, the outcome of universal franchise must be to destroy choice. And we can’t always rely on the military to be on the side of freedom.

I’m not sure where that line of thought is leading to, so I’ll leave it for now.

Flavour of the month just now is the alleged intention of government to remove the requirement for ‘Financial Advisors’ to tell their clients that the package that they are eagerly pushing as in the client’s best interest is in fact that which gives the Advisor the largest commission – preferably with trailing commission extending to infinity.

And you know what? I think I am in favour of that. It’s just another useless bit of legislation that we can do well without.

If the legal system worked as it should, anyone who tried that sort of trick would be liable to a charge of simple dishonesty and would rapidly find themselves impoverished for life. THAT would work. The present system is just another scheme to enrich lawyers.

What we really need is a police/legal system that puts its resources – and awards punishment – where it most benefits society. And leaves citizens who have not set out to harm anyone SEVERELY ALONE.

I have said before, and don’t mind repeating endlessly if need be, that in any case before the law it should be asked:

1. Was anyone physically harmed – including restriction of liberty? If NO then this is a second or third, level or trivial charge. Go to 2.
2. Was there a realistic probability that physical harm could have resulted? If NO then this is a third level or trivial charge. Go to 3.
3. Was anyone deprived of their wealth or possessions? If NO this is a trivial charge.

Only a first level charge should result in a custodial sentence, which should be mandatory. Physical injury cannot be recompensed, although additional financial penalties may – and usually will – be appropriate.

A second level charge, where deliberate malice is involved, should result in severe and prolonged restriction of movement. If through neglect of a duty of care, restriction of movement for a period and a possible ban on employment where that duty of care is necessary should result. In both cases additional financial penalties may be appropriate.

In a case of simple carelessness, where care is not a specific duty, a period of general inconvenience will suffice.

A third level charge, if found proven, should result in substantial financial penalties, proportional to the amounts involved, in addition to the return or replacement of all sums or items involved . If the offence results from a breach of duty to act in the best interests of a client, penalties should be doubled.

Note: ALL financial penalties should be paid to the person or persons harmed. The law ought NEVER to be used as a cash collection agency for government at any level.

Trivial charges should be dismissed or result in a short period of minor inconvenience. Temporary confiscation of vehicles, house arrest, reporting to police, at inconvenient times, and conspicuous public display of details of the offence and the perpetrator, should be used in serious or repetitive cases.

The punishment for ANY offence should be complete. It should not include repeated harm caused by disclosure of the conviction to any person.

Convictions should be recorded in secrecy; disclosed to the court in the event of conviction for a repeat offence, but NOT disclosed to ANY person under any other circumstance.

To disclose such a record OR TO ATTEMPT TO DISCOVER SUCH A RECORD should itself constitute a restriction of liberty – a level 1 offence.

EXCEPT in the case of perversion or repeated violence (or threats of violence) where it MUST be publicly disclosed for the protection of possible victims. And Public Humiliation is obviously public, but re-broadcasting the details after the end of the period of punishment should be an offence in itself.

I recently heard a rather confused woman advocating no penalty for a particular (extremely serious) offence and supporting her case by saying that the best deterrent was the likelihood of detection and punishment. (If you can’t see the fallacy here, don’t waste your time trying to follow my arguments.)

Well I believe she was absolutely right in her second point. When the police and courts are unencumbered with trivial and pointless cases, the police can concentrate on matters of importance and the courts can do their work promptly and efficiently. This should substantially increase the likelihood of conviction and punishment for offences that actually matter. Which in turn should spiral upward, reducing offences, as the likelihood of conviction and punishment increases, and thus reducing the numbers of police, lawyers, and hangers-on, needed to uphold the law and administer the legal system.

This in turn should result in a substantial reduction in costs and release a significant number of people from the system to seek productive employment, as well as saving the general public a great deal of pointless irritation and inconvenience.

Good for the economy, beneficial to the community, and very bad news to those who want an easy life strutting and arguing without contributing anything of substance to society.

In my opinion a call girl has more moral integrity than most members of the legal fraternity.

31

 

Here comes another Australian election, complete with the old furphy ‘You are legally obliged to vote’.

You aren’t of course; you are legally obliged to attend a polling station or send in a postal vote but you can’t be forced to choose anyone. So the whole process starts with a lie. Quite appropriate really.

 

Why do we have this offensive rule that interferes with our liberty to vote (or not) as we please? The answer is obvious. Our politicians know very well that most of us don’t think that any of them are worth voting for. Compulsion is the only way to pretend that they are our choice.

The stupid ‘preferences’ idea is a part of the same thing. It gives the major parties a way to pretend that they receive more votes than they really do. And most of all it gives them more power to squeeze out any real choices that we might otherwise have.

The other really offensive and insulting thing is the way the major parties squeal that a vote for anyone but them is wasted.

Well recently it backfired on them. We managed to elect some real people, just like us, into the Senate. They may well have agendas that I disagree with but that doesn’t matter. Those votes weren’t wasted. They are a tiny spear of democracy piercing the leather hide of party politics. And with any luck the tip will be poisoned.

The really delightful irony is that this apparently happened due largely – or so ‘they’ claim – as a result of their stupid ‘preferences’ system. Maybe if we can repeat the result often enough we can say goodbye to that.

And to cap it all, Clive Palmer was elected. Now Clive isn’t like us – he’s big and rich and pushy.

All true, but he’s not a politician, or a lawyer or, worse still, both. So he’s a lot more like us than most of ‘them’ are. And their frightened howls when they realised that he was going to win were music to my ears. This might encourage other real people, powerful, energetic, real people, to challenge their cosy little fairy castle.

Didn’t they scream and piddle themselves, rushing to change the rules so that we’ll have no choice but to elect them? And I find it hard to believe that the mysterious loss of votes in Western Australia was an accident. If it looks like a duck…

Well now that we’ve got them running scared we’d better act fast, before they can tighten up their defences even more. And it’s really simple. I have been doing it for years but it won’t work unless you do it too:

If you don’t like them DON’T VOTE FOR THEM. VOTE FOR SOMEBODY ELSE. It doesn’t matter much whom at this stage, although we would do well to avoid those people who have used their so-called independence to prop up unpopular governments. They are mere party hacks in disguise. Just pick someone harmless, like the Fishing Party or the Party Party or the Sex Party.

They aren’t real parties of course; they just have to call themselves something. Mostly they are just PEOPLE. And that is what we need. You want a slogan? OK here it is:

PEOPLE IN, LAWYERS OUT.

That should take care of the majority of professional politicians. We can weed out or emasculate the rest later.

32

Although I have studied a number of constitutions and am aware of what were, until recent acts of political vandalism, the important and accepted tenets of the unwritten British constitution, I thought it best to attempt my first draft of an Australian constitution without reference to the existing one.

Having done so, and refreshed my mind with a re-reading of John Stuart Mill on Liberty, I have taken a run through our present document, plus the excellent overview by the Australian Government Solicitor, and realise that it is more badly flawed than I imagined.

One problem with the extant Constitution of Australia is that it was written at the time when Australia was a group of colonies under the rule of Queen Victoria.

As a result, many of its provisions were met at the time of federation and others are not appropriate to modern conditions. These irrelevancies need to be removed.

For example: it is inconceivable that a law should nowadays be passed restricting the rights of certain citizens on the grounds of race; therefore the provision to do so should be removed.

We give our citizenship too freely but, having done so, a citizen is (or ought to be) a citizen, and the term ‘race’ has no meaning in that context.

A second problem is that the constitution was written to entrench the power of certain political elements and the judiciary of the time. It was NOT written to provide protection of the rights of citizens and does not even acknowledge the existence of any such rights.

We should require two changes in this respect:

1. The inclusion of a Bill of Rights in the manner of the American constitution.

(A terrifying idea, embodied in recent legislation, is that if anyone chooses to take offence – regardless of the words or actions resulting in this charge and of the intention of the accused person – a punishable offence has been committed. We desperately need protection from this sort of madness NOW.)

2. A mandate for the courts and Parliament to respect the letter and the intention of that Bill, unlike the practice of the American judiciary and governments where it is flouted at will.

A third problem arose out of petty jealousy and snobbery between the States of Victoria and New South Wales – which still exists. This is the determination of the location of the National Capital. The wording embodies the sentiment ‘No way in Victoria but convenient for those who come from Sydney’.

This has resulted in the Capital being located in a desolate area of climatic extremes, extremely inconvenient for those Members of Parliament travelling from Perth and Darwin and not much better for those from Hobart, Brisbane and Adelaide.

Geographically, Alice Springs is the obvious choice but climatically it is less than ideal.

Commonsense suggests that the equitable climate of Brisbane makes it the best location, although the distance from Perth and other State capitals is still a drawback. However, if you have a long journey anyway, surely it would be pleasanter to arrive in Brisbane, rather than in Canberra, at the end of it?

I will just note here that, as a pommy migrant:

a. I have no geographical allegiance, although Port Adelaide is my adopted home, and

b. I have dual citizenship and, as a former member of the RAF, took an oath of allegiance to the Monarch; both of which debar me from standing for Parliament, and

c. I’m too old anyway, so I have no personal interest in where it is.

In fact the function of the constitution was simply to allay the fears of the various petty colonial governments within Australia that they would be upstaged by the new Federal government. And that, to the various petty State governments of the present day, is still its only political purpose.

The Constitution was of course drawn up by lawyers, so it is unsurprising that it gives sweeping powers to the judiciary and effectively provides judges and magistrates with total protection from dismissal, however idle, incompetent, biased, perverted or dishonest they may be.

(In that respect we follow American practice closely. Although they attempted, by making some Judicial positions elective, to give the citizenry some control, all of their major positions are political gifts and their occupants need demonstrate little consideration of fairness and equity toward, or between, ordinary citizens.)

We need also to strengthen the position of the press and other media. Despite the low and degenerating standards on the part of many in the industry there is no one else who can be trusted to uncover dishonest or other unacceptable behaviour by members of the establishment – in which I include the Unions.

It seems strange that, with these and other manifest deficiencies, the only current proposal to amend our constitution is apparently to ‘Recognise the Indigenous Population of Australia’.

What on earth does that mean? Apart from the appalling treatment that they received from the invading white hordes and the fact that they were until very recently disenfranchised, in what way do the indigenous peoples differ from the rest of us? They are here. So are Greeks and Poms and Afghans and Germans and Italians and Lebanese and Syrians and Chinese and…We all need to get along and be nice to each other. If we are not going to all go away and leave the indigenous peoples in peace – and we are too selfish to do that – they are stuck with us. We need to remove barriers, not erect more by singling some group out for special recognition.

33.

Oh Boy! It’s happened again. I see from a column in our local paper that a woman has been fined for blocking access to her own driveway. Now isn’t that a strange thing. When I park in my driveway it stops anyone else from accessing it. I wonder how long it will be before I am fined for this.

And it gets better. Nobody at the council offices would speak to her or respond to her email. Do NONE of you object to these piddling little bureaucrats with their total lack of responsibility for their own actions or those taken in their name? Wouldn’t you like to see the lot of them sacked and replaced by people willing to listen to reason and act sensibly?

Recently I heard that a man had been fined in Queensland for not closing his car window when he left it for a while. I wonder what the fine is for failing to lock your door when you go out of your house? And I seem to recall that there was a bye law in Brisbane making it an offence to lock your bicycle to a bench on the pavement – although presumably it is an offence not to lock it at all – despite the fact that the council provides no bicycle racks and hardly anyone ever sits on the benches.

Of course our elected representatives have no power to get rid of these plonkers and replace them with people willing to earn their money. Not councillors, not state MP’s, nor federal ones. Their unions would scream the place down if any of the people whom WE elect to govern our society actually tried to eliminate any of them.

Of course you might say that these people are no worse than those in business who employ poorly paid but desperate people (laughingly called Customer Service Representatives) to parrot endless garbage down the telephone until their enraged customers give up trying to obtain any restitution for poor service or shoddy goods. But they are.

Although our options are shrinking rapidly we do still have some choice over where we spend such money as our multiplicity of governments allow us to keep. Retailers still have some incentive to compete, unlike banks, which struggle in unison to attain ever lower standards of service. But the people laughingly known as ‘Public Servants’ have no competition and enjoy absolute security. Even if their ranks were thinned, as some politicians like to threaten though they haven’t the guts to follow through, it would not be through any measure of incompetence.

Who has ever said “We will reduce the numbers by throwing out the Ill Mannered, the Pig Headed, the Idle and the Inept? Has any ‘Public Servant’ anywhere in the world EVER been chucked out for any of these reasons. My own impression, gained over very many years of unavoidable encounters with these creatures, is that those are the principal characteristics required for promotion.

It seems that within the human race rational people are outnumbered by a sub culture to whom fairness, consideration, personal responsibility, and the simple desire to get along with others, are incomprehensible. It certainly explains the result of universal suffrage.

Climbing out of the morass – or rather scrambling up the side of it – toward the usual field of my labours, I have been struck by the public auction of favours that passes for election campaigning. Those striving for our vote tomorrow vie with each other to gain our favour with offers of Road Improvements, New Hospitals, Improvements in Education, Jobs, etc. etc. As far as I know, NOBODY has pointed out that these are all things that WE will pay for – except the jobs, which they have no power to create anyway.

Governments don’t make money. They take it from US or they borrow it and WE pay the interest. Anything they spend is OURS.

It’s nice of them to spare a little over from their salaries and expense accounts and lifetime pensions and perks to use for things of public benefit but I can’t see how it makes one of them any better than another. That’s quite apart from the fact that they are under no obligation to keep any of their promises anyway, and frequently don’t.

Thinking of this latest farcical election I found myself considering the virtues of an unelected body, such as the English House of Lords. The nice thing about such a body is that the members are free to use their intelligence, follow their consciences, and pay serious attention to the views of others. Once they are in, nobody can threaten them with dismissal or de-selection or any other harm. And by and large they rise to the occasion, behaving sensibly and damping down the more ludicrous excesses of the lower house.

A Senate dominated by one party or another is either a blank cheque or an obstructive nuisance. Perhaps if we drastically limited the number of senators that any party could have it would behave more usefully. But I still think that tenure would be better. Perhaps senators should be obliged to take an oath not to support or be a member of any political party.

I tried writing to the local newspaper pointing out that we can repeat our recent successes in the senate if we simply avoid voting for either of the major parties. They didn’t print it of course; they are part of Murdoch’s empire and anxious to preserve the major parties, despite the ludicrous pretence that they are opposed to any of them.

For the record, I shall go tomorrow to ensure that my vote will not, as far as I can control it, benefit any major party. I’m not expecting a miracle but if we can sneak in even one real representative in place of a party hack I will be delighted.

34

Meanwhile, down at code pathetic, our bizarre electoral system has resulted in a technical draw between the major parties in this State. This despite the fact that one party received well over 50% of the total vote.

I had hoped that more non-aligned candidates would be successful but only two were elected to the lower house. They would not have been my choice had there been any alternatives. In our own electorate the incumbent was returned easily, She is a nice girl whom we know slightly – pity about her politics.

I must admit that none of the five alternatives on offer to us appealed to me, I just listed them in order of least undesirable.

Attendance at the polls is mandatory, although there is a note on the voting paper saying that it is not compulsory to mark the paper. I would much prefer a positive alternative – a box labeled ‘None of the Above’ would do nicely. If the number of us who ticked that box were published it might well encourage more people to stand for election and give us a real choice. (Since writing that, I understand that the Indian government has proposed giving its voters exactly that option.)

We have not received the Senate results yet. Our weird system allows failed candidates to direct their votes to others of their choice – and so ad infinitum – unless one specifically lists every candidate in order of preference.

One can pick one of half a dozen parties listed ‘above the line’ and let them do what they like with one’s vote, or plod through and list every one of the individuals listed below it.

In some states this amounts to over 120 names; in ours his time it was 63, whom I worked through backwards from the least desirable at #63. My wife uses a slightly different system, listing her first two choices and then working backwards through the rest. Whichever way, if you make an error in the numbers the paper is void. Why we can’t just list half a dozen and leave the rest is beyond my understanding. It all seems a part of the pretence that we want to vote for any of them, combined with a strong incentive to choose one of the major parties, rather than plod through the tedium of voting ‘below the line’. (I believe that this option is now available in some states.)

I think the colloquial name for the system ‘two party preferred’ indicates the way it is deliberately biased against individuals gaining entry. It reflects the fact that at the end of the day most of the votes directed elsewhere end up supporting one of the two major parties.

The Greens managed to make a dent in that cosy system for a while, before they were infiltrated and taken over by people with a taste for world domination and little interest in the ecology.

Now they are becoming perceived as a cut-price version of the Labor party.

The Democrats – invented right here in South Australia – used to be a force to be reckoned with, until they decided to commit ritual suicide a few years back. There was an attempt at revival which I was keen to support until I discovered that they too were focused on world domination and had little interest in the people they were proposing to represent.

Apathy rules!

I think I’ll stick this on the blog. Pity nobody ever reads it, or bothers to weigh in with some constructive criticism.

35

Just for a change here’s something a bit different. My good American friend has grave concerns about the governance of his country and we exchange emails on the subject of change and how it might be accomplished. He has suggested that my latest to him, in response to a very vigorous and convincing online critique that he pointed me to, should be printed here.

Perhaps he is tactfully saying that it is an improvement on the sort of guff that I usually write here – and he may well be right. Here it is:

Revolutionary!

When you are feeling old and tired, just sliding down the last few feet of the ash chute into oblivion, it seems futile to protest. Change HAS to come from the young – but it’s so hard for them to envisage something other than the status quo.

Do people risk their lives to attain a dream or simply to escape a nightmare? Maybe to some degree motivated by both; but for most surely escape from the real is stronger than striving for the imagined. So the imagined can be left vague; then it is attained and may well turn out to be not at all what was expected.

The example of Egypt is salutary because it is contemporary, not because it is original. The manipulators, the Stalins, Napoleons and Hitlers have already perfected the model of using discontent to serve up unlimited power. Morsi had only to follow the simple instructions and voila! Instant Dictatorship. Silly man overlooked the need to compromise the army first. A few judicious promotions surely would have taken care of that.

But then, had the British had the sense to let their soldiers in the Green Mountains know that there was a war starting they probably wouldn’t have let their cannon be stolen. (For those who don’t know, those cannon were crucial to George Washington’s success in the American revolution.)

Unemployment has been a force in the past. If enough young, vigorous, clever people are excluded from society, impoverished and frustrated, whilst the already wealthy grow richer and older, maybe something will give. But are ample supplies of drones (oops! another word losing its real meaning) being bred and positioned to simply inherit the cash and perpetuate the system?

Internet and ipad, the dream world of Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google and the rest (if there is any ‘rest’) seem to be an adequate substitute for a life in many cases. Indeed, I find it a constant fight to prevent the Internet and its baubles from intruding further into my life and squeezing out all that really matters.

36

Meanwhile; back in present day Australia…

To some degree I am getting to like Tony Abbott. He didn’t really shine in the Howard government but he does seem to have grown in stature recently – perhaps because, as unchallenged Prime Minister, he can now speak his mind without much risk of censure within his own party.

I found two of his recent statements most interesting. I am taking them out of context but I think they are worth examining for their own sake.

The first statement was:

We want to reduce the amount of legislation.

That’s a good start. The key question that I would like every candidate for election , at every level of government, to answer is ‘How much legislation do you propose to repeal?‘

The second statement was:

‘We must decide how much freedom to allow you.’

That remark encapsulates – inadvertently I am sure – everything that I abhor about politics. What should be decided – in every case and in every situation – is how little interference with freedom there can and shall be.

The politician’s mantra should be ‘Don’t interfere unless you absolutely must, and then only to the smallest degree that is absolutely essential to the preservation of peace and good order.’

That should be burned into the brain of every person in every position in every level of government.

And we should vote only for candidates who declare that to be their principal guide. Preferably ones who have already demonstrated it but we may have to wait for a while until we have any of those.

And the next question that those in government should most frequently ask is ‘How much previous interference can we now dispense with?’

The field of taxation offers splendid (I almost said ‘rich’ but that might be misleading) opportunities.

Instead of a massive volume of detailed legislation, providing overpaid employment for millions of lawyers and tax agents and establishing millions of ‘public servants’ in purpose built palaces, with access to massive data banks and vast computer power, why not apply the Willie Sutton rule?

The famous bank robber was asked why he robbed banks and is widely misquoted as replying ‘Because that’s where the money is’. And this principle has been incorporated into medical diagnosis as ‘Sutton’s Rule’, which states that the first place to look for a problem is the most obvious one.

In this respect it is similar to ‘Occam’s Razor’, which says that the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one. So what do we conclude?

Take the money that you need from the banks.

The idea is inherently fair. Poor people don’t have much money and don’t move it about much – if indeed it reaches a bank at all. If you impose a tax of a tiny, fixed percentage of each movement out of an account you will only need enough people to monitor the banks and other financial institutions and you can collect whatever sum is necessary to fund all legitimate government activities.

And, provided you impose draconian penalties on bank directors for any malfeasance, that will put an end to tax dodging.

(You wouldn’t tax deposits of course; you want the stuff to be put in there.)

An obvious objection is that people will move to a cash economy. This is easy to combat by limiting the money supply and frequently reissuing the currency – with strict limits on the amount that can be exchanged for the new issue. There may be some resort to barter but it is difficult to imagine this taking place on a major scale. On the plus side it would be a great help in combating money laundering.

Another useful scheme would be to make all transport infrastructure creation and maintenance costs, plus the cost of all licencing and third-party insurance, a charge on road fuels.

This is inherently fair, as those who make the heaviest use of the system will pay the most. A man who travels by bicycle has no need of freeways and ought not to pay for them. He will gain some benefit from efficient infrastructure from lower transport costs for his goods, but he will pay for that in the purchase price.

And so, at a stroke, another massive edifice of ‘Public Servants’ can be swept away.

The difficulty, which I have observed before, is what do we do with all of these unemployed lawyers and clerks. Is it even possible to train them to do something useful and is anyone prepared to invest the time and capital needed to create productive employment for them?

And here I think we have the nub of the problem. First and foremost the government needs to keep these people busy. If they are reasonably intelligent and not kept busy they will become a nuisance to us all. (Well they already are, of course, but in a way sanctioned by society.)

The possibility of creating gainful employment is so extremely complex that I will avoid discussing it here. I will only comment that, as far as I am aware, no government has ever done so and government claims to have facilitated its creation should be regarded with deep suspicion. As long as governments contain the sort of idiot who had the brilliant notion of taxing employers for employing people it is difficult to imagine them doing anything constructive.

What is a matter of historical record is the privation and distress created by the introduction of mechanisation in England. This, combined with the enclosure of common land to force the population to work in the factories, was largely the cause of the settlement of America and mass migration to Canada, Australia and other colonies.

So, many people chose hardship in hostile surroundings over slavery and starvation in their own land; now they choose slavery over being deprived of their toys. But more and more have neither toys nor adequate food and shelter. Slaves are in over-supply. And the wonderful world of opportunity has put up a sign – ‘Members Only’.

Commerce is a wilful sort of God and subsistence is not ennobling. I don’t have the answers but I very much wish that more people were asking the questions.

37

Meanwhile; back in present day Australia…

To some degree I am getting to like Tony Abbott. He didn’t really shine in the Howard government but he does seem to have grown in stature recently – perhaps because, as unchallenged Prime Minister, he can now speak his mind without much risk of censure within his own party.

I found two of his recent statements most interesting. I am taking them out of context but I think they are worth examining for their own sake.

The first statement was:

We want to reduce the amount of legislation.

That’s a good start. The key question that I would like every candidate for election , at every level of government, to answer is ‘How much legislation do you propose to repeal?‘

The second statement was:

‘We must decide how much freedom to allow you.’

That remark encapsulates – inadvertently I am sure – everything that I abhor about politics. What should be decided – in every case and in every situation – is how little interference with freedom there can and shall be.

My response to that particular remark is ‘You work for US sonny and we have NOT awarded you the right to determine how much freedom we shall enjoy.’

The politician’s mantra should be ‘Don’t interfere unless you absolutely must, and then only to the smallest degree that is absolutely essential to the preservation of peace and good order.’

That should be burned into the brain of every person in every position in every level of government.

And we should vote only for candidates who declare that to be their principal guide. Preferably ones who have already demonstrated it but we may have to wait for a while until we have any of those.

And the next question that those in government should most frequently ask is ‘How much previous interference can we now dispense with?’

The field of taxation offers splendid (I almost said ‘rich’ but that might be misleading) opportunities.

Instead of a massive volume of detailed legislation, providing overpaid employment for millions of lawyers and tax agents and establishing millions of ‘public servants’ in purpose built palaces, with access to massive data banks and vast computer power, why not apply the Willie Sutton rule?

The famous bank robber was asked why he robbed banks and is widely misquoted as replying ‘Because that’s where the money is’. And this principle has been incorporated into medical diagnosis as ‘Sutton’s Rule’, which states that the first place to look for a problem is the most obvious one.

In this respect it is similar to ‘Occam’s Razor’, which says that the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one. So what do we conclude?

Take the money that you need from the banks.

The idea is inherently fair. Poor people don’t have much money and don’t move it about much – if indeed it reaches a bank at all. If you impose a tax of a tiny, fixed percentage of each movement out of an account you will only need enough people to monitor the banks and other financial institutions and you can collect whatever sum is necessary to fund all legitimate government activities.

And, provided you impose draconian penalties on bank directors for any malfeasance, that will put an end to tax dodging.

(You wouldn’t tax deposits of course; you want the stuff to be put in there.)

An obvious objection is that people will move to a cash economy. This is easy to combat by limiting the money supply and frequently reissuing the currency – with strict limits on the amount that can be exchanged for the new issue. There may be some resort to barter but it is difficult to imagine this taking place on a major scale. On the plus side it would be a great help in combating money laundering.

Another useful scheme would be to make all transport infrastructure creation and maintenance costs, plus the cost of all licencing and third-party insurance, a charge on road fuels.

This is inherently fair, as those who make the heaviest use of the system will pay the most. A man who travels by bicycle has no need of freeways and ought not to pay for them. He will gain some benefit from efficient infrastructure from lower transport costs for his goods, but he will pay for that in the purchase price.

And so, at a stroke, another massive edifice of ‘Public Servants’ can be swept away.

The difficulty, which I have observed before, is what do we do with all of these unemployed lawyers and clerks. Is it even possible to train them to do something useful and is anyone prepared to invest the time and capital needed to create productive employment for them?

And here I think we have the nub of the problem. First and foremost the government needs to keep these people busy. If they are reasonably intelligent and not kept busy they will become a nuisance to us all. (Well they already are, of course, but in a way sanctioned by society.)

The possibility of creating gainful employment is so extremely complex that I will avoid discussing it here. I will only comment that, as far as I am aware, no government has ever done so and government claims to have facilitated its creation should be regarded with deep suspicion. As long as governments contain the sort of idiot who had the brilliant notion of taxing employers for employing people it is difficult to imagine them doing anything constructive.

What is a matter of historical record is the privation and distress created by the introduction of mechanisation in England. This, combined with the enclosure of common land to force the population to work in the factories, was largely the cause of the settlement of America and mass migration to Canada, Australia and other colonies.

So, many people chose hardship in hostile surroundings over slavery and starvation in their own land; now they choose slavery over being deprived of their toys. But more and more have neither toys nor adequate food and shelter. Slaves are in over-supply. And the wonderful world of opportunity has put up a sign – ‘Members Only’.

Commerce is a wilful sort of God and subsistence is not ennobling. I don’t have the answers but I very much wish that more people were asking the questions.

37

Discussing the ongoing and apparently accelerating collapse of justice in the USA, with the government now permitting the military to arrest and detain its citizens without trial or representation, and reflecting on similar attitudes toward liberty and due process here and in the UK, I had the following thoughts:

The really scary thing is that as this goes on we will get used to it and fail to be scared. Then it will be too late - if it is not already. It is evident that governments, in the UK, the USA and here in Australia, are running scared of bogey men and phantom organisations instead of focusing their resources tightly on real threats. Are they in fact too scared to act resolutely against actual enemies for fear of retribution? It is much safer to bail up a few harmless people on minor or outright faked charges than to go after dangerous terrorists - until the terrorists win.

Am I being unfair to our politicians and our Feral Police? I hardly think so. WHEN I see an unsolicited public apology for indefensible conduct, accompanied by public denouncement and removal of persons who have exceeded their authority and/or ignored proper process I MAY think that whatever ignorance, idleness, or corruption has led to this sort of conduct is not and will not be permitted. At the moment it is, if not actively encouraged, at least allowed to pass with neither stricture for the offenders nor apology to the offended.

It is encouraging to learn that there are in the USA jurists with enough pride and belief in the principles that they have sworn to uphold that they will tackle the government head on. But the government has the power, and has obviously used it, to load the ranks of higher court justices with its own lackeys, who will unquestioningly rubber-stamp any action that it chooses to take. So even the protests from within the system are swept aside.

One begins to understand the absolute determination of American citizens to retain the right to own weapons with which, in the extreme, they hope to be able to defend themselves from their own government. I used to think that was overstated; now I am becoming rapidly converted to the idea that it is America's only hope of avoiding a total slide into a Gestapo-like regime.

That brings up the disquieting thought 'was the Australian government's introduction of stiffer gun control laws motivated by a genuine wish to deter gun crime or was that just a convenient excuse to reduce the citizen's power to resist autocracy and a police state?'

The trouble is that reasonable people don't want to believe in conspiracies and power grabs. We pretend that they only happen in the Middle East or the Balkans. Or maybe Russia. But the sort of power-crazy people that succeed in those places exist in our society too. And I don't mean the religious sickos that we are importing in ever increasing numbers. They will certainly become a problem in the not too distant future but we already have enough home bred sickos here. They don't wear beards or turbans or any convenient outward sign of their type. A pig in a double-breasted suit and a club tie can pass as a statesman any day.

We hope that the little Hitlers of the Union movement will battle it out with the big Mussolinis of the Business world without harming us. It's just a show; an entertainment to amuse us and keep us from thinking things out for ourselves. None of them care a damn about us. All of them want to herd us into a pen and exploit us for their own gain. Behind the scenes they have far more in common with each other than with any of us.

Is there a way to stack our parliaments with a mix of people such that only legislation that can be agreed upon as essential by a majority of people is imposed upon us? That surely is the test of democratic freedom – no restraint except that which all agree is essential. Would it be possible in the present day to find a politician who can claim to have been won over by an opponent's speech in parliament and changed his vote as a consequence? Under the party system this is inconceivable. Nobody who did that would be preselected by the party at the next election. And we all know that a party label carries more credibility than competence or honesty. The procedures of parliament as currently practiced are therefore a sham and a waste of considerable amounts of public money.

The Ruling happens behind the scenes; so-called justice is a farce; and nobody cares. We are like herd animals on a plain. We know that predators want to attack us; we have no idea of how to organise our superior numbers to combat them, as we so easily could. We simply run and hope that someone else is pulled down and torn apart, whilst we survive for another day. Trying to help anyone who is hit upon is an open invitation to share the same fate.

37

Discussing the ongoing and apparently accelerating collapse of justice in the USA, with the government now permitting the military to arrest and detain its citizens without trial or representation, and reflecting on similar attitudes toward liberty and due process here and in the UK, I had the following thoughts:

The really scary thing is that as this goes on we will get used to it and fail to be scared. Then it will be too late - if it is not already. It is evident that governments, in the UK, the USA and here in Australia, are running scared of bogey men and phantom organisations instead of focusing their resources tightly on real threats. Are they in fact too scared to act resolutely against actual enemies for fear of retribution? It is much safer to bail up a few harmless people on minor or outright faked charges than to go after dangerous terrorists - until the terrorists win.

Am I being unfair to our politicians and our Feral Police? I hardly think so. WHEN I see an unsolicited public apology for indefensible conduct, accompanied by public denouncement and removal of persons who have exceeded their authority and/or ignored proper process I MAY think that whatever ignorance, idleness, or corruption has led to this sort of conduct is not and will not be permitted. At the moment it is, if not actively encouraged, at least allowed to pass with neither stricture for the offenders nor apology to the offended.

It is encouraging to learn that there are in the USA jurists with enough pride and belief in the principles that they have sworn to uphold that they will tackle the government head on. But the government has the power, and has obviously used it, to load the ranks of higher court justices with its own lackeys, who will unquestioningly rubber-stamp any action that it chooses to take. So even the protests from within the system are swept aside.

One begins to understand the absolute determination of American citizens to retain the right to own weapons with which, in the extreme, they hope to be able to defend themselves from their own government. I used to think that was overstated; now I am becoming rapidly converted to the idea that it is America's only hope of avoiding a total slide into a Gestapo-like regime.

That brings up the disquieting thought 'was the Australian government's introduction of stiffer gun control laws motivated by a genuine wish to deter gun crime or was that just a convenient excuse to reduce the citizen's power to resist autocracy and a police state?'

The trouble is that reasonable people don't want to believe in conspiracies and power grabs. We pretend that they only happen in the Middle East or the Balkans. Or maybe Russia. But the sort of power-crazy people that succeed in those places exist in our society too. And I don't mean the religious sickos that we are importing in ever increasing numbers. They will certainly become a problem in the not too distant future but we already have enough home bred sickos here. They don't wear beards or turbans or any convenient outward sign of their type. A pig in a double-breasted suit and a club tie can pass as a statesman any day.

We hope that the little Hitlers of the Union movement will battle it out with the big Mussolinis of the Business world without harming us. It's just a show; an entertainment to amuse us and keep us from thinking things out for ourselves. None of them care a damn about us. All of them want to herd us into a pen and exploit us for their own gain. Behind the scenes they have far more in common with each other than with any of us.

Is there a way to stack our parliaments with a mix of people such that only legislation that can be agreed upon as essential by a majority of people is imposed upon us? That surely is the test of democratic freedom – no restraint except that which all agree is essential. Would it be possible in the present day to find a politician who can claim to have been won over by an opponent's speech in parliament and changed his vote as a consequence? Under the party system this is inconceivable. Nobody who did that would be preselected by the party at the next election. And we all know that a party label carries more credibility than competence or honesty. The procedures of parliament as currently practiced are therefore a sham and a waste of considerable amounts of public money.

The Ruling happens behind the scenes; so-called justice is a farce; and nobody cares. We are like herd animals on a plain. We know that predators want to attack us; we have no idea of how to organise our superior numbers to combat them, as we so easily could. We simply run and hope that someone else is pulled down and torn apart, whilst we survive for another day. Trying to help anyone who is hit upon is an open invitation to share the same fate.

38

I am still worrying away at this political bone. I have had a good many years now to observe the system in action, both in Australia and the UK. I have even received the courtesy of a visit to a State Capitol in the USA. Also, if I had any doubts, I have the words of Barack Obabma that I quoted in an earlier commentary. ‘Nobody is listening’.

Yesterday I received an email containing two pictures of a chamber – I won’t say whose – debating two bills.

The first, concerning the disadvantage to handicapped people resulting from certain legislation showed attendance by a scattered handful of members.

The second, debating a bill to increase members’ salaries, was packed to the rafters. No doubt this matter was debated with the incisive sharpness of a tennis ball. The struggles of those opposing the measure would presumably have been apocalyptic.

Really, when the government of the day has a commanding majority, there seems little point in other members speaking or even being present. Parties are run on military lines; the leader decides the outcomes and the whips drive the troops forward regardless of their wish or inclination. Unlike a military battle though, the greatest number always win.

No weapons, no weight of truth or justice or plain commonsense will avail the opposition. Nobody is listening. They are not even thinking. There is no evidence that they are even capable of thought, or truthfulness, or comprehending the concept of justice. And the only time they are permitted to consult their consciences – if indeed they have them – in during a rare and generally unimportant ‘conscience vote’.

It has become clear in recent years that so-called ‘Independents’ are only too willing to prop up a government of any flavour, rather than risk their seats in another election before they are absolutely forced to. They use their balancing power to extort pork-barrel items from the government to their constituents, the better to enhance their chances of re-election when the next poll becomes inevitable, but contribute little else.

Dropping down a gear, let’s look at local government.

The thing that strikes me most about local government is its obsession with money.

The reason that we are all being encouraged to build houses in our backyards, and developers are encouraged to overshadow them with ever higher and more densely packed people hutches, is because this yields more income for the government to spend.

(At least, that is the motivation that we are supposed to accept. I find it ludicrous to ignore the probablility that a great amount of palm-greasing goes on and that little or no attempt is ever made to detect it and bring the parties involved to justice.)

There is not the slightest consideration of whether the existing population wants more money spent. And local government is in any case under ever increasing pressure by higher governments to provide more ‘services’ – whatever those may be.

I have to concede that there are people who expect government at some level to provide for their ‘needs’ and I am not referring only, or even mainly, to those at the bottom of the social scale. I don’t claim to know the reason for this; it could be simple inertia – an unwillingness to take responsibility to resolving competing demands for space and freedom of action – or an extraordinary preference for being ordered around and milked dry by greedy and arrogant persons.

In either of those cases it matters little what flavour of politics the rulers claim to represent. So a system that doesn’t require them to justify each individual imposition that they place on the rest of us is perfectly satisfactory.

Yet we continue to pretend that issues are debated, minds open to persuasion, and value placed on facts, even where those are unpalatable to the hearers.

They aren’t.

If you can bear to listen to the proceedings of Parliament you will hear excellent speeches, supported by verfiable data and impeccable logic, utterly disregarded. Not a mind is swayed. No mind of opposing view is even engaged. And all too often none is present.

And you will hear the droning of mindless drivel and hackneyed slogan, for no discernible purpose than to fill in time allotted for pointless justification.

However, what most people associate with Parliament is the sort of mindless invective that was the sole visible capability of Paul Keating. As a circus act I must concede that it was of a far higher standard than anything that recent performers have been able to achieve. The current level compares more with the behaviour of small and not particularly intelligent boys in a school yard. Can it really reflect the intelligence and ability of our ‘chosen’ representatives?

It seems depressingly likely that the mass of the population actually like their affairs to be ‘managed’ in this way. Certainly a brief glance at their apparent choice in telvision viewing supports this conclusion. And the apparent popularity of irrational ranting and bigotry on radio seems to confirm it. Neither of these require any engagement of the brain; perhaps the political process is correct in aiming for – and achieving – the same standard.

Nobody is listening. Because nobody cares. Is it Apathy? Stupidity? Frustration? Despair?

Apparently it is Inevitable.

39

Well yes – I gave up for a while. I failed to do a lot more things in that time, most of them more useful than politics. But now that Clive’s pups are chewing a few shoes, so to speak, there is at least some interest in Australian politics.

And still I have read no comments, anywhere by anyone, pointing out that this is how Parliaments are supposed to operate. Issues are debated, everyone listens to all the points raised and makes a decision on how to vote based on what they have heard – and how much of it they believe – and only those measures that meet with the approval of a majority are passed into law.

Perhaps I am the only person in Australia – or maybe the world – who believes in real Parliamentary government.

Horse trading behind the scenes – so-called ‘Independents’ toadying up to one side or the other and propping up governments with no real mandate so as to hang on to their own seats – is not democracy at work. Whining because you thought you had a deal cuts no ice with me. Any bill that has so little support that one or two switched votes can derail it should never be introduced.

Leaving the antics of Canberra aside for a moment, we have the interesting spectacle in South Australia of a politician elected as representing a major party accepting a position in the governing, opposing party. Now I don’t think much of people voting for a party label but the fact is that they do. And parties spend a lot of cash making sure that everyone knows which candidate is theirs. So for an elected politician to change sides and retain his seat is surely a greater case of misrepresentation than anything that would be permitted to a commercial company without penalty.

Change your views by all means but you’ve promised the electorate that you will represent a known set of values and to abandon those values for others that the people who elected you may abhor is simply cheating those who voted for you. Such a despicable person should be summarily ejected from the parliament if they have not the decency to resign of their own accord. If they wish for a seat let them compete honestly for one.

Getting back to the main arena, I do enjoy the shrieking and wailing of those who fear that their little apple carts will be upset by this handful of real people who have somehow broken in to their cosy private club. ‘Oh dear, they don’t seem to understand the rules; we shall have to train them to be like us.’ I have news for you, sweetheart. They don’t want to be like you and you have no means of intimidating them. And now that we have found a way to break through this arcane electoral system, so carefully crafted to pretend that people have voted for dickheads that they don’t really want a bar of, we are unlikely to stop there.

I look forward to seeing further novel ways of directing votes toward real people and right now I don’t give a damn who they are or what they stand for. Perhaps more people like Clive Palmer, with a successful career in business or any other responsible field, may be persuaded to step up and take a role in public affairs for a time – as in a real Democracy! The major parties offer little attraction for most voters.

Look at what we have at present:

The Liberals and their coalition represent big business, whatever verbal sop they may offer to small business people. The overall effect of their policies will always be to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. However, there is some chance that the poor will be left with something. To vote for them is the best, bad choice.

The Greens give no more than lip service to the environment and devote their energies to verbal attacks on Israel, for some obscure reason, and propping up the Labor party. Nothing that they do is likely to promote prosperity for anyone. To vote for them is rather pointless.

The Labor party was created to give a voice to the Union movement and there is therefore no way that union influence within it can be considered excessive. People seem to overlook that fact.

In reality it exists to provide cushy jobs for people of questionable integrity and doubtful competence but if union members choose to be represented by those sort of people that’s their prerogative. It’s just a pity that the Union movement throws up such creeps – the old phenomenon of scum rising to the top. They are the only people to prosper under a Labor government. To vote for them is simply to keep their noses in the public trough.

(If other Labor supporters don’t like it they should join or form a different party.)

And we have had a few so-called Independents who are mostly closet Labor supporters who have some particular axe to grind and little interest in anything else apart from retaining their seats at all cost. A vote for them is only useful if you are desperately anxious to see whatever peculiar measure they promote succeed, whether it be freedom to take dope or compulsory religious observance.

So anybody or any party that comes on the scene has to offer some prospect of improvement. Even if they only make life difficult for the people who thought that they were born with a God-given right to rule the rest of us they are welcome to my vote. I cannot recall a previous time when politics were interesting.

I’ll finish with a nod to the mundane. I think I mentioned earlier my astonishment that the NSW government has seen fit to introduce special penalties for persons who succeed in killing someone with one punch. I saw some reference to it again recently, which reminded me.

Will this be followed by a special law for people who kill someone with one shot? Or one stab? Or one bash over the head with a brick?

And why stop there? We could have special laws for each number of punches, shots, stabs, bashes over the head and indeed multiples of every imaginable method of causing death. The lawyers could then enjoy endless hours of highly-paid argument about every incident – even more than at present.

The temptation for lawyer/politicians will surely prove irresistible.

Here's a thought. Instead of having highly paid judges in secure employment that enables them to make grossly unjust decisions without fear of criticism or punishment, why not appoint citizens temporarily to the job just as they are called to jury duty? It would be a lot cheaper and there is no reason to suppose that their decisions would be less flawed.

40

It’s a long time since I wrote anything; well someone has to provide the surgical profession with their superannuation. Unfortunately being the subject of their work can be distracting, even when it is successful. Indeed, its very success makes possible pleasant activities that have previously been constrained, such as extensive travel. And this in turn can distract, especially as Internet access, although theoretically universal, can be somewhat dependent on the facilities offered by the places where one stays. But above all I have been writing about politics and it is SO BLOODY BORING.

It is boring because nothing much changes. Idealists are totally committed to ramming their ideas down our throats without trying to discover whether they are either practicable or capable of creating the beneficial effects that they claim will result. Worse, this apparently blinds them to their own weaknesses, to the extent that they are easily elbowed aside by the venomous and self-centred elements of society.  Which in its turn focuses the efforts of the defenders of freedom and fairness to rush us back to the other extreme.

And so we see excessive greed and mindless compassion sway to and fro – complicated by a side-serving of lunatic religious fanaticism.

I conclude that the real problem for people like me, who do not want to manipulate other people or order them about, is that we can’t prevent those who wish to do so from interfering with us, other than by using their own methods. Which is self-defeating.

As for the religious nutters, how can they possibly imagine a being capable of creating the universe – and indeed infinity, since there is no reason to doubt the existence of many universes – who has all the characteristics of an irritable old man, so insecure that he needs us feeble creatures to fall down and worship him at frequent intervals, in order to boost his self-esteem?

It is recorded that the great scientist Ampere, who gave his name to the unit of measurement of electric current, was wont to say after each of his many discoveries ‘How great God is.’ Exactly. Humanity has created precisely nothing. We are mechanics, tinkering with God’s creation. We cannot ‘make’ a grain of sand or a blade of grass and to presume that our behaviour is more important to God than that of a slug or earwig is ludicrously presumptuous.

One thing that we do have in common with all of God’s creatures is a tendency to expand our numbers until we destroy our environment – and everyone else’s of course.  And it is in this one capability that we excel.

Well that’s cleared my mind a bit so I’ll move on to the subject that I originally intended to address, namely Bullshit.

You may well say that this is hardly a change of subject from politics and religion but bear with me, O faithful imaginary followers. I wish merely to explore and amplify some detail of the excellent and scholarly paper ‘On Bullshit’ by Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University.

(I commend to you the original, which may be found at http://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/pdf/on-bullshit.pdf)

Mr Frankfurt discusses whether intention is a characteristic of bullshit and invokes Ludwig Wittgenstein as follows:

Wittgenstein once said that the following bit of verse by Longfellow could serve him as a motto:

In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods are everywhere.

For the benefit of those who believe in only a single God we could modify the last line to read:

For God, we know, sees everywhere.

Now that is very fine and an excellent precept but is it germane to our subject?

Where bullshit is used for the purpose of obfuscation, a practice that is widely observed by many politicians especially those occupying ministerial positions, it may be beautifully crafted, with exquisite care. You may say that this is not the same as the hidden work of the craftsmen to which the poem alludes, yet insofar as they, for example, finely engraved the obverse of a clock face, this did not in any way contribute to the accuracy with which the clock kept time. Nor even did it contribute to the visible ornamentation of the piece. It was done for their benefit, not that of the beholder. They did, though, endeavour to attain the same perfection in the visible and utilitarian features of their work.

I conclude that we may justifiably admire the skill with which reality is obscured within a finely constructed example of bullshit, without implying approval of its distortion or concealment of truth. This we may term subtle bullshit. Its intention is unquestionably to benefit the bullshitter although, in its highest form, it is intended also to imply benefit to the hearer. ‘Vote for Me! You’ll never regret it.’ or ‘This will benefit the Whole Nation’ or perhaps ‘All of Humanity’. Expressed in fifteen paragraphs without actually using any of those words. Where it differs from the work of the craftsman is in the fact that it results in no compensating utility whatever.

There is of course what we may class as crude bullshit; the sort of thing that is spoken by persons who are unaware of their own ignorance and, far from wishing to mislead their audience, present their own delusions in an honest belief that they are the truth. It is extremely hard to differentiate these bullshitters from those who are deliberately trying to deceive; fortunately it matters little provided we recognise the need to disregard both.

Mr Frankfurt gives another Wittgenstein example:

Wittgenstein devoted his philosophical energies largely to identifying and combating what he regarded as insidiously disruptive forms of “non-sense.” He was apparently like that in his personal life as well. This comes out in an anecdote related by Fania Pascal, who knew him in Cambridge in the 1930s:

“I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling
sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: ‘I feel just like a dog
that has been run over.’ He was disgusted: ‘You don’t know what a
dog that has been run over feels like.'”

Now who knows what really happened? It seems extraordinary, almost unbelievable, that anyone could object seriously to what Pascal reports herself as having said. That characterization of her feelings—so innocently close to the utterly commonplace “sick as a dog”—is simply not provocative enough to arouse any response as lively or intense as disgust. If Pascal’s simile is offensive, then what figurative or allusive uses of language would not be?

Mr Frankfurt does not say that Wittgenstein preceded his statement with the expression ‘Bullshit’. Coarser persons might have said ‘Bollocks’ but the little that I have read of Wittgenstein suggests that he was not of a coarse nature.

Most people would surely interpret Pascal’s remark as shorthand for ‘I feel as awful as I imagine a dog that has been run over would feel’. And we would not expect a person in that condition to engage in excessive precision of language.

Although precision in language was a major part of Wittgenstein’s philosophical outlook, as an Austrian his first language was German; a precise and structured language. And although he lived in England – he died in Cambridge in 1951 – he perhaps did not grasp, or refused to accept, the fact that nuances and understatement are structural elements in the English language, particularly in its spoken form. Possibly he simply did not realise that the English like it that way and are strenuously opposed to any attempt to reduce its capacity for implication and innuendo.

In complete contrast, Josef Conrad, despite his Polish roots and the fact that he was 40 years old before publishing his first writing, had an innate understanding of the niceties and subtleties of English. If Conrad wrote bullshit it would be because he wished it to be understood as such.

Well that will do for now I think. Possibly you will say ‘What utter bullshit’ which is a fair comment on anything presented in an attempt to entertain which falls short of the standard expected by the reader.

Nonetheless, I may develop this theme further in subsequent blogs, whilst I seek in vain for any material of substance in the political/legal world.

41

Just after I concluded the last entry I received a delivery of the very material under discussion. It falls into the major Bullshit sub-category Salesmanship, section Telephone.

To be absolutely fair I must also acknowledge that this particular Bullshit has, for me, considerable entertainment value. Indeed I have encouraged it in the past by allowing the caller to present his spiel and also to send me ‘proofs’ of the viability of the scheme that he is attempting to peddle. He is polite and courteous, asks if his call is convenient and offers to postpone it if not.

Not wishing to be unfair, I do warn him that he is unlikely to be successful and suggest that it may be more productive for him to terminate the call and devote his time to a more amenable prospect. He has always declined this invitation but I did this time detect a degree of disgust and impatience when, after listening to a long and passionate exposition of the virtues of his scheme, I indicated continuing disinterest.

Not wishing to be mysterious either, I will outline the particular Bullshit under discussion. The basic premise is that a panel of experts in financial fields has been assembled, these people being able to predict movements in the stock market index with better than 50% accuracy. Using this information, punters are invited, via smartphone, to bet a 5% stake of their capital invested in the company’s scheme on each predicted up or down movement.

Impressive spreadsheets show how following this scheme would, despite convincing losses from time to time, have produced enormous gains over a year, provided that all of the alerts were responded to.

Now one of the points made during the spiel is that it is entirely optional which alerts the punter responds to. But any attempt to point out that it wouldn’t take too many omissions and wrong choices to lose the entire capital or at least produce a very different result from that shown in the examples is brushed aside with a skill that one can only admire.

And that insertion of carefully crafted negative results into the spreadsheets is true artistry. At times the ‘investment’ capital surges upward, only to lose all of its gains and fall to dangerous levels before climbing inexorably once more, despite further intermittent losses of carefully crafted magnitude, to eventually conclude with a huge and triumphant gain.

I had no heart to point out to the caller that anyone with access to such a sure-fire money making scheme, over the time during which the scheme has so far been touted, would hardly choose to spend his days on the phone, in a room echoing with many other calls in the background, trying to share his good fortune with others. Or even, if such a good Samaritan could be found, that a roomful of others could be found to share in the attempt.

I must admit that I find the scheme more credible than the horse racing scheme that I believe was originally promoted by the same people. I don’t recall the ingenious ‘reasoning’ that lay behind that scheme as it was temptingly placed before me, but it was, as I recall, quite persuasive. And definitely Bullshit.

(I could I suppose save a few letters by typing ‘scam’ rather than ‘scheme’ but I don’t want to be less polite than the promoters.)

It is perfectly possible that the promoters may apply the punters’ funds as they claim, using the device known as a CD. The gorgeously named Contract for Difference, or CD, is an alias for a bet with a broker that a share or index of shares will move up or down over a given time. It has nothing to do with actually buying or selling any shares – although the broker, or indeed the ‘investor’ might decide to do so in order to ‘hedge’ the bet.

In essence the CD is the financial system’s equivalent to betting which of two flies crawling up a window will reach the top first. It’s promotion as an ‘investment’ is a fine example of Bullshit in its own right,

Now the scam, sorry, scheme promoters operate ‘client’ (ie. punter) accounts and so have access to a very large quantity of money that they can place at interest in the financial markets . And if you have a very large sum of money there are extremely lucrative short term investment opportunities that you can take advantage of. So there is an opportunity, by simply delaying payouts to clients, for the promoters to make a tidy profit at no risk to themselves.

Then CD’s may indeed be bought corresponding to the published predictions, and a margin allowed between the payout on the successful CD’s and the payout to the punters. After all, the punters only know what they are told. It’s even possible that the promoters really do have some expertise or inside knowledge that enables them to achieve a better than 50% chance of guessing the movements of the index correctly. And when the punters lose, they don’t.

Overall, the fine combination of truth, assertion, and appeal to latent greed is truly one of the finest examples of pure Bullshit that I have encountered in a very long life. So convincing is it that, if I were younger and had a bit of spare cash, I would try it out. It’s probably a better bet than lottery tickets and need cost no more than some of my acquaintances spend on theatre tickets in the course of a year.

And there is the thought that it would be only fair to give the promoters some return for the enormous entertainment that their calls and brochures have given me over time.

So we see that being Bullshit does not mean that something has no value at all; it may have considerable entertainment value, whether this is intended or no. The name however implies that it has no value in the context in which it is presented. To qualify as Bullshit it must be completely lacking in intrinsic value.

In my next blog I will explore the huge, related field of Copywriting.

And now, for a complete change of subject (or is it?)

Religion corner.

Irreligious as I am, I can find no fault with the code of behaviour that we ought to observe toward one another which the Bible attributes to Jesus Christ; nor in His stated attitude to excessive wealth. The great mystery is why, out of everything written in the Bible, His instructions in these matters are totally disregarded by just about every variant of religion established in His name.

It seems probable that more Camels than Cardinals will pass through the eye of the needle.

41

Just after I concluded the last entry I received a delivery of the very material under discussion. It falls into the major Bullshit sub-category Salesmanship, section Telephone.

To be absolutely fair I must also acknowledge that this particular Bullshit has, for me, considerable entertainment value. Indeed I have encouraged it in the past by allowing the caller to present his spiel and also to send me ‘proofs’ of the viability of the scheme that he is attempting to peddle. He is polite and courteous, asks if his call is convenient and offers to postpone it if not.

Not wishing to be unfair, I do warn him that he is unlikely to be successful and suggest that it may be more productive for him to terminate the call and devote his time to a more amenable prospect. He has always declined this invitation but I did this time detect a degree of disgust and impatience when, after listening to a long and passionate exposition of the virtues of his scheme, I indicated continuing disinterest.

Not wishing to be mysterious either, I will outline the particular Bullshit under discussion. The basic premise is that a panel of experts in financial fields has been assembled, these people being able to predict movements in the stock market index with better than 50% accuracy. Using this information, punters are invited, via smartphone, to bet a 5% stake of their capital invested in the company’s scheme on each predicted up or down movement.

Impressive spreadsheets show how following this scheme would, despite convincing losses from time to time, have produced enormous gains over a year, provided that all of the alerts were responded to.

Now one of the points made during the spiel is that it is entirely optional which alerts the punter responds to. But any attempt to point out that it wouldn’t take too many omissions and wrong choices to lose the entire capital or at least produce a very different result from that shown in the examples is brushed aside with a skill that one can only admire.

And that insertion of carefully crafted negative results into the spreadsheets is true artistry. At times the ‘investment’ capital surges upward, only to lose all of its gains and fall to dangerous levels before climbing inexorably once more, despite further intermittent losses of carefully crafted magnitude, to eventually conclude with a huge and triumphant gain.

I had no heart to point out to the caller that anyone with access to such a sure-fire money making scheme, over the time during which the scheme has so far been touted, would hardly choose to spend his days on the phone, in a room echoing with many other calls in the background, trying to share his good fortune with others. Or even, if such a good Samaritan could be found, that a roomful of others could be found to share in the attempt.

I must admit that I find the scheme more credible than the horse racing scheme that I believe was originally promoted by the same people. I don’t recall the ingenious ‘reasoning’ that lay behind that scheme as it was temptingly placed before me, but it was, as I recall, quite persuasive. And definitely Bullshit.

(I could I suppose save a few letters by typing ‘scam’ rather than ‘scheme’ but I don’t want to be less polite than the promoters.)

It is perfectly possible that the promoters may apply the punters’ funds as they claim, using the device known as a CD. The gorgeously named Contract for Difference, or CD, is an alias for a bet with a broker that a share or index of shares will move up or down over a given time. It has nothing to do with actually buying or selling any shares – although the broker, or indeed the ‘investor’ might decide to do so in order to ‘hedge’ the bet.

In essence the CD is the financial system’s equivalent to betting which of two flies crawling up a window will reach the top first. It’s promotion as an ‘investment’ is a fine example of Bullshit in its own right,

Now the scam, sorry, scheme promoters operate ‘client’ (ie. punter) accounts and so have access to a very large quantity of money that they can place at interest in the financial markets . And if you have a very large sum of money there are extremely lucrative short term investment opportunities that you can take advantage of. So there is an opportunity, by simply delaying payouts to clients, for the promoters to make a tidy profit at no risk to themselves.

Then CD’s may indeed be bought corresponding to the published predictions, and a margin allowed between the payout on the successful CD’s and the payout to the punters. After all, the punters only know what they are told. It’s even possible that the promoters really do have some expertise or inside knowledge that enables them to achieve a better than 50% chance of guessing the movements of the index correctly. And when the punters lose, they don’t.

Overall, the fine combination of truth, assertion, and appeal to latent greed is truly one of the finest examples of pure Bullshit that I have encountered in a very long life. So convincing is it that, if I were younger and had a bit of spare cash, I would try it out. It’s probably a better bet than lottery tickets and need cost no more than some of my acquaintances spend on theatre tickets in the course of a year.

And there is the thought that it would be only fair to give the promoters some return for the enormous entertainment that their calls and brochures have given me over time.

So we see that being Bullshit does not mean that something has no value at all; it may have considerable entertainment value, whether this is intended or no. The name however implies that it has no value in the context in which it is presented. To qualify as Bullshit it must be completely lacking in intrinsic value.

In my next blog I will explore the huge, related field of Copywriting.

And now, for a complete change of subject (or is it?)

Religion corner.

Irreligious as I am, I can find no fault with the code of behaviour that we ought to observe toward one another which the Bible attributes to Jesus Christ; nor in His stated attitude to excessive wealth. The great mystery is why, out of everything written in the Bible, His instructions in these matters are totally disregarded by just about every variant of religion established in His name.

It seems probable that more Camels than Cardinals will pass through the eye of the needle.

42

So; Bullshit in Copywriting, as promised.

It’s true that Macbeth didn’t quite say ‘There is an art to hide the mind’s construction in the text.’ but if he’d been deluged with emails from people trying to flog him stuff he probably would have. Then he would quite likely have tracked down the senders and cut their bloody throats with his Claymore.

Sometimes I am sorely tempted to try Copywriting; after all, the people who teach it are extremely convincing when flogging their courses and I do not for a moment doubt their claim that the masters of the art command huge fees. And Macbeth was only a figment of Shakespeare’s imagination.

At the finest, most imaginative, crafted, polished, absolute peak of Copywriting, the mind’s construction, that is, the intention of the copywriter to flog you something that you would otherwise be entirely happy without, is totally hidden. Or rather, Obscured. By powerful doses of added Bullshit.

What flavours of Bullshit do we find in Copywriting?

• The ‘Free Gift’:

  We are offering you ABSOLUTELY FREE these (fifteen pages/10 chapters/5 volumes) of priceless information on Vole Fondling, the scientifically proven way to reduce stress/cure warts/get pregnant/grow hair/lose weight/attract warthogs/whatever.

Click HERE to start your FREE download

Now what’s all that about?. Well, people who can think of no constructive way to spend their time have discovered that if you give someone something that they never particularly wanted, and maybe have never even heard of, they feel under an obligation to you. So it’s easier to flog them something else that they didn’t really want. (or persuade them to contribute to some worthy – or even worthless – cause). It’s a cloying flavour that is extremely hard to get rid of.

• The ‘Good Life’:

With our help you can do this standing on one leg in the shower and drinking pints of the vintage Champagne that you’ll quaffing all day and every day in the new lifestyle that you’ll be enjoying thanks to our training.

I particularly enjoy this flavour. The subtle blending of Greed and Lust, enhanced by the piquant hint of Near Idleness taunts the taste buds erotically. It is used freely in the main course of all efforts to spruik ‘Get-Rich-Quick with Little Effort’ schemes

• The ‘Get Rid of that Beastly Boss/Stop Working to make Someone Else Rich’:

May be used to flavour an Aperitif or a Dessert. An earthy flavour, appealing to those who consider themselves unappreciated and/or downtrodden.

Like ‘The Good Life’ this is often used to disguise the underlying taste of Ripoff in ‘Work From Home and Make a Fortune Whilst Effortlessly Child Rearing and Crafting You Best Selling Novel and needing No Capital Outlay’ dishes.

Before moving on to consider the flavours of Bullshit used to tempt the appetite for goods and services I will illustrate just two of the anomalies in the promotion of training schemes that the keen student may note over a sustained period of observation.

The following examples are loosely based on real communications that I have received.

Anomaly #1. Promoting a Course of Training:

With our tuition you will soon find yourself able to afford the lifestyle of your dreams, working only a few chosen hours a day, relaxing in your own home or garden and enjoying your hobbies.

Contrast with (in a later email):

‘Our renowned expert, Fred Bloggs, will teach you all you need to know for a fraction of what he normally charges on the rare occasions when he is willing to give lessons. For he normally sits at his desk 16 hours a day, 350 days a year, so devoted is he to his work.’

Now, is Fred utterly incompetent or simply the greediest bastard that you ever encountered?

Either way he isn’t cruising along easily at home, pulling in a small fortune with negligible effort and enjoying heaps of spare time in which to bath the dog and collect rare porcelain. I’d expect him to be tired and irritable and his wife and kids probably left him years ago.

Anomaly #2. Revealing the Charm of Work at Home.

‘Here we reveal the virtues of working at home, as illustrated by a case study of our former student Ms Anna Purna’.

Case study gives glowing details of Child, Dog, Husband, Culinary Skills and Overseas Vacations:

Contrast with (in a later email):

‘Ms Purna has joined us as a valued member of our permanent office staff and will be available to respond to your queries six days a week between the hours of 8.30 am and 6 pm.’

Now how did the Home Lotus Eating Life lose its charm so quickly? Why is Anna now slaving to make a fortune for Beastly Boss whilst accepting a relative pittance for her own time? Isn’t this exactly what Beastly Boss’s company is training people to escape from? They told us that Anna HAD escaped, and it WAS good. Could they have LIED? Surely not!

And what of Child, Dog and Husband; abandoned to survive on takeaway food and deprived of their luxury holidays?

I leave it as an exercise for the student to collect and analyse other such conflicts. Study material is easy to obtain; I myself have some 800 such emails, unread, that have accrued over a few months when I have lacked the time to distract myself with such trivia.

43

Not what I intended for this blog but I seem to have strayed into the realm of pure Bullshit so I will share that with you.

I was looking for information on Nicola Tesla. You may not have heard of Tesla or know little about him. This is not surprising given the way his life and achievements have been largely ignored or actively suppressed.

Yet you would not be reading this, nor living in the advanced society that so many of us take for granted, without his work.

There is an excellent video about Tesla in which it becomes clear that every – not most, every – development in electrical power generation and use, broadcasting and other forms of communication – such as this – are wholly dependent on, and stem directly from, his discoveries.

One of my favourite sayings, sometimes attributed to Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, goes like this

Men have two opposing pairs of basic attributes, cleverness and stupidity, energy and idleness. How these are combined in the individual determine his usefulness in society, as follows:

Stupid and Idle: Useful for menial tasks.

Clever and Energetic: Suited to hands-on, constructive activity and middle management.

Clever and Idle: Ideal in top management positions, capable of highest thinking and undistracted by mundane activities.

Stupid and Energetic Lethally dangerous, apt to act without thought of consequence and hazard to others. Must be harshly repressed.

I have seen it presented more elegantly but that is the gist of it. Unfortunately it takes no cognisance of greed and dishonesty; motivators of consequence in all societies and of significance in the Tesla story. That story is well explained in this slightly over-dramatised video, courtesy of the BBC and CBS.

It does touch upon our topic of Bullshit to the degree that Edison – stupid but extremely industrious – employed all sorts of Bullshit to justify his adherence to direct current electricity, even though he had Tesla in his employ willing and even eager to share with him the knowledge and understanding of how electrical power MUST be alternating if it were to develop its full potential. Yet it was Edison who, by a combination of frenzied industry, often sleeping for only a few hours on one of his laboratory benches, greed and dishonesty, secured a place in history. Tesla, cheated and ignored, moved on.

I could continue to wax indignant at Tesla’s treatment but our subject is Bullshit and I must return to that, pausing only to acknowledge the debt of gratitude that we all owe to George Westinghouse who, despite active interference from Edison, .backed Tesla to bring us the extraordinary benefits of alternating current electricity that we take entirely for granted today. (Ironically carried to much of the USA today by Consolidated Edison!)

The next Bullshitmeister I wish to introduce is Marconi. Not only did Marconi’s entire success rest upon Tesla’s patents but he managed to Bullshit the US Patents Office to reassign those patents to him; a travesty only reversed years after Tesla’s death in poverty. Marconi was far too stupid to know what he was doing but industrious enough to get it to work, extremely crudely. It helped that he had private means sufficient to fund his attempts and render it unnecessary for him to engage in gainful employment.

But the treat that I have saved for last is a second video that I had hoped might present further information about Tesla’s life and discoveries. I give the narrator full marks for industriousness; the stupidity speaks for itself. I shudder at the effect it may have on people unconversant with electrical principles, yet the narrator seems honestly to imagine that his stream of irrational and erratic description will help the uninitiated to grasp a basic concept.

As an example of pure, disinterested Bullshit it would be hard to surpass. He narrator is not trying to impress, neither is he selling anything. He is simply blundering through a morass of ineptitude and confusion under the impression that he is saying something significant for the benefit of others.

The repetitive and entirely disconnected stream of Tesla quotations and news items that accompany the monologue, often too briefly shown to be read in their entirety, form, I think, the ‘Piece de Resistance’ of this truly outstanding performance.

This is Bullshit so powerful that I was unable to continue listening beyond half way through the video, and to get even that far took exceptional self-control. Please, if you begin to feel impelled to scream and tear out your hair, stop the video at once. It is no part of my intention to subject you to harm, even though we must pursue the path of truth boldly, undeterred by personal danger.

I suggest that when starting the video you be accompanied by a sturdy companion, who can prevent you from over-indulgence and soothe your nerves after this stressful experience.

WARNING This video is unsuitable for persons with an extreme devotion to rationality, clarity and accuracy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ7Jv_re5EQ

44

Hi there fan – if you exist. Oh! What the hell. Hi there anyway.

I read all sorts of blogs and I am amazed by the industry with which those people churn them out. Even the ones who are just doing it for the money are working like slaves to get it and those apparently doing it for no reward are quite extraordinary. I salute them.

But I can’t summon that much energy. For a while I thought that people were fighting back against the ingrained politico/legal system and that encouraged me to comment on it. Exploiting the crack-brained (or cunningly created, depending on your interpretation) Australian electoral system to insert some people into the system who were ‘Not one of Us’ seemed a major breakthrough.

Then it all seemed to stall; I lost heart and stopped blogging.

But the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the USA was surely a similar breakthrough. It doesn’t matter whether or not you like the Donald or his policies or actions,; clearly he is ‘Not One of Them’. Not a politician. Not lawyer. How many virtues can you ask for in one man?

True, he is a billionaire. There is no other way to become President without being beholden to those who stake you. And even then he will have had to make deals with unsavoury people in order to persuade them not to undermine his campaign. But he went out and said ‘Vote for me and not for one of the self-selected superiors who are urging you to vote for them.’ And he succeeded.

What his supporters said, and said emphatically, was ‘We don’t know about you but we can’t do any worse than elect you. Not one of those other bastards has any interest in us or in our needs and hopes’.

And that is exactly the case with the majority of those who rise scum like to the top of the Australian political scene. They are in it together for themselves; none of them give a damn about us.

If I were in any doubt that a cabal exists at the top of Australian politics – across the entire political spectrum – it would be swept aside by observing the way in which the most dismal, ineffective, questionably honest, and downright crooked politicians are given a stream of lucrative sinecures the moment they are removed from office. (And yes, I do note that there are also spectacular examples of this in the UK, where the most dismal and damaging politicians step unhesitatingly across into the European Parliament and continue their pointless and harmful activities at considerable public expense. People whom Nigel Farrage so aptly described, to their faces, as having never done a day’s honest work in their lives.) A large number of people in the UK woke up to that fact. Unfortunately we have no Brexit equivalent to save Australia.

Wouldn’t it be nice if politicians had to show evidence of having done an honest day’s work – better still about five years of it – before being allowed to stand for office. And what about Ministers? Are they required to have any qualifications? No! If you needed a major operation would you like your surgeon to be chosen for his popularity with people in the street and not worry about whether he had any training and knowledge specifically relevant to his profession? No? Then why should a Minister not be required to show an equivalent level of qualification for his position? These politicians make decisions that have a major impact on the lives of tens of thousands of people. And they are ALWAYS members of a major party who cosy up to the party leader and make deals to gain their positions. But there is no requirement for them to demonstrate ANY degree of competence.

But now I am being drawn into a counsel of perfection. It is a step much too far. Back to reality then.

Western Australia had the opportunity to buck the trend; to give the major parties a major thrashing and start some real change in Australian politics. And they threw it away. They handed their State over to the tired old hacks of broken promises and unfulfilled dreams. They already have a stunning debt and broken infrastructure. Now they are heading for an infinitely worse debt that will be incurred to finance broken promises and subtly enrich certain politicians in ways that will never be declared dishonest but never shown to be honest either. At least, that is what history indicates will be the case. They may, I suppose, invent the flying pig, but I think the voters have been most unwise to bet so strongly on the likelihood of it.

Once upon a time people simply rebelled – blood in the streets, public guillotining, you know the sort of thing. Except for people whom we daren’t identify for fear of laws that our political masters have enacted to protect themselves, most of us don’t want to return to that system. But the system that we have in place is destroying itself. It puts power into the hands of greedy and irresponsible people and their increasing greed is only matched by their increasing lack of concern for the fate or actions of the majority of humanity.

But we don’t believe it. We don’t want to believe it, so we say it isn’t really so. But the world in which anyone could do an honest day’s work, if they tried hard and long enough to find the opportunity, is vanishing. Automation and communication are making us redundant.

Already there is talk of a minimum wage for everyone. Why? So that they can buy the things that the owners of the robotic, automated, factories of the near future create. For when most of us are starving and living in the street, where are those owners to get their fortunes from?

But wait! Why can’t they just share the things they make between themselves – especially when they make things that do all of the cleaning and repairing that people now do? Well of course they can. We are then just garbage. Why pay us at all? Just send in the robot disposal units.

The politicians that we have are either driving us down that path or simply stumbling mindlessly down it themselves. Perhaps the people who want to kill us for not sharing their beliefs are just saving us from a worse fate. But can they save themselves? Just possibly. Perhaps a return to barbarism is, after all, the lesser evil.

Well I have just read through all of that and if you have too I thank you for your patience and tenacity. I apologise for the curious variation in text size; I don’tknow what has caused it and can find no way to correct it. And now it is very late and I am too tired to do more. It is as it is.