Thursday 17 May 2012

The Australian Budget and Government


Well, well, well. I have heard a lot in my time but this has to be quite high as a political budget, not really a budget for the people or the country of Australia. I'm not going to dissect this budget and show how the figures have been fiddled (if they have) but I'm going to discuss government and what is it all about because I think it is about time all the people that have been voted in by the people take some responsibility for their actions. They seem to play by their own rules and when they don't like it they shout "Ah, but...". This has to stop!
First I'm going to have a swipe at the Australian Government in particular and all politicians in general, then I'm going to suggest some remedies.
Lying. This government had lied on more than one occasion, and even lied to get elected. They changed leadership on what would seem to be pressure from big industry - may be the mining industry, this is only a possibility as I have no concrete proof. They seem to suggest that a successful government is one that can push through as many laws as possible in a short space of time - production of legislation. Wouldn't be so bad if it helped at all, but as I once heard, the more laws you create, the more criminals there will be, cause and effect.
Another problem is the two party preferred voting system, which is not democratic and is not representative of the population, but would appear to be designed to keep in "power" those already there, and possibly wipe out the opposition as like what happened in Queensland in recent months. It also has the effect that people will vote for the party rather than the candidate, which means they might get a great party into power but a useless parliamentarian to represent them. Seeing as democracy was originally intended to distribute power, surely the voting system should be geared to encourage the voters to vote for the best representative for their area rather than the party, which really only has it own self interests at heart. A better system would be proportional representation. this also can cause problems, but is better, I think, overall.
Now comes the subject of power and those in government do have power and with great power come great responsibility. Should it be called "power"? Those elected to government are elected as servant of the people, are they not?
So the question I ask is what is government for?  If you had to write a job specification for the government, what would it include? Where would you draw the line?

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