Democracy

Democracy can be a fragile creature; one that thrives best on respect for its institutions and a public belief in the ultimate equity of its processes.

At the very core of Australia’s democratic system is the principle that we, the people, decide who will form our government. It is a system that eschews powerful technocrats and (apart from our outmoded ties to the British monarchy) rejects the concept of political representatives gaining office through breeding and patronage.

It has worked for us for more than a century and serves us well today.

Continue reading "Quit moaning - we get the politicians we vote for" »

In a democratic polity like Australia, there is a compact between the governing party and the governed people. Under it, the people make a choice and thereby give their consent to be governed after having been informed of the policies and platform of the respective parties.

This information is provided in a variety of ways: through official party platforms, policy documents, media releases, communications to organisations and individuals, and media statements. Together, it constitutes the basis upon which the citizens make a choice at an election.

Some of this material is vague and general, but much of it is detailed and precise. Parties make commitments to do – or not to do – certain things, knowing that their word will be relied upon by the people in casting their votes.

Continue reading "The wooden puppet who dreamed of becoming PM…" »

Julia Gillard, Australia’s 27th Prime Minister, is apparently no Prime Minister at all. She is, as they say, ‘illegitimate’.

This belief has become almost as entrenched in the national discourse as the word ‘discourse’ is entrenched in first year arts essays. To many, the circumstances surrounding Ms Gillard’s ascension to the nation’s highest office carried the complexity sufficient to completely erode its legality.

Throw in a few taxes and a handful of independents, and you have the green light for all manner of nutbags citizens to observe the ‘death of democracy’ – a ritual replete with cardboard coffins cleverly decorated with the word ‘democracy’.

Continue reading "Democracy is dead. Long live democracy!" »

When Tim Berners-Lee launched the world-wide-web in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. At that time the web was a domain for practitioners only. Today it’s: “Here comes everybody.”

The web 2.0 enables communication and collaboration on a scale thought unimaginable only a few years ago. Today people want more of a say in everything we do - and that includes our democracy. Voting every few years is not enough for people anymore. What we’re talking about is how to bring our democracy into the 21st century and to align it better with our modern lives.

We have moved on, leaving our Parliaments behind. When the Berlin wall fell, so too did political divides. Yet our current democracy - Democracy 1.0 - continues to divide us. In our daily lives, at work and in our communities, collaboration is the norm. In Parliament, collaboration is the exception.

Continue reading "The system’s broken: Time for Democracy 2.0" »

In his personal review of his legacy to South Australia, Premier Rann had two main regrets. The first was his inability to abolish the Legislative Council.

This has been a key aim of the Labor party for over a hundred years.

The passion flows from the fact that Labor has never won a majority of the seats in the Council.

Continue reading "Keep the Upper House until they fix the Lower House" »

“Breaker, breaker Rubber Ducky, looks like we’ve got us a convoy… “. Well, actually we’ve got eight of them now and soon the wheels will be turning across the length and breadth of Australia in what promises to be the biggest mobile protest we have ever seen, with the Labor Government and an early election as the targets.

The “Convoy of No Confidence in the Federal Government - Coalition of Industries” will rumble towards Canberra next month from every mainland state.

What originated as a plan for a peaceful protest starting from Darwin and calling for an early election has gone viral in the space of less than a week. Organisers, the National Road Freighters Association, soon realised from expressions of interest and promises to participate that Darwin would not be able to cater for the expected numbers, and routes have now been planned for eight separate convoys including several in Queensland and others in all mainland states.

Continue reading "Telling the Government to go and get trucked" »

I have always been sceptical of televised people’s forums. I always assumed that the audience participants were not truly uncommitted voters and that poll results or “worm” results were not a true reflection of the event.

I have often felt the programs are simply propaganda designed for the question under review.  In this specific case - to implement a carbon tax.

An audience member of a recent ABC episode of Q & A confirmed my scepticism. They claimed the whole thing is staged from start to finish including the producers urging the audience to look thoughtful just in case the cameras panned in on their faces. This audience member claimed they were contacted by email for possible questions and every question was deliberately hand picked from those submitted.

Continue reading "Talking to pollies: You’re forum or against ‘em" »

Why has the western media provided only a biased, incomplete view of what is going in Syria? Why have the steps taken by the Syrian government to answer the concerns raised by its citizens been ignored? 

I am not a Syrian government apologist (more on that later). I just want to read the whole story. If I can find a variety of news sources including the official statements made by government officials and pro-Syrian government supporters why can’t the BBC or ABC or any other well-resourced western media?

And I am not only talking about the bizarre twists in the Syrian conflict such as “Damascus Girl”. If you missed that one, a young Syrian lesbian blogger created an international outcry when she suddenly disappeared. The Syrian government was suspected of abducting and maybe even killing her. One of her great supporters – fellow lesbian blogger Lez Get Real was particularly upset.

Continue reading "Western media ‘disappeared’ half the Syrian story" »

Whenever I mention to people that I am a researcher in politics, they talk to me about elections, the government and how they often feel slated by the behaviour of their politicians.

Ask what the best political system is, and people will tell you it’s democracy, of course. And if you ask them what’s most important in a democracy, clearly they’ll answer it’s the right to vote. Why?Because it gives ‘us’ all some sort of voice; a say in who will represent us in parliament. If it wasn’t for voting, a minority would certainly take power and rule only for their own interest.

Let’s consider these statements and ask ourselves a few more questions. How many of us really think our vote matters and truly influences the way our country is run? Apart from token measures, who truly believes there is much of a difference between our two major parties? More to the point, how many of us vote for the ‘least worst’ rather than for a party which truly represents our ideas of what society should be?

Continue reading "Democratic by name, not by nature" »

In order for democracy to really take hold in the wake of the recent Arab Revolutions, the people of the region should be careful not to conform to Western ideas of democracy and instead develop their own model, one relevant to their own cultural norms and in tune with their own rich history of democracy.

The Arab Revolutions themselves give us insight into what this model might look like. Indeed, recent events are to be admired for the extent to which divergent voices have been heard, legitimate grievances have been aired, and women and minorities have been involved.

They are also to be admired because a balance has often been struck between the pragmatic and the ideal, between the secular and the religious, between the desire not just to oust failing tyrants but to replace them with something new, something that could respond to the varying needs of the citizens.

Continue reading "The Middle East should not adopt Western democracy" »

The Presidents of Tunisia and Egypt have gone, the President of Yemen is going. The dictator of Libya has lost control of half of his country and is being bombed out of the other half.

But the revolutionary tidal wave of the Arab Spring has now come up against a tougher opponent – the 40-year-old dictatorship of the Assad family in Syria.

It’s clear that President Bashar al-Assad and his security forces have no intention of giving up power, and are now engaged in a violent and bloody crackdown on dissent.

Continue reading "Syria: the dictator fights back" »

One of the terrific luxuries of life in the democratic west is that we are free to write and say pretty much anything we like about our elected representatives.

In the space of one day this week, we saw a powerful demonstration of how blasé and indulgent some of us can be in exercising that freedom.

In Egypt, thousands of people have taken to the streets to demand the removal of a politician who for 18 years has resisted any shift towards democracy, and is still refusing to stand aside.

Continue reading "S**t does happen when democracies get lazy" »

Communism was a really good idea – stay with me here – and so is democracy. Unfortunately, neither ended up the way their idealist inventors imagined.

If you lived through the ‘Reds under the bed’ era this might come as a shock, but at its core communism is really rather nice. It would be great to think that we could treat everyone as equal and be sharing, caring community.

The fatal flaw, though, is communism didn’t really take human nature and greed into account, so ‘What’s mine is yours’ evolved into ‘What’s mine (and yours) is the dictator’s’.

Continue reading "Democracy is dead. Long live democracy!" »

Spaniards went to the polls today in 1978 to vote for democracy following 40 years of dictatorial rule.

Welcome to Monday. What’s on your mind? Share it here.

A hung parliament is a golden opportunity for serious reform. The independents should not waste their extraordinary power on ephemeral trivia such as the black holes issue. (This is essentially about whether Treasury’s long term predictions are reliable. They are not.)

They should do something for which they will be immortalised in the nation’s pantheon. They should propose fundamental reform to our system of government, making it more democratic.

Why do the people have to wait three or four years to pass judgement on a failed government?  Why shouldn’t they block a law they do not like?

Continue reading "Trivial independents miss chance at making history" »

While we in peaceful democratic Australia have been conducting our political battles at public meetings and settling our disputes at the ballot box, in less fortunate places politics is being conducted by other means.

In Tibet, where the Chinese authorities have launched a new crackdown, these include arrests in the night, secret trials, long prison sentences on spurious charges, and beatings and other forms of violence.

In early August He Guoqiang, a member of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo and head of its Central Commission for Discipline, visited Tibet. Apparently he was not pleased by what he found, despite the intensive repression that has taken place in Tibet since the riots in 2008 in which at least 200 people were killed. He ordered a fresh crackdown on Tibetan “separatists” and intellectuals, particularly the Buddhist monks and nuns who have been at the forefront of the protests against Chinese rule over the past few years.

Continue reading "In Tibet they’d die for a hung parliament" »

The 2010 election result may not yet be clear, and we may be far from certain just who will be Prime Minister in a week or a fortnight’s time, but there is one thing we do know after the events of Saturday night.

The Australian people have chosen the Greens to play a much greater role in our new Parliament, and a much greater role in our decision-making.

Aside from the fact that we are looking at the first hung parliament since 1940, we have seen an historic vote for the Greens, with a record share of the national vote for a third party, both in the House of Representatives and the Senate. That is in addition to the success of Adam Bandt , the first Green to win a lower house seat at a Federal election.

Continue reading "Democracy will benefit from a healthy shade of Green" »

There are some things that can’t be measured. Like one vote one value; a government of the people, by the people, for the people. And the audacity, idiocy and hypocrisy of Mark Latham.

The former Labor Leader should face charges for using his platform on 60 Minutes to incite Australians to forgo their democratic right.

In Burma, Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is under house arrest, fighting for her people to have a say in their future. In Iran, Neda Agha-Soltan died protesting against the fraudulent election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The ongoing struggle for democracy across Africa – from Nigeria to Zimbabwe – has claimed millions of lives.  Aside from the Eureka Stockade, which some historians consider the birthplace of Australian democracy, we’ve never had to risk our lives for freedom.

Continue reading "Embittered Latham takes our democracy for granted" »

‘Vox pops’ are among the staples of daily journalism. Little snippets of public opinion, they don’t prove anything about the way people are thinking, but they can give a flavour. Sometimes they reveal how little the public know about a subject that’s been grabbing the headlines, sometimes their vehemence reveals unsuspected levels of bitterness or anger.

But ask any TV or radio journalist, and you’ll find that vox pops are in some ways harder to get than they used to be. It’s not because the public are less willing to talk – quite the reverse.

Back in the seventies, almost everyone would hurry past the proffered microphone: nowadays people are much more media-friendly. No, the problem nowadays is often where to ask your questions – because we, as a nation, have allowed so much of our public space to be privatised.

Continue reading "Freedom’s just another word" »

The aims of any public rally or protest generally are to: draw attention to the cause, build public support, and secure a favourable response by authorities.

Australian protesters regularly score well on the first because protesters have an excellent sense of when cameras are likely to be in the vicinity, and that slogans and large, TV friendly signs and props will be useful to those editing the evening news bulletins.

But on the other two aims Australian protests are in something of a rut. Increasingly the numbers of people at public rallies are grimly thin and feature people and slogans that are more likely to inspire puzzlement than passion. This was brilliantly evidenced by two protests in Sydney this week - one which involved a mock kangaroo funeral and another calling for the Reserve Bank to drop rates - both of which were attended by only a handful of protesters. They were extreme examples but underscored the malaise affecting the wider culture of public protest in modern Australia.

Continue reading "Time to take to the streets over falling protest standards" »

Rugby League star Jarryd Hayne made an interesting admission in this morning’s Daily Telegraph. Not only has the 22-year-old never voted, he did not know Kevin Rudd represented the Labor Party.

Hayne was spruiking a new campaign by the Australian Electoral Commission to get young people to enrol to vote, but he may have just done a big favour for the voluntary-voting brigade.

There were immediate suggestions on radio this morning that Hayne’s ignorance was simply indicative of his generation, and people who know and care so little don’t add much to our democracy by their forced participation. But that’s a cop out.

Continue reading "Even people who have no idea should be made to vote" »

Coalition Senator Michael Ronaldson decries the current mixed funding system of elections in his post on the Punch last week.

Early last year the newly elected Government introduced the Commonwealth Electoral Amendments (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2009 to the Senate to make political donations more transparent. However the bill was defeated by Liberal Senators who did not want to clean up our campaign finance system.

Australia has a very clean electoral system by world standards. While we don’t hear complaints in Australia that elections have been rigged, the funding system is in need of some reform.

Continue reading "Clean up our election laws now" »

They take on the privileges of Australian citizenship with little real knowledge of, or attachment to, our key values and institutions.

I’m not talking about migrants, who at least have to pass a minimum test for citizenship.

I’m talking about young Australians who are ‘born’ into citizenship and who receive the full privileges of a citizen on their eighteenth birthday.

Continue reading "Let’s stop taking our citizenship for granted" »

Theodore Roosevelt once said “A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of the user”.

As the national voting age is again a topic of debate, thanks to a recent Government Green Paper on electoral reform, these are words that we should pause to consider.

At what age is it likely a voter will carefully consider and target their vote instead of just shoot from the hip as they wander into their local polling booth? Some may say never…

Continue reading "A lower voting age risks a lower voting standard" »

You’ve got to hand it to those Americans. For them, there is much more to democracy than theory. It’s there to be practised and even better if it can be done in the streets.

A now-ageing generation took democracy to the streets and forced the politicians to bring an unpopular war in Vietnam to an end. And against the odds they changed America and world history campaigning for civil rights laws that paved the way for a black American president.

And though small in number by comparison, those freedom-of-speech loving Americans were back in Washington streets at the weekend to protest against the policies of that same black president.

Continue reading "America’s mastery of free speech, even for maniacs" »

My first brush with politics was in local government. I think I was eight.

My father was an independent ‘alderman’ on our local municipal council. A significant part of my youth was spent standing on polling booths, pounding the pavement to deliver Dad’s election newsletters and fielding constituent calls after school before Dad got home from work, as my older brother refused to answer the phone. 

I remember one year standing on a polling booth for Dad where the big issue was council amalgamations. Dad was strongly opposed. So there I was, arguing the case for grass roots democracy against the monolith of big council bureaucracy.

Continue reading "There’s more to councils than spivs and shysters" »

Last year I had the honour of being elected to the Australian Parliament by the people of Mayo in South Australia.  I was elected at a by-election following the retirement of Alexander Downer who had represented Mayo since its inception in 1984.

The by-election was hard fought with ten other candidates representing all political parties and a range of independent (with the exception being the Labor Party who chose not to run a candidate presumably because it is so ashamed of how it has treated the Lower Lakes, but that is another story…)

Something struck me during and following the campaign that I did not expect and that was the genuine lack of interest in participating in the election. 

Continue reading "Trust the voters? Why not?" »

I appreciate that our attention is elsewhere as we wait to see, to paraphrase Mal Farr, whether the Treasurer takes a Swan dive off the back of Kev’s ute. But as all of this was going on a report into the conduct of the last election was tabled in the parliament last night.

Nelson Mandela said there is no easy walk to freedom. Those in Iran, Iraq, Burma and Zimbabwe and any number of others striving to join the league of truly democratic nations would agree.

As one of the oldest democracies in the world, I wonder whether our passion for this most prized of personal freedoms is growing cold and whether what Richard Dreyfuss has to say in the video about democracy lost in the US (see video www.tinyurl.com/democracylost) reflects our own challenges.

Continue reading "Bring me your tired, your complacent and your lazy" »

I just got off the phone to an Iranian who lives here in Australia, more than 12,000kms from Tehran.

He wouldn’t speak publicly about the protests and clashes between supporters of Mir Hussein Mousavi and authorities.

Here’s why (more below the fold) - and remember, he’s more than 12,000km away from where this is all happening:

“We don’t want to be pulled aside in the airport by security. They’ll say, ‘what’s this, you’ve written this article…

Continue reading "‘I don’t want to be pulled aside in Tehran airport’" »

The images we’ve been seeing of rioting and bloodshed in Tehran take me back almost three decades, to the northern spring of 1980, and the weeks of living dangerously in what was then still a revolutionary situation in Iran.

It was May the first of 1980 when I learned that my translator had been murdered. His name was Bahram Dehqani-Tafti. He was a poet in his mid twenties, a graduate in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford, bilingual from birth because his mother was English and his father was the Anglican bishop of Esfahan.

Bahram himself showed no signs of following in his father’s footsteps; he was a secular, literary, somewhat westernised character, and I am often reminded of him by the cosmopolitan, western-oriented youth who blog in such numbers from Iran today.

Continue reading "Iranian bloodshed harks back to an earlier atrocity" »

Follow this person on twitter right now: http://twitter.com/Change_for_Iran

He or she is an unknown Iranian student who is giving a live first-hand account via twitter of the repression that is unfolding at the University of Tehran. Despite the attempts by the Iranian regime to disable facebook and twitter this student has sent 34 tweets so far in the past five hours.

“I’m dizzy but ok. some people are getting shelter in the nearby unfinished bank building. police arresting a middle aged man.” - two hours ago.

“my eyes are burning hard to keep them open #iranelection” - two hours ago

Continue reading "My eyes are burning: gassed Iranian student’s twitter feed" »