The world’s in a bit of poop right now, and I’m not talking about the GFC, although that is the catalyst currently bringing a lot of bad shit to the surface.

The government in the UK is about to fall in a very ugly way, thanks to the expenses rorts, and it won’t just mean a change of Prime Minister from Labour to Tory, it will mean a wholesale change to the parliamentary system itself.

The US Empire is collapsing, thanks to the same things that brought down the British Empire and the Romans before that: privatisation of the military and rampant corruption.

The Wall Street nabobs have engineered a nice little coup for themselves whereby the US taxpayer will pick up their losses, while their profits remain untouchable, and “government control” has taken the form of the government employing Wall St to regulate Wall St.

Here in Australia we have an enfeebled media, dependent on government for sound bites, happily regurgitating press releases ad nausea (no, not a typo people, it’s called satire!!); and a Prime Minister whose sole concern is tomorrow’s news cycle, whether that be trade figures or the latest faux pas by the Chaser team or Gordon Ramsay.

We’re in trouble, folks.

Civilization has taken many forms over our history, and some of them have been pretty effective and lasted for a long time. Give humans something good, however, and they’ll fuck it up eventually. Of all the empires and states and nations that have existed, few and far between are those that fell entirely because of outside or uncontrollable events or influences. Now I could go through various empires and tell you why they fell and why they were doomed to fall and aren’t I clever and haven’t I read a lot, blah blah blah, but that isn’t the point of this piece.

As noted by Winston Churchill: “democracy is the worst form of government ever - except for all the others”. As noted by your editors in our piece on page 10, democracy is struggling, and we need to find a way to save it before evolution takes its course and the Western world ends up entirely dysfunctional, or under dictatorship, or both.

Our solution is this: alongside representative democracy, and a Parliament of The People, there needs to be some positions within the government that are appointed for life.

At the moment all government decisions are made at the whim of the electorate, by politicians who have their eyes fixed firmly on the next election; they cannot see the long term, and when they need to cater to voters with their fixation on next months pay check they cannot be trusted to act for the long term even if they could see it.

In most Westminster democracies, judges are appointed for life, with the only proviso in their position that they are forced to retire at a certain age. They cannot be removed from the bench unless exceptional circumstances exist, and even then in most cases it takes something like a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament to force them out. This system works, because judges are not at the beck and call of the government.

No, you say, they’re a law unto themselves (I say they should be, because it’s their job to interpret the law).

No, you say, they should be held to account when they make a bad decision (I say they are already, their decisions can be appealed against to higher courts).

No, you say, they should be held to account by having the risk of losing their jobs if they screw up!

Absolutely. Fucking. Not. Who defines Screwing Up?

Imagine you’re part of a class action against the State for, say, a toxic waste site that’s contaminated your suburb. The State, should you succeed, is looking at tens, possibly hundreds of millions of dollars to clean the site up, compensate you, care for your sick kids, and pay your legal bills. It will bring down the minister(s) responsible, and possibly the entire government. Imagine the judge hearing the case is nearing the end of her five-year performance based contract, and try not to imagine the Attorney-General’s department dropping quiet hints about her next five years and her pension plan.

That is why we appoint judges for life, so they can make decisions like this without fear or favour, having regard only to the Law.

This is my argument in favour of similar lifetime, untouchable appointments for certain positions within government. I would suggest, at minimum, this should include the Heads of the Departments of Defence, Justice, Treasury, Health, Environment and Education. Imagine how much more we could get done if the people in those positions were the best and most knowledgeable in their field, had no further need for money or power and did not have to kowtow to day to day political shenanigans!

The Governor of the Reserve Bank is a long-term appointment, made with great care and much consultation. The Governor is doing a pretty important job, and while he can take the advice of the government, he’s not bound by it, and he pretty much just tells the government what he’s going to do and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.

Head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, for example, should NOT be a line on a resume, and it should NOT be five years of manoeuvring policy to set oneself up for lucrative board positions later in life. But most important of all, it should NOT be a couple of years at the beck and call of the PM and cabinet, giving them deniability when something’s gone wrong, too afraid to give contrary advice or bad news, only telling them what they want to hear and constantly watching one’s back.

There would have to be conditions imposed upon the appointees to make it work, obviously. Some of these would be a huge salary, certainly higher than that of any politician, and an extremely comfortable pension plan. These two conditions lessen the possibility of the position being misused; as would this: they cannot take another paying job for ten years after they leave their position, if they want something to do they can volunteer their services to a charitable or not-for-profit enterprise. This eliminates the nest-feathering that defines the last few years of most senior appointments, and also gives the NGO sector a massive pool of talent, connections and credibility.

Our senior public servants must be able to do their jobs, they must give advice and bear bad tidings to their elected superiors, or you get the situation that’s occurred in the UK where public servants, afraid of losing their jobs or, worse, being sent to Wales, were signing off on the ludicrous and often criminal expense claims of MPs. Sheer avarice is set to bring down a government and has the entire UK turning away in disgust, because public servants weren’t able to tell elected officials to sod off and pay their own bills.

Anyone notice how the CIA, NSA, FBI and a dozen other agencies all eventually gave up trying to tell the truth to Rumsfeld and Cheney about WMDs and Iraq’s non-existent links to Al Qaeda? Four thousand dead American soldiers, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, Abu Ghraib and Blackwater later, there’s no one left to hold to account.

Imagine there was a boatload of refugees on its way to Australian waters, and somebody started a rumour that there were children being thrown overboard. Imagine the PM and the defence minister loved this story and wanted to know more and wanted to see pictures, then some pictures appeared, which looked a bit dodgy, but the PM and defence minister were all excited about it and were already making speeches about the kind of people these refugees, sorry, “illegal immigrants” were. Then imagine someone at Defence piping up to his line manager and saying “hey I’ve got the original photo here, that one’s been cropped to buggery, their boat was on fire and they were just passing the kids to the sailors to get them to safety”.

But the PM and the defence minister, and by now the rest of the country don’t want to know that! Shut Up or we’ll all lose our jobs!

Thanks to Howard’s media advisors usurping the role of Defence Liaison, and controlling what information he, and therefore we, received, hundreds of men women and children who’d sold everything they owned to escape the Taliban or the Tamil Tigers or whoever ended up behind razor wire for years on end, traumatised and damaged forever. We got to substitute “terrorist” for “Muslim”, “queue-jumper” for “refugee”, and we got the riots in Cronulla. And we got Howard for another term.

Children Overboard was the Big Lie we eventually found out about. How many more have there been, and how many more will there be, while public servants aren’t allowed to tell the truth and have to continually cower before politicians whose only concerns are wining election?

And so, our current plan to fix the world: either appoint some independent non-political positions within the government, or, allow your esteemed editors to rule the world as we’ve always known we should.

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