The following is not an attempt to educate you in politics, particularly Australian politics. It’s simply a list of things you should get mad about.
Go to Hansard, news archives, and Google it. Get informed and get angry.
Cabinet documents are exempt from access under FOI laws. So you know what they do now? They just wheel hundreds of documents through the Cabinet room, on trolleys. They’ve been in the room while Cabinet was meeting, therefore they’re Cabinet documents. So we can never know what’s in them, or if they even exist, or exactly why they’re being hidden from us.
Speaking of cabinet; when bad or just embarrassing memos or emails or discussion papers get leaked, the Feds are called in, and it’s a disgrace, and we can’t trust our public servants, and Heads Must Roll. However no one’s ever been investigated for all the tax cut/rebate/handout/feel-good details that keep getting “accidentally” leaked in the weeks leading up to the budget, have they?For a short while, there were rebates of up to $8000 available to homeowners who installed solar power. Dear Leader Kevin has put a means test on it now, limiting it to those households with a family income of less than $100,000. That is, everyone who doesn’t own a house. So the rebate is still there, it’s just never going to be taken up.
So in a couple of years they can say it didn’t work, and piss it off entirely so they can spend more money on grotesque fantasies like Clean Coal.
And now, when the Senate is doing its job and running an enquiry into the legislative change that has meant the solar rebate is effectively dead, Peter “I used to be somebody who believed in something” Garrett has ordered his staff to “defer” their appearance before the committee. All of the submissions to the committee thus far have been along the lines of “You tight-arsed hypocritical bastards”, so by the time the Environment Department delegates appear, if at all, they’ll be so PR-spun and scripted you’d think Sir David Bellamy had been cross-bred with Barack Obama.
Remember when obesity was a hot issue with the previous government? In the face of all the submissions from children’s groups and nutritionists, they told us that they wouldn’t impose restrictions on advertising junk food during children’s TV, because there was no evidence that it was leading to obesity. Apparently advertising doesn’t work, which was a gutsy call from the people who spent so many millions of our dollars promoting their Work Choices legislation. So their solution to childhood obesity? An advertising campaign and a Code of Conduct.
WA Premier Alan Carpenter was on Lateline a few weeks ago, and I’m still reeling. At the time, the WA opposition was self-destructing thanks to a few incidents of chair-sniffing and bra-snapping and some unconfirmed rumours of interfering with a Quokka, so Tony Jones put to him that perhaps it would be a good time to take advantage and hit the election trail. “Well I’ve got a lot of problems in my own caucus before I start thinking about elections, Tony. I’ve got two members in there that I tried to expel, and I got rolled by the factions…”
Excuse the fuck out of me? He’s admitted to a problem? When was the last time a politician did that?
Although, Carpenter is the guy who publicly said that he was wrong to have supported the Iraq invasion, he was misled by the false intelligence, and he now admits it was a bloody dreadful idea. And he’s the only Australian politician I know of who has ever publicly admitted to being wrong. I sincerely doubt that he is the only one who has ever actually been wrong though.
Work Choices was lovely, wasn’t it? Nasty enough to bring down a Coalition government, and to boost the stocks of all the Labour state governments, who, funnily enough, were quite happy to use it to their advantage when negotiating with their state public servants, teachers, nurses, train drivers and so on…
I have absolutely no idea whether dredging Port Phillip Bay is a good or bad idea. I do know that it’s an enormous project, costing a lot, and there are going to be a lot of people and businesses with a lot to say about it. It stands to reason that there’s going to be some kind of effect upon the bay if you dredge up a couple of million tonnes of shit from the bottom of it, surely.
So, how does one go about doing it? Propose, Consult, Environmental Impact Study, Committee, Plan, Tender, Contract, Legislate. That’s generally how these things work, however we do things differently in Victoria. Contract. Announce. Commence. Consult (dictate). Sue.
Living as we do in this marvellous ‘burb, we’re lucky enough to have decent public transport available. But that’s only because Elwood and St Kilda have been around since Melbourne was Bearbrass, and public transport was seen as an indispensable part of a city (ah, those were the days). It actually is easier and cheaper to get the train or tram into town than to drive, most of the time. Just have a think about those poor benighted souls in the outer suburbs for a moment.
There is absolutely no public transport in newer suburbs on the fringe, and very little in a lot of older ones. Every time a new freeway or arterial is proposed, there are always complementary train or tram lines planned. For instance, the Eastern Freeway, built in the 70s, was supposed to have a train running down the middle. Ross Eddington’s transport blueprint also screams about the need for more train lines to the outer suburbs, and all the right noises will be made to appease the public transport lobby, then we’ll just get more freeways with a couple of bus lanes tacked on.
A perfect example of the short-sightedness and road-centric planning process is the level crossing at High St in Glen Iris. They went to all the trouble and expense of building the Monash Freeway under High St, but didn’t spend the extra few million to put the trains under there as well. Nowhere else in the world are there as many level crossings in a metropolitan area, and for good reason. They slow down traffic. But ten million to remove a level crossing is seen as public transport spending and Vic Roads would rather that ten mill went towards another freeway.
Come to think of it, how useful would a train line out to the airport be? Why don’t we have one? Perish the thought that it could be because the company that owns the carparks at the airport has rather a lot to lose from it? Or that the taxi companies also pay rather large leases for their ranks and access? Sorry, it’s a free market, and a train line would impose the sacred philosopher’s stone of competition upon these monopoly holders. Oops.
While on public transport, do I really need to go into what a disaster privatisation has been? Myki anyone?
Do you love election campaigns like I do? Have you noticed that these days every newspaper and TV station runs the same stories each day? There’s a reason for that, and it’s not actually the fault of the media. During an election campaign, the major parties release at least one big policy every day – they load the press gaggle onto a bus, then when they arrive a long way from anywhere for the policy announcement, they’re handed a three-hundred page document. Then five minutes later the minister or shadow minister appears with a scripted answer for every single question, and no one’s had a chance to read the policy and ask a decent question.
By the time any reporter has had a chance to digest the detail of the policy, it’s the next news cycle and we’re onto the next policy, and we the people get no actual analysis of anything that’s being promised.
Somewhere along the line folks, we got ripped off; we might change figureheads every second or third election, but the system and the real power stays the same.
What to do? I honestly don’t know, except question everything, rely on no one, get angry and stay that way
