Debut

Now that I've resurrected my blog, I may as well give people a reason to read it. These are sort of my overarching views on the Australian political system. Enjoy.

Our political system is almost irrepairably flawed, which is entirely unsurprising considering the level of interest afforded to it by most people in this country, and particularly young people. There are the usual suspects, corrupt politicians, the aforementioned uninterested voters, both of which are taken as given when it comes to politics, but there are some other, subtler, aspects of our political system which might not initially come to mind.

Our Constitution is inadequate. In fact, it's so completely flawed as to deny us many of the rights that we take for granted, and are taken for granted in other countries. For instance: we do not explicitly have the right to free speech. The closest we get to that is an implied right to freedom of political communication. The High Court decided, in the case of Australian Capital Television Pty. Ltd. v. The Commonwealth that the right to freedom of political communication is implied, since an open political forum is vital to an informed vote, it is an essential part of an effective representative government. The problems with this are a) the High Court could change that at any time, and we'd be left with state sponsored censorship and b) even if the High Court doesn't suddenly go all Stalin on us, that right only extends to political communication. That essentially means the media's reporting on the political news, and debate on such matters, etc. I do not have the right to speak my mind on, say, religious matters, or philosophical ones. The only reason it's generally accepted is because our politicians gift them to us, but only out of wanting to be seen as a true democracy. That's not the kind of country I want to be living in. The second we get a government that decides it wants a tighter grip on what the people say, then there's nothing stopping them from doing that.

And then, we have these meaningless power struggles between our state and federal parliaments. To clarify, let me say that the individual state parliaments and governments are an utterly redundant form of governance. The states were born out of greed. The governments of the original colonies didn't want to lose the power they had, so come federation, they lobbied for, and were granted certain concessions. They were allowed to keep their existing parliaments and governments, constitutions and most of their powers. They are at worst, a level of bureaucracy created by power hungry men, for power hungry men, and at best, a superfluous holdover from a bygone era. Their continued existence is nothing but a sham.

Then we have the only-half-thought-through "right" to vote. It's not a right. It's an obligation. Sure, it sounds like a good idea at first. How else do you get an accurate representation of what every voter wants? Really, what it does is provide a warped representation of society's wishes, always skewed in favour of the two major parties. An undecided voter under the compulsory voting system will do one of two things: 1) vote informal, in which case he's just wasted 15 minutes of his time, or 2) he'll vote for one of the two major parties, in this case, either Labour or Liberal. This means that those parties don't have to spend as much effort on policy making, or good governance, because they know they can count on the corrupt political system to save them. You cannot force freedom onto someone.

Of course, the problem with those issues is that they are constitutional. The only way they can be changed is via a referendum, which are notoriously failure prone. Out of the 44 referendums in Australia's history, only eight have been approved. You need both houses of parliament to approve the amendments, as well as a majority of the citizens in a majority of the states, and a majority of citizens overall. This is why we'll likely never see the large scale changes we need to see in order for our political system to become *slightly* less corrupt.

That was a brief introduction to my political views. Please, I encourage anyone who bothered to read that to leave feedback, and help me on my continued quest for self improvement.