Politics

Politics! This word can evoke thoughts of total boredom or extreme excitement, even barbaric violence. They say never take sides politically but tonight I am going to break the rules and be blatantly one-eyed. I will expound my political views and dare my guests to take an opposing viewpoint. I have all the answers, will they?? How politically aware will my guests prove to be? Let’s discover shall we?

Politicians by their very nature can be nothing more or less than slimy, self-seeking, petty, fickle and morally bankrupt individuals, because they are called to service by a system which is completely archaic and requires such personality types to make it function. Basically, our political system was formed by the growing needs of a large unmanageable English prison that needed to be controlled as it expanded economically through the wholesale slaughter of the local population, the mass clearing of all the natural vegetation and the digging up of the land for mineral wealth.

Our current political system was finalised after a turbulent century of haphazardly modifying state borders, British laws and a few American concepts to suit whatever problem struck the governors of the day in the face. The need for rail links, the threat of war from the French colonies in the asia-pacific region, and other issues such as rat plagues, bushrangers, snuff shortages and the price of anvils. Basically it worked like this - if you were connected to the British Aristocracy or big business, and you could convince a vocal minority of scurvy and tuberculosis ridden, rum-soaked, fly-blown, red-neck squatters that you could get them 2 shillings a week for killing abos, a free bottle of rum for every 1,000 giant cedar trees they could ringbark and a bonus plaster nose to replace the one they lost to syphilis if they didn’t rape your daughter, you’d get elected. And get elected they did, with illiteracy at about 98%, and no TV, phone, radio or film – the power-mongers and politicians were pretty much free to do whatever the hell they liked. They only had to be elected by about 7% of the people, because women, blacks and of course anyone under 21 couldn’t vote!!

So finally by 1901 our marvellous democracy fell into place. A constitution, that nobody had ever read or even heard about, based loosely on the Magna Carta, that says nothing about a prime minister or a cabinet, and a lot about the queens pleasure, basically gives a bunch of impotent old men free reign over the country. And the constitution is almost impossible to change, because a change has to win a referendum, and as we saw recently, this is an outrageously impossible task.

So there you have Australian politics. Ever since federation, through the century of greatest change in the history of the human world, a bunch of childish name-calling drunkards have been conspiring to tack amendment after amendment to law after law in an attempt to keep their jobs and appear useful. Naturally they have failed miserably and so we now have the far more efficiently run multinational corporations running rings around us all, getting whatever they want from the politicians and leaving our society in a sad state of social disrepair.

That is why I say it is time for nothing short of a revolution. There is no way a system devised before the invention of electricity, when children were prescribed opium for headaches, where women were second class citizens, when they didn’t even have microphones so you couldn’t talk to a crowd bigger than about 150 – there is no way this system is the right system to use to run a country as technologically advanced and organisationally complex as we now live in. How can a system that asks for one vote per person every three years, supposedly to trust either one party or another to make every single decision on our behalf be seriously contemplated as a workable system? Of course both major parties believe it is the perfect system… why? Because they get to keep their jobs.

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Insane as it may seem though, some people do believe our system is a good one. They like to look up to politicians and hold them in high esteem – they need to feel like everything is under control just because one middle aged man is chosen by the other middle aged men to be their leader, make the most speeches and look important. I have with me one such believer ________ who is a voter.

Who do you vote for? Why?
How do you feel when you cast your vote?
Did you or your parents get a say in the design and construction of new parliament house?
What do you think of the eucalyptus green colour they chose for the house of representatives? Do you find it clashes with Johnny Howard’s glasses frames? Do you think there should be laws to prevent such clashes of colour in parliament?
What percentage of women do you think should be in government?

Well, there you go, another Australian voter completely in the dark about any activities of the people they voted for. Making their decision based on trivial and selfish issues, with not a clue as to how the country is run. Yes it’s a perfect system – if you are a politician.

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It’s time now to meet _______ for a short political quiz.

Do you vote? Who do you vote for? Why?
A short political quiz.
What is the number one stated ideal in which the Liberal Party believes?
Australia, it’s people and it’s future.
Which Party did Chifley belong to? Labor
What is the Liberal government’s biggest achievement since they formed in 1944? – Dragging a decrepit queen into the new millennium – an incredible feat by all accounts.
What is labour’s biggest achievement in the last 100 years? –
Kim Beazley topped 220 kilos just before the referendum.

Well thank you for your enlightening views on Australian politics.

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It’s now time to meet _________ for a few more quiz questions, this time about the Australian legal system.

Do you vote? Who do you vote for? Why? So you place the decision making in the hands of your elected representatives? OK….

Well, Politics is about making laws, so here are a few legal questions for you….
What is the punishment for not paying your parking fines?
Incarceration and Sodomy.
And what about if you don’t sort out your GST properly with your accountant and accidentally overcharge your neighbour $5 for mowing his lawn?
Incarceration and sodomy.
And what about if you take a bunch of backpackers to a state forest and brutally slay them in a bizarre killing spree?
Incaceration, which of course includes free food, rent and TV, You also gain the utmost respect from your cell-mates, the chance to hang out with the heavy dudes, sodomize their “punks” and get in on any escape plans that are floating around.

There you go. Thank you for your enlightening views on Australian politics – I think we have managed to get right to the bottom of what it’s all about, don’t you? Yes Indeedy doody!.

Can you imagine keeping a 286 computer running windows 3.1 for 100 years and modifying it to keep up with the times? Well that is exactly what has happened to our country.
Our laws are essentially an operating system – a code, programmed by spuriously elected politicians. Everything we do revolves around this code, so seeing as it’s our actual lives being controlled I think it should be the best damn software we could possibly imagine! Not an ad hoc patchwork of desperate bug fixes and fanciful add-ons designed to boost the programmer’s popularity. No, the code should be built from the ground up and the system rebooted constantly, maybe even daily - to reflect the current realities we face.

We watch other countries completely disintegrate because of the failure of their code to function – a “crash” as it is called in computer terms – so we think our system is so good because it hasn’t crashed yet and no one seems to be able to come up with a better system. Well I think a million better systems are imaginable – but to consider them you’d have to talk the politicians into giving up what they’ve got – and they are hardly likely to willingly forfeit chauffer driven limousines, business luncheons, free alcohol, complimentary call girls, overseas holidays, massive retirement packages, incredible business opportunities and the chance to play god with our lives.

Well, I for one want to play God with my own life and I reject our 100 year old system outright, and call for a revolution toward true democracy! The constitution is dead, the queen is dead, the patriarchal society is dead, it’s time… time to install a new operating system - Government 2000.

So there it is… do you, like me, have the power of your political convictions? You and I will never let Australia drown in a sea of political apathy, we’ll praise the donkey voter! Understand our system of government as I do and refuse to vote! We are the politically enlightened, we decide through logic and reasoning to ignore politicians altogether, and draw funny moustaches on them in the newspapers, or, In Johnny Howard’s case, we liquid paper out the eyebrows. We choose a medical professional for his knowledge and ability, not his popularity. We should take back control of our political system and really make our opinions matter.

On a lighter note, next week is program number twenty and “it’s my birthday”!! I will seize two recorders and link together some of the more stimulating moments of my television announcing yesterdays. So, until next week, and My TV Birthday, this is Stefan Sojka, saying goodnight.