By way of introduction, the column this week quotes from contributions by supporters of those, who like so many Australians these days, are fed up with the lack of leadership and utter lack of direction which our nation has been confined to under current political parties.
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Both writers have had distinguished careers in serving the nation with success and distinction in their respective careers in education and the defence forces in the grand manner that Captain Charles Sturt once said, "my job is to serve the public", something today's parties are sadly lacking.
One writer referred to an article by Richard Dennis in The Saturday Paper recently headed, "Morrison's economic lies", in which Dennis wrote, "democracy is about making choices". Our writer sent a second contribution from Eureka, which really highlights how far the population of Wagga (as well as most other towns and cities in Australia) is from the composition of parliamentarians that we have - Liberals, Nationals and Labor. The other writer was brief: "The so-called leaders of the Country are appalling. It's all about me, me and me".
Let us not leave out the mainstream media's standing in this political decline.
As I write, Crispin Hull's weekly contribution in The Canberra Times has just arrived, appropriately headlined, "Fear and political paralysis", which appropriately was preceded a fortnight back by his "Flood of public failure" in which he expresses great concern about "the fissures in the Australian federal system have widened substantially in recent times demonstrating the gradual erosion of the art and science of public administration to a point where dysfunction and paralysis have set in".
This week, Hull referred to the billing of the coming election as a contest between a man who doesn't hold a hose and purports to like rugby league and beer and a man who has just shed 18kgs and sharpened up his suits and glasses. "It should, of course, be much more than that," Hull wrote; most of the national media should take note.
As Hull indicates, not one of the three major parties is interested in laying out any clear set of measures to deal with the major problems nor do they seem to care. Well, it is time we, the voters, gave all three the wake-up calls they have been ignoring for the past two decades when the wretched John Howard, who Hull predicted in August 2019, history would ultimately prove to be our worst PM. Although, Scott Morrison is a raging hot-favourite to take that "title".
As a letters writer to The SMH argued: "Howard's legacy is forever stained by allowing "for-profit" aged care providers into the market. Some aged care operators have trousered far too much of taxpayers' money given to them to look after the most vulnerable". Having inept ministers like Richard Colbeck and Greg Hunt in that portfolio since Howard's days hasn't helped either but that just indicates how disinterested in the future of all Australians our political parties have become. If you read the lists of the current federal cabinets and shadow cabinets, you'll be hard-pressed to find a single candidate as a potential future PM - the exception being Labor's Tanya Plibersek.
Let us not leave out the mainstream media's standing in this political decline. It has failed Australians. Instead, journalists like Tim Dunlop, writing in publications like Eureka, are highlighting the fact that well-educated and economically secure voters, many of them in blue-ribbon conservative seats, are letting it be known that they are no longer willing to be taken for granted by the major parties.
The "Voices of"- an independent movement - spurned by the election of Cathy McGowan in the previously safe Liberal seat of Indi in north-east Victoria nearly 10 years ago, has, wrote Dunlop, engendered "the realisation that democracy is not just a matter of voting for parties, that the parliament can be a place of genuine deliberation and argument, and that the balance of power in the House is something they can actively influence, has, I think it is fair to say, been life changing for many".
"Reform, of Question Time, the creation of a federal ICAC, electoral reform, issues of gender violence, let alone climate change, are only likely to be seriously addressed by an independent cross bench, removing the control of major parties currently wielding their own interests and the interests of their donors".
The overall feeling amongst these disenchanted voters is not, as Dunlop described, "that they have changed their values but the parties have, and the Coalition, particularly, has turned into something they neither recognise nor like and they will no longer support in its current form".
