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fifth grade politics .....
How stupid do our political leaders think we are?
Judging from the election campaign so far, pretty stupid. It's not the Hey Hey It's Saturday-style stunts that are the problem. You always get some of those in a campaign. Watching how politicians react in slightly whacky circumstances can be fun and sometimes quite revealing. Kevin Rudd went on Rove Live, Paul Keating posed for that picture in Rolling Stone wearing shades and John Hewson once wore six silly hats in a single day of campaigning - my personal favourite being the one shaped like a hot dog.
And Julia Gillard used to have a great sense of humour before her prime ministerial white-jackets-and-forced-smile persona took over - last year on Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader, she impressively figured out how many vertices there were in a regular octahedron (six) but foundered on the title of Roald Dahl's last book (The Minpins).
No, the problem with this campaign is not its lighter moments, it's what happens when the leaders are supposedly being serious. That's when they really start to insult voters' intelligence.
Both leaders learn from focus groups that swinging voters are worried about asylum seekers arriving by boat in particular and immigration in general. They know they already have the capacity to adjust the annual immigration intake and that a reasonable level is necessary to maintain economic growth and fill skilled job vacancies.
They also both know the 36 million-strong "big Australia" in 2050 that so horrified voters was not a "goal" but a Treasury forecast based on reduced levels of net overseas migration and an already slowing rate of population growth.
But the most important thing they know - far more important than any of those facts - is that voters hate it, so each ignores the facts and constructs a non-policy with which to navigate the campaign.
- By John Richardson at 24 Jul 2010 - 7:47am
- John Richardson's blog
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Getting the message across.
Just pause for a moment and think reason and use a little logic.
If I foolishly wanted to stand for election in the future, under the corrupt system of the US, I would have to be a multi-millionaire to even stand a chance.
The so-called American style of the "richest has the most chance of success" is a sham. This is boasted about in the US and I have always wondered how the claim that "anyone can become the President of the US" until the Bush mob stole it. Amen.
Any country who would "allow" someone like G.W. Bush to the Presidency, even by shocking circumstances is a clear contradiction of the principles that this once great country could claim.
The advertized need for wealth, as it is in Australia, has, in my opinion, no place in the claim that "democracy" is available to any citizen - in America that is 300 million. Fair dinkum.
The only chance of justice and fairness in our nation today is to depend on the basic reasoning and logic of our citizens. Having said that, how do we reason and use logic when the entire information that we received by which we are able to judge - is controlled by the same international American control of that information?
What then does the American Military/Corporate preemptive war doctrine stand for? Profit? International control? Absorption of the natural resources of lesser nations? And to what end?
Are we really part of that insatiable absorption of all assets outside the world wide dynasty of the United States of America? The foreign miners and their supporters in the Liberal Party would know.
Why can’t we stand on our own? “Because a country is only entitled to that which they can defend”?
In my lifetime, that has included Vietnam, Korea, Kosovo, and many African states that have been exploited because of their lack of progress and their foolish attempt at contemporary “democracy”. Keep them illiterate and who controls the news controls the people.
So now for Australia. We are being obliged to go to the polls, not on the successes or failures of the current government, but on the available pros or cons in the media – primarily News Ltd.
And how can we Australians avoid the paranoiac of the Americans? And their all consuming objectives?
God Bless Australia and may we, and others realize that the advantages of the “Roman/American” dynasty is over. NE OUBLIE.