the nature of the beast

Just as a leopard does not change its spots it seems that the thug style approach to politics in the Liberal party (if not established during of the Howard era certainly consolidtated) in Australia remains. I was reading tonight that Tony Abbot has had to reign in his fellow representatives after reports that

Liberal MP Alby Schultz threatened independent Tony Windsor

great. I know that many voted for the Coalition to demonstrate dissatisfaction with the Labor party (and there is much to be dissatisfied in) but this is a stark reminder (if the other post election bullying have not been) that the nature of the Liberal party has not yet turned away from the lies and twists of the Howard era.

If you've forgotten babies overboard then perhaps you may ask who it was that got us into Afghanistan and Iraq, that would be Howard and the Liberals.

Just as a reminder, lets look again at the break down of the so called unified coalition:



That table is sourced on the results so far from the AEC. So making up the "liberal nation party coalition" we have:

• Liberals
• The Nationals

but as you can see in that above table they aren't even that unified as they have further splits into:

• Liberal National Party of Queensland
• Country Liberals

seriously ... its worse then the Monty Python skit about the fragmentation of resistance to the Romans.

so where is this "two party preferred" heading to when we have 4 parties (if they are not distinct entities then why are they listed as being distinct?) making up the two party system which underpins our democracy. From this source

it is possible to derive a two-party-preferred figure, where the votes are divided between the two main candidates in the election. In Australia, this is usually between the candidates from the two major parties

Ohh ... I guess that Tony is thinking that they were the popular front ... splitters

Reading comments by The Australian writer Paul Kelly:

But where, exactly, is Labor heading? Its tactical skill at clinging to office is impressive. The risk, however, is that Gillard is affirming Labor's weakness and accentuating its decline into a situation where, with a falling primary vote, its future is to share power with Greens and independents as the once mighty Labor Party fades into history.

I feel that he may be bang on the money. Which isn't what I think of as a bad thing. I think that here in Australia we may be ready for politics where its about what we want rather than about what a party wants.

Perhaps this is something we can actually do with modern technology. Perhaps debate in Parliament could be aimed at people (instead of the other bored pollies) and we could direct our members with our intentions based on polling by some electronic method. I think its possible to have politicians turned back into servants of the people rather than some sort of "seat of power".

children vs childish

I was reading the paper this morning and spotted this one:



Come on folks if some one had dressed as Edi Amin (aside from noone knowing how he was) or Ivan the Terrible there would be no need to apologise?

... and Grim Reaper, what you've never seen a Halloween party? Gosh this is sounding like the parents should all go and become Amish or something.

I can imagine children acting like children, but the parents should not be so childish.

History is history, we all know what the Fascist government of Germany did at that time and we all know that Hitler was the leader and responsible for all of it. However mindless iconisation of him personifying evil are pointless and perhaps even false. Hitler was just as much made into what he was by the allied appeasement. His own journal writings suggest that if the Europeans had followed Churchils call for him to get out of Austria then he would have done so.

As adults the parents should be a little less childish and teach their children history and not just a highly stylized version of it.

Google goes voip?

Started up my gmail this morning to notice a new icon in the left navigation. "Call phone"

Hmm ... looks like they're not content to let Skype take the market share (as indeed skype took much of the market from other VOIP players such as PennyTel WorldDialPoint ... yadda yadda).

Interesting.

Prices seem exactly equal to Skype (which is dearer than VOIP via a Linksys type SIP). So it seems that as the technology is "new" (or rather as there are many new people on the market I've been using voip for about 5 years) they can provide something which is cheaper than regular telephony and still pull in some bucks.

2010 election results

The election outcome was quite tight, with the news hitting the world that Australia was unable to make a clear decision on who to govern us.

The Wall Street Journal in the USA reportedly saying:

Australia, normally one of the most stable democracies in the region, faces its most uncertain period in recent political history after a national poll on Saturday failed to deliver a clear result.

The country's two major parties, the centre-left Labor administration of Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the Liberal-National conservative bloc of Tony Abbott, said a new government likely won't be formed for a number of days, as negotiations begin with non-party lawmakers who hold the keys to power in the first hung parliament in 70 years.

Perhaps there is another way of viewing this.

In my previous post about informal voting I (half jokingly) suggested that the ballot ticket also contain another choice:

None of these buggers

Because I genuinely don't feel that any of them do represent what I want. I also have little faith in or personal knowledge of them.

Further I think more and more people around the world in developed stable democratic nations feel the same way.

Around me before the election I commonly heard expressed it wasn't about who I wanted "in" it was about who I didn't want "in". This is not what the election process is designed to do.

Today I think that the issues of National Governance are many more and far more complex than in the past when Sir Henry Parks gave the Tenterfield Oration. We as a community can no longer be satisfied with stale and or out of touch individuals within our elected representation making deals on what "party solidarity" wants while neglecting their electorates needs.

With the cost of the election being billed at about AU$170 million perhaps we need to start considering a more active participatory approach incorporating some modern technology. I think that internet technology and public private key security holds a potential answer to this problem. It would allow the representatives to get a good feel of the electorate and enable them to not only make better decisions but to demonstrate to us that this is what people wanted.

This sort of sophistication adds to the neural network of the Government and expands it to what it should be. As it stand we have an organism the size of 20million people with a nerve network of less than that of a jelly fish.

No wonder we blob around in the political sea