I started the new-year well. On New Year’s Day I drove form Antwerp in Belgium, across the Netherlands to Aachen, just over the German boarder. It’s home to the ‘Imperial Cathedral’ and I had wanted to see it ever since seeing the list of the original 1978 inductees to the UNESCO World Heritage list on the wall of a salt mine just outside Krakow Poland (which also happens to be on the list). Its an astonishing building, was well worth the drive and I can now say I have been to all three European sites granted World Heritage listing in the initial round of allocation. Tick.

So 2012 is feeling pretty good for me on a personal level at least. I’ve got pretty high hopes for the year. While last year was one of great adventure, it was also one of extraordinary loss.

I was tempted to follow in the footsteps of more than one blogger and bemoan ‘the state of the union’ – rightly so I might add, this shit isn’t getting any better – but I’m left with a great sense of optimism for the year ahead. Having relocated to London, established a pretty sweet crew and have the rest of Europe on my door step things are looking good. Between now and Summer, I’ve got 3 confirmed overseas trips and up to 5 on the cards.

I’ve got a good job which has cemented a career change that has been on the cards for some time now and there are no shortage of possibilities for what the year may hold.

In 2012, as the shit hits the fan with the welfare state being dismantled in the UK, the eurozone collapsing and Australian politics desperately searching for yet another way to assert its irrelevance, I fully intend to milk this puppy for all it is worth.

Oh yeah, and while I’m at it, ‘tip of the hat’ to the Occupy movement and any other general shit stirrers that don’t have a rightwing or nationalist agenda. I hope you guys keep it up in 2012 – someone has to.

I was lounging by a friend’s pool in the South of France a couple of weekends ago, enjoying a last minute surge of summer.

The issue of our energy future was raised and our gracious host stated in a matter-of-fact manner that nuclear energy was clearly the only option left available to service out energy needs. What struck me more than anything else about the statement was that there was an assumption that I had naturally adopted this position – it was the only logical conclusion.

My gut reaction to nuclear is a steadfast ‘no’. You just don’t mess with something that has the potential for destruction on the level that nuclear does. But the problem with nuclear goes beyond that.

To be able to produce as much energy as we are currently producing then our choice is basically either coal or nuclear. But we in the west need to reduce our carbon emissions my something in the order of 90% to 95% of 1990 levels by yesterday at the latest which would naturally lead us to the conclusion that nuclear is the only answer. After all, Global Warming is probably the most serious issue humanity has ever faced so we must stop emitting greenhouse gases immediately.

I’m not sure that I entirely agree with the assertion that nuclear could meet all our energy needs, or that coal and nuclear are our only two choices, but it is certainly fair to say that we cannot produce the amount of energy we are currently using use of renewables. There’s just no way.

The issue for has always been, not how the energy is produced, but how much we use. In a sense I don’t care if we’re using coal or nuclear providing we reduce our energy consumption by 90% to 95% (possibly even more). However if we only need to produce 5% of what we are currently producing then sourcing our energy from renewables is suddenly feasible and should be done for a wide range of health and environmental reasons.

Needless to say, such a drastic change in energy consumption means massive changes in the way the world operates going far beyond major infrastructural changes.

To create a low-carbon world we need to continue to produce enough energy to do the work necessary to reduce the amount of energy we use, keep as many people as possible from starvation and start building the required renewable energy generators. Activities such as the construction of a wind farm requires time and energy which is why we’ve left all this far too late. For now, the only way we can generate that energy is through existing sources of energy, ie coal (or nuclear if you’re in the USA, Japan or France).

Which is why all this nuclear business bothers me. Even if we could, hypothetically, mine uranium in a manner that doesn’t destroy the environment and had a genuine solution to the storage of nuclear waste, the lead time for a nuclear power plant is at least a good 15 to 20 years, probably more. And the lead-time only gets longer when you start talking about wide spread rollout. In 15 or 20 years, it’s all too late.

Where are you going to put all these plants? I don’t want them in my backyard and I’m pretty sure you don’t, but they need to be close to urban centers where most of the energy is consumed. They also need to be near fresh water supplies. Similar problems exists for the storage of nuclear waste. Sorting all this out takes time – lots of time – and then you have to actually build a nuclear power plant which is a time consuming task unto itself.

The pro-nuclear argument also seems to assume significant technological advancements in the breakdown and storage of nuclear waste – technologies which may be available but remain largely untested because very few nuclear power plants have been built of late.

But ultimately what bothers me about nuclear is that it is very 19th Century, industrialist thinking. It’s a ‘science will save us’ or ‘we command nature’ sort of position. It’s a technological fix to a problem caused by an over reliance on technological solutions.

Our energy future has to be low tech. Windmills are reasonably low tech. Mirrors focusing the sun’s rays to heat something up is low tech. We need to use the technologies that are available to us now and nuclear just isn’t one of those.

This leaves me in the awkward position of supporting a coal fired renewable energy future.

It’s the late 50s/early 60s, things are good! Taxes are high, wages are high, inflation is high unemployment is almost non-existant and everyone is happy. We’ve never had it this good.

Oil is cheap, the population is booming, there is disposable income and the war is a distant memory for a young generation who are enjoying a level of prosperity with a wide base – the likes of which we haven’t known before. Take off your clothes, smoke lots of weed, go on a road trip with no money, it’s a revolution you know.

Working class people can own a house and a car, health and education are free, there is a massive expansion of the welfare state. And it’s all affordable because everyone is earning a good wage, the population is still quite diminished (although rapidly growing) so less people are placing demands on the service.

Tax and government are highly centralised thanks to the war effort, the top marginal income tax rate is just below 70% and there is loads of money to throw around. Lets make tertiary education free!

Then the mid-late 70s happen. The brutalised and over simplified version of Keynesian economics
we’d grown so used to fails us. Stagflation! And just when it couldn’t get any worse: Oil Crisis!! God damn it, it’s expensive to drive places now. How am I going to get to work if I am lucky enough to even have a job?

Quick, someone pick up that book written by Hayek, something about surfing, he said this would happen!

Roll on the 80s, a time of excess. Business is booming but everyone I know is still unemployed.

Globalisation! Deindustrialisation! Off shore the shit out of that industry! I’m rich!!

So on through the 80s and 90s: cut spending, lower tax rates and flatten them out while you’re at it. How did we get so bloated, sell everything! Business can run telecommunications infrastructure more efficiently than a government. Business is good, government is bad. Oh look, selling everything has meant that we’ve now got a pile of cash. We can still afford schools and hospitals, especially since we’ve cut all their funding as well.

Come to think of it people should really pay for the services they use, let’s cash in our future and start charging for a tertiary eduction. All these Art’s Degrees are just costing us money. Everyone I know got a free education, why should I care if ‘the kids’ get one or not – particularly kids whose parents didn’t go to university and can’t pay for their kids to attend. How did we get so carried away with upward social mobility in the first place?

Fast forward to the last five years: Debt crisis! The pursuit of growth has left the economy significantly over stretched. There are skills shortages. Our universities are propped up buy foreign students whose parents undergo extraordinary financial hardship to send one child to university in Australia giving Australian Universities enough revenue to function.

Unemployment rates spike, there’s a housing bubble created by baby boomers that decided to cash in on the 1960s boom period they grew up in and spend our inheritance investing in the now bloated property market. And who can blame them?

The population keeps growing at ever increasing rates despite birthrates being below replacement level. As it turns out it is much cheaper to have people in the majority world absorb the cost of training a doctor and then letting them immigrate to Australia. Poor countries pay for their education, we reap their fruitful and taxpaying years!

And we can do this for any trade with a skills shortage! I knew it was a good idea to cut spending on education. Importing the future of other countries is much easier.

So tax rates a low, the population is growing faster and faster – we need it to, how else do we ensure that the economy keeps growing. But how do we pay for the growing demands on public services? We can no longer afford to fund the services that people have become so accustom to.

Austerity measures! Cut public spending, it only benefits those that are still reliant on public services anyway. Pass on the burden of debt to those that struggle to get by while the wealthy hid behind tax loopholes. Come to think of it, the rich wen’t paying much tax in the first place, so why don’t we cut their taxes some more – that’s sure to stimulate growth.

So now the people are getting angry and taking to the streets. They’re occupying Wall Street! Their rioting in Athens!

Where to from here?

Tax the rich.

Reading The Guardian today (from my new abode in London) I came across an article about a group of British academics that were starting trials on a hot air balloon ‘the size of Wembley stadium’ that would float 20km above Earth and pump ‘hundreds of tonnes of minute chemical particles [sulphates and other aerosol particles] a day into the thin stratospheric air to reflect sunlight and cool the planet.’

That sounds pretty hi-tech to me. And just think, we’d be able to keep burning up fossil fuels and pumping as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as we want!

Am I the only one that can see this going wrong? Since when has pumping chemicals into the stratosphere been a good idea? Not to mention the fact that I’m sure it requires a huge amount of energy (hence more carbon pollution) to get the balloon up there as well as producing the chemicals and then pumping them up 20km of hose.

When will we stop trying to come up with these high-tech fixes to the problem of global warming? Technology will not save us, we just need to use less energy.

Meanwhile, back in Australia, the newly elected Victorian Baillieu Government has introduced new planning laws that will destroy the feasibility of Wind Farms in Victoria.

Wind farms are a low tech solution to our energy needs which, if coupled with a huge increase in energy efficiency across the state of Victoria, could provide enough energy to ensure we all lead comfortable, carbon free, lifestyles.

There are many concerns about the new planning laws: they will retard the growth of wind power in Victoria; thousands of vital rural and regional jobs won’t be generated; and so on. But perhaps the most concerning thing is that it would seem that the government is adopting the policies of the Australian Environment Foundation and the Victorian Landscape Guardians – both essentially front groups (AEF is funded by the right-wing corporate funded think tank the Institute of Public Affairs).

It’s also concerning the journalists aren’t picking up on these well established links.

It all reminds me of an Arch Druid Report article from 2009. The article compare’s the viability of two potential renewable energy sources: Fusion reactors which have had billions of dollar spent trying to development and are yet to produce one kilowatt of usable energy; and micro-hydro systems built from recycled washing machines which required very little research and development and are currently producing small amounts of energy with a high level of efficiency.

So let’s get behind Beyond Zero Emissions, Friends of the Earth and others like them and develop an low-energy future that doesn’t need balloons spraying chemicals into the stratosphere.

Well, I’m currently sitting on a flight from Cairo to Frankfurt which was chartered by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade after 8 days of civil unrest in Egypt. It certainly isn’t where I’d expected to be a week ago.

Yes, I’m afraid the ‘witnessing a revolution’ phase of our trip has finally run its course and it’s time to try and get on with being a tourist again.

Last Friday (28th Jan) we left Cairo for Alexandria. There wasn’t really any plan, we just thought we’d see if Alexandria was a little quieter than Cairo and would therefore be safer to see a few sites. How wrong we were. Egypt’s ‘second city’ turned out to be a flash point for this significant moment in Egypt’s history.

That day, further protests were planned to take place following the morning prayer which usually finishes around 12:30 or 1. We got to Alexandria nice and early to avoid any trouble, checked into our hotel and went off to find something to eat.

When we arrived the place was very quiet so we ended up walking quite a way along the foreshore before finding a fancier restaurant which seemed to be the only one open in town.

After some fine dining with a beautiful view over the harbour, we walked out onto the street. Immediately our eyes started watering and our mouth and nose started to burn. Tear gas. This wasn’t going to be a quiet trip to Alexandria.

We decided the only thing we could really do was get into a cab and try to get back to the hotel avoiding the protests. The cab driver took the long way around but we kept running into groups of protesters and having to change course. Our driver eventually gave up trying to and told us it was impossible for him to drive us back to the hotel which was two short blocks from the main protest area so we would have to walk the last few ourselves. We got out of the car, only to have every passing Egyptian tell us not to go in the direction of our hotel – great.

We eventually made it back with a few long pauses to let the protesters march by. Eventually we made it up to our room where we bunkered down, running out onto the balcony every time we heard the protests go past. It was really starting to get serious.

Initially, everyone was keeping the more rogue protesters in line but this was less and less effective throughout the day. Increasingly the groups of protesters were carrying large sticks and baseball bats and had taken to breaking things as they went. As the day wore on police riot shields and helmets started appearing in the crowds – trophies from their clashes with the police.

At one stage a group went past carrying a body above their heads. We didn’t need a reminder of the seriousness of the situation, but there it was.

As the afternoon wore on, huge black plumes of smoke appeared throughout the city and we started noticing small pieces of ash floating through the air. Some of the streetlights came on early as the sky darkened with smoke. The next morning the streets contained the burnt shells of the cars that had fed the fires.

As we sat down to eat dinner that first night in the hotel restaurant we rushed to the window when we heard a terrible scraping noise coming down the street, getting louder and louder. It was the sound of a tank’s caterpillar tyres on the asphalt. The military had been deployed.

The police had just disappeared although we got conflicting reports as to whether they had been instructed to do so by the government or if they had done so of their own volition. What ever the case, nearly every police station in the country had been set on fire and then looted for weapons and tear gas.

Surprisingly, most people in Egypt seemed to think that military intervention was a good thing and they are well respected. The same cannot be said of the police who are almost universally despised.

The protests continued the next day – Saturday – and on an even bigger scale, but this time the mood was celebratory. Before the protests started we went for a walk to see some of the sites in Alexandria (all of which were closed along with nearly every shop) and buy train tickets back to Cairo for the following day.

On the way back to our hotel we passed a coffee shop with CNN playing on their TV. Some locals changed the channel to an Arabic station shortly after, but CNN was on long enough for us to learn that the President, Mubarak, had appointed a new Prime Minister and totally reshuffled his ministry. Whilst it fell well short of what the protesters wanted, it was clear evidence that for the first time in this dictator’s 31 year reign, he was having to pay attention to the concerns of Egyptians.

The scenes on the street that day were really moving. Huge crowds – tens of thousands of people living under an oppressive dictatorship – all chanting, dancing and hugging in the streets. Many of them signalling to us to come down and join them (an offer we politely refused).

It really struck me how open everyone was about their displeasure with Murbarak. Everyone took the time to tell us how they had had enough of him and it was time for change – something I certainly didn’t hear last time I was in Egypt. In fact, it’s illegal to criticise the government. Many were apologetic that it has interrupted our holiday – they are all so hospitable – but all were genuinely pleased to hear that we supported their protests.

Later that afternoon a group gathered around a car with speakers on the roof, when the Call-to-Prayer went out. The group stopped, formed lines facing Mecca, and prayed. They then stood up, sang the National Anthem (or some presumably nationalistic song), and continued with their marching and chanting. Yet another moving scene.

As the tanks rolled down the street on the second day, they were met with cheers from the crowd. A few days later the military would make it clear that they were on the side of the protesters by announcing that they would not use force against any peaceful protesters which meant that hundreds of thousands later turned out on the streets of Cairo.

On that second night in Alexandria men stood guard at each intersection, armed with bats and sticks. It was quite intimidating however we later learned that they were just good citizens preventing looters from running riot.

We didn’t realise until that night that the bottom floor of our hotel was a Military Hospital which also happened to be where the military were taking people for interrogation. We made the mistake of thinking we’d be able to go out for dinner only to pass a particularly horrifying scene. When we got outside we were told that a curfew was in place and it wasn’t safe for us to be outside. In any case, nothing was open. So back past the interrogation we go. Ho hum.

We arrived back in Cairo the next day – Sunday – to find tanks at every major intersection, the burnt shells of police trucks and the city almost completely closed for business. Back at the hotel, we flicked on the telly to find every station was now broadcasting the state television station which included an English language version. Al Jazeera had been banned and it’s journalists kicked out of the country which was, interestingly enough, one of the news items on the Government’s propaganda channel.

Moreover the internet had simply been turned off for the past three days and mobile phones were only working intermittently.

Later that day, at about 4pm, two Mig Fighter Jets circled the city at very low altitude for about half an hour. It was deafening and the building shook.

So we phoned home and got a flight booked to Amman, Jordan. The flight was cancelled (as were most flights because the airlines couldn’t get enough staff together with the curfew in place). However that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. We learnt later that day the King of Jordan sacked the countries entire government following widespread protests.

We arrived at the airport at 2:30 pm that day – Monday – because the curfew was in place from 3 pm to 8 am and our flight was at 8:30 am on the Tuesday which we would not have been able to get to if we left in the morning. Once our flight was cancelled we registered with Australian Consular Officials to get on the chartered flight scheduled to leave on the Wednesday and where I find myself now.

Many of the Reuters reports on the situation in Egypt I’ve read are running the following paragraph:

Egypt’s population of 80 million is growing by 2 percent a year. About 60 percent of the population — and 90 percent of the unemployed — are under 30 years old. About 40 percent live on less than $2 a day, and a third are illiterate.

It’s an appalling situation that Mubarak has let Egypt get into and the West must take some responsibility for its ongoing support of this dictatorship. These are the kind of statistics that damn a country for a generation. They are also the sort of statistics that set the stage for a government to be over thrown.

Politically, a really interesting facet of these protests is that there isn’t really any viable opposition party or movement as such. There isn’t one group organising these protests – it is a genuine grass roots outpouring – and it remains to be seen who will fill the political void in Egypt.

Mubarak actively outlawed opposition parties in Egypt which has left the country poltically bankrupt. The importance of opposition voices is hard to overestimate when considering the long term future of any nation-state. The only really viable opposition party in Egypt is the long-since-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood who have been linked to terrorist attacks (usually targeting tourists) and who do not enjoy widespread support but will surely benefit from these developments and Mubaraks opposition to pluralism. A pluralism the West seems only willing to support when it is convenient.

On reflection, elements of what I have seen over the past week, such as people taking the initiative and putting their bodies on the line to maintain peace (and undoubtedly, their own livelihoods), is evidence of the desire Egyptians have for control of their own destiny. They are ready to step up to the plate and take responsibility for the future of their country which is precisely what they have done with these protests. Inshallah.

Ma’a salama Egypt.

We arrived in Cairo in the early hours of the morning yesterday (Tue, 25th). When I checked my email a close friend and former Cairo resident had sent me an email saying that we’d arrived just in time – it was a public holiday and large protests were planned.

Not particularly looking for any trouble, although always interested in civil unrest, we decided that we should keep our heads down and go to the Cairo Museum for the day.

So off we went, immersing ourselves in 6000 years of history and the gold of Tutankhamun.

As we made our way over to the exit we noticed a crowd gathering at the doorway. The Tourist Police were not letting anyone leave the museum and not providing an explanation for why we were being help captive. When we were finally let out we weren’t allowed to leave in the direction of our hotel so went out the other way and made our way around the museum and towards Tahrir Square which we needed to walk through to get back to our Hotel.

Everything became clear as we turned the corner and saw the large group of protesters that were gathering there. We did a quick about face and got in a cab to take us the long way round, back to our hotel.

A few hours later we decided to go out for dinner; somewhere close by and away from Tahrir Square and the protests. After our first Egyptian meal we took a short walk to Midan Orabi for a post-dinner ahwa (coffee house). As we enjoyed our coffee alfresco style, a commotion started up, with people running every which way and all the shop keepers started frantically packing up their outside tables.

Our fairly intense looking waiter assured us that there was ‘no problem, no problem’ and that we should stay put. Only to quickly usher us inside a minute later still assuring us that there was ‘no problem’, only this time patting his hip which seemed to imply that he was packing heat. But whether he was going to protect us or shoot us if we didn’t relax was unclear.

Welcome to Cairo.

That night as we lay in bed we heard chanting outside our 4th floor window. We went out on the balcony to watch as three different groups of protesters converged on the intersection beneath our balcony and continued marching down our street. The riot police to arrived 5 mins later to block off the intersection that the protesters had already marched through.

It sounds like a pretty ordinary street scene outside our window this morning but we’ll wait and see what the day brings.

Today’s Age reports that Australian Centre for Contemporary Art is hurrying to defend this:

In the installation, artists and the public are invited to email works to the gallery, which are vetted, printed and displayed in a process streamed live to a website.

But the project, called myworkisintheaustraliancentreforcontemporaryart, is a promotion for Hewlett Packard, and the fine print gives the technology giant extensive copyright.

It just struck me as a great example of all that is wrong with the current Intellectual Property regime that permeates most of the globe at the moment. It typifies the loss of control over their own art that many artists are facing and the concentration of intellectual property into the hands of a shrinking number of highly litigious multi-national corporations.

To state the obvious, how does this do anything to encourage creativity or protect artists?

Today’s Age carried an article syndicated from the Guardian about men objecting to Pornography.

The article is based around a project set up by Matt McCormack Evans called the AntiPornMenProject but draws on a range of literature out there about the damaging effect porn has on men. Most recently it has been Gail Dines’s Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality which was published earlier in the year.

I don’t think I’m an alarmist (or prudish), but the mainstreaming of hardcore pornography does concern me. I’m quite sure most men can make the separation between the real life women they are intimate with and what they are seeing on their screen. However I also think that it is almost impossible to watch this sort of stuff without it having some sort of effect. As the article in The Age says:

One obvious problem for many porn users is the conflict between their stated belief in equality and respect for women, and the material they’re watching in private. McCormack Evans says he used to exist in a ”kind of double consciousness. For that half hour when I was watching porn I thought, ‘This is separate from my life, it won’t affect how I view the world.’ But then I realised it did.”

…

It can also leave porn consumers with sexual scripts and images they can’t forget, and can’t resist calling to mind during sex. Dines reflects on this in Pornland, in her encounter with ”Dan”, who is worried about his sexual performance with women, and tells her: ”I can’t get the pictures of anal sex out of my head when having sex, and I am not really focusing on the girl but on the last anal scene I watched … I started looking at porn before I had sex, so porn is pretty much how I learned about sex.”

It would also seem that porn getting rougher and more degrading. I brought this up with some of my male friends recently who denied it initially but did admit that they were increasingly coming across porn that they were uncomfortable with because of how degrading it was. However there was also a sense that porn was always like that – something I’m not so sure about.

One thing I’m hearing more often to justify the use of porn is “the desire to watch naked women having sex is totally natural and therefore shouldn’t be judged.” It’s an attitude that really bothers me. We judge should and do judge people that commit non-consensual and aggressive acts – sexual or otherwise. I’m certainly not implying that people that watch porn are committing such acts but the notion that you can’t judge such desires clearly does not stand the test of logic.

Whatever its effect, it’s an extremely complex issue. But the mainstreaming of porn doesn’t seem to have lead to much constructive discussion around its effect. There will always be a lucrative market for porn – that’s the side effect of all the things I love about the Internet. So what is vital is that we start talking about it; start talking about the effect this sort of imagery has on men and their attitudes towards women and sex.

I’m adding the AntiPornMenProject to my RSS feeds and I hope you do to.

Until a few days ago, I’d seen ‘Grog’s Gamut‘ appear in my twitter feed from time to time as someone I follow retweeted him, but never really paid attention.

Of course since then James Massola has revealed the identity of Grog’s Gamut and the interwebs have spewed forth huge volumes of work on the man and his anonymity. This is hardly surprising given that it is an issues that just about everyone that blogs or tweets has put some thought into from time to time.

For the record, I don’t think it was unethical to out Grog’s Gamut. However, I do think it’s quite boring and I question to value in doing so. There is probably a little public interest, not because he’s a public servant, but because it is gossip. I don’t see how traditional media expects to be taken seriously when it prints boring rubbish like this.

To make matters worse, the boringness of this sort of reporting is further punctuated by the fact that the only reason anyone is interested in Grog’s Gamut is because he’s quite good at what he does and is yet another example of new media are out performing traditional media.

But for me the more interesting question the issue raises is on of trust and legitimacy. In traditional media, what is written falls under the banner of the once respected masthead of the paper they are writing for. New Media practitioners have to actually earn the trust of their audience and that is even harder to do if you are anonymous.

Grog’s Gamut was clearly a good read – so good he managed to influence the ABC’s the managing director Mark Scott. By all accounts he was insightful and that cut through the cacophony of other blogs that are less insightful (like this one). To have your writing noticed, acknowledged and trusted* when no one knows who you are or what your credentials are is quite remarkable.

*The same issue presents itself to wikileaks and I think it’s fair to say that there is currently a concerted effort to undermine the trust that the organisation enjoys that legitimacy by a range of people.

I’ve avoided commentary on the Federal Election result because there has certainly been no shortage of it both online and in print (as one would expect). But I got a call from ABC Newcastle yesterday asking me to discuss the democratic implications of the election result in my capacity as a Director of the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice.

Unfortunately ACDJ is starting to wind down now (more about that later) so I didn’t think it would be appropriate to comment in that capacity, but I do have some thoughts on the matter that I thought I’d share here.

I think this election is the best thing that has happened to Australia’s Democratic for some time and am extremely frustrated by comments in the media about the three ‘country independents’ holding the country to ransom when they only represent a small pocket of Australia. I’m also frustrated by the focus on two party preferred votes (which at the last count I heard, the ALP was in front by under 100 votes).

So let’s be clear, what matters is the number of seats you win. In the 1998 election, the Labor Opposition lead by Kim Beasley, won the popular vote but not enough electorates to form government. That’s the way our electoral system was constructed at the time of federation and it is a democratic check and balance. It is a way of ensuring that the geographic diversity of Australia is represented.

Anonymous Lefty makes a similar point in this post.

To say you need the popular vote to have a mandate is ridiculous. If you think that then we should move to a single multi-member electorate with 150 spots up for grabs and a proportional voting system. It’s actually a pretty good idea and would mean the Greens have a lot more seats (over 15 on the current count) but I’m pretty sure that’s not what these commentators are after. So let’s just keep that one in check.

Democracy is about ensuring that the widest possible cross section of the country has a voice. In this case, that is done geographically – something that is probably a little dated in this digital age but as fair a distinction as class, ethnicity, gender and so on. Democracy is better judged by its ability to give a voice to minority views, the disempowered in our society, than it is by representing the ‘majority’.

For this reason, I think the country independents are doing exactly what they should be doing – representing their electorate. If the numbers fall in a particular way and that gives them more leverage, then good on them for seeing it as an opportunity to look after their lot. You’ll notice that it is no coincidence that they are probably the MPs most connected to their local electorate.

I’ve always been a fan of minority governments. For years now I’ve been looking forward to the days when the ALP needs Green votes in the Lower House. Minority governments mean a lot more compromise and a lot less party influence. You can’t just automatically assume that a Bill will pass the lower house and then be amended until it passes the Upper House. Instead you need to work towards getting approval from MPs who aren’t part of the party machine and therefore beholden to the dreaded focus group. And the result is usually some pretty big initiatives. The NBN will now continue unabated and it looks like a price on Carbon will happen a lot earlier than initially expected. These are all big ticket items and not characteristic of a ‘timid’ government which many in the mainstream media are saying this government will be. So let’s cut that chatter out too.

I think the party machines of both major political parties are rotten to the core. The Liberal Party essentially has no base these days, very few people identify with the Liberal Party and the Labor Party is losing it’s base very quickly. The ALP Union affiliation is a major cause of the rot but also probably the last connection it has to its grass roots.

(and by-the-way this faceless men business is a little ingenious as well. The ALP is, at least in theory, the political arm of the Union movement, of course the unions are heavily involved)

In his press conference announcing that he would back the ALP to form government, Tony Windsor said “Philosophy, in terms of both these parties, died about a decade ago or probably longer.” He’s spot on. The only way we have left to ensure that Australia has a robust democracy where a wide range of voices are represented is to ensure that there are other MPs outside the traditional two party system that have a strong influence in Australia.

I hope that’s what this minority Labor Government will give us.