The farce that passes for politics

Many people voted for the bloke on the right (who is Left) to be Prime Minister,
not the woman on the left (who is Right)!

FOREIGN Affairs Minister (and former Prime Minister) Kevin Rudd has called for “sweeping reform” of the Labor Party, saying “the aggressive conservative onslaught of a resurgent right” could push the party into a situation where it could “fade away”.

“We are fools if we do not understand that the public has had a gutful of what currently passes for much of our national political debate,” Mr Rudd said.

He is absolutely correct.(LINK)

As Southern Highland News columnist Dr John Hewson often writes, our politicians are too busy paying attention to their egos rather than paying attention to what the country wants or needs.

Dr Hewson wrote in one of his columns: “The essential problem is that politics has become a game, an end in itself, a daily contest to win the media against the other side.” (LINK)

But the whole political system seems to be flawed, especially within the Labor party where essentially there are three parties within the one – the Left, the Right and those in between.

This is how Kevin Rudd was rolled by Julia Gillard – and too bad for those voters who wanted Rudd as PM and not Gillard.

Rudd said in the Sydney Morning Herald at the weekend that his core concern “is how to reform our party so that it has a future, not just as a diminished political rump …”.

That’s a problem for the ALP to solve, but in the meantime we must educate our children about politics and that must start in school.

Too few of our young people pay any attention to politics when they should – and I doubt they realise that without paying attention democracy is dying – if it is not, indeed, dead already.