Politicians - The Fools in Charge!

I don't think much of our politicians. Why? Because politics largely involves misrepresentation and abuse of power. Politicians feel they must be seen to be doing something, even something that they know is useless or wrong. So, for example, they claim to champion freedom of speech, yet have the OFLC (Office of Film and Literature Censorship, in reality) ban books and other material. Plenty of these books, such as Steal This Book, by Abbie Hoffman (Various publishers), ISBN 1568580533, are available online or in libraries in other countries.

Here's another example: My local member in the federal government used to be Michael Wooldridge. When he was Minister for Health, he never seemed to do anything but cut all the hospital budgets and make sure that we didn't get decent public health despite paying a fortune in tax for it.

However, that's just the incompetence of his government. There is a far worse danger than incompetence in our governments: The attitude that the politicians should run our lives and ignore basic rights. I wrote to Michael at one stage concerning a number of matters, including the Liberal government's ever increasing censorship and reduction of the rights of adults to self-determination. His response to me was: "Regarding the availability of erotica, while I have never sampled public opinion locally, I would expect a majority of my electorate would be offended by such material."

In other words:

• He doesn't actually know what the electorate wants. Rather, he's happy to make assumptions and act on those assumptions.
• He thinks that if the majority of the (mostly old) people in his electorate don't like something, it deserves to be made illegal. If most of us are offended by politicians, I wonder if he'd like to make being a politician illegal too?
• He has no understanding of the concept of freedom, or doesn't wish us to participate in it.

It is politicians such as Michael Wooldridge who are a danger to society as we know it and, regardless of our preferences regarding the economic policies of the left and right wings of politics, we need to get rid of them.

Don't be deluded into thinking that politicians who purport to be right wing are the only authoritarians, either. The idea of censoring the internet in Australia goes back over a decade. After all that time, we now have Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy embarking on an inane and technically impossible attempt to censor the whole internet!

My current federal member is Anna Burke. She supports her party's attempt to censor the net. So, for me, it's out of the frying pan and into the fire. What's the point of voting at all when the choice is Fascist A vs Fascist B vs various others who won't win anyhow?

At least our leaders don't have as much power as US leaders, so they can't manage to run around starting wars. I rather hope we'd not let them get that far, too. As London's Daily Mirror said in Nov 2004: