In light of recent elections, it’s very tempting to look at the argument that was once put forward that, as half the population is below average in intelligence and/or political awareness, that democracy is a flawed model and that we’d be better off adopting the model where only the elite got to vote…
Ah, those bloody inner-city elites. Woke nonsense. Thank god we have a few people with their feet on the ground who can vote in a man of the people like Donald Trump, who’ll be taking advice from such down-to-earth people as Robert Kennedy Jnr and Elon Musk… (admittedly the latter is planning to establish a colony on Mars so that we don’t have to worry about staying “down-to-earth” or even saving it, but there ya go…)
I still have some faith that a system where we all get a say is a much better system than one where a few special people get to make all the decisions, however, the problem is that politics has rarely been an area where people put forward potential solutions and sensibly debate possible outcomes. Instead, it resembles a gladiatorial contest where the winner gets to make the decisions and the losers are left with just tossing rocks until the next election.
If we take the problem of wars, I have put forward a perfect solution which none of the politicians want to know about. In a time where we should be concerned about global emissions, instead of sending ships, planes and armies to another country at great expense, once war has been declared, Country A could simply say to Country B that it wanted to bomb a particular area of their country and Country B could bomb it much more cheaply because they already have troops and equipment there. In return, Country B could then say, “Well, now we’d like to retaliate and we’d like you to blow up your munitions factory with about fifty nearby civilian houses destroyed…” At this point, Country A could escalate and ask Country B to destroy an energy plant, leading to Country B retaliating by asking Country A to destroy some vital piece of infrastructure…
When I suggested this, someone said that it was absurd and wanted to know why any country would be prepared to blow up its own areas and kill its own citizens, I shrugged and said that it was pretty much what happens now, except that each country has to destroy the other one’s things and then wait for the country to retaliate; my way just saves on the shipping costs. “But,” the person objected, “what would happen if one country didn’t follow through? This might mean that the whole thing would stop and before you know it, you’d have peace breaking out!”
Anyway, back to democracy…
The fundamental problem is that we don’t have the various sides of politics saying that we have a big problem and we don’t know what to do about it; we have everyone arguing that they’re the only ones with the solution and the various other sides are just wrong.
If we take the recent cap on student numbers as a prime example, we have Peter Dutton telling us in his budget reply that we need to put a cap on student numbers. Now, whatever your position on this issue, I’d suggest that you’d believe that Mr Dutton is in favour of a cap. However, when Labor put forward their bill proposing a cap, the Coalition announced that they’ll oppose Labor’s bill because it’s not the cap that they want and it won’t solve the problem of housing or Mexicans or inflation or Labor’s inability to manage money. (Yes, Labor have produced two surpluses but they’re the ones who can’t manage money!)
Then, of course, there’s the misinformation bill. Of course, there are two sides to the banning of misinformation. The first is that there’s a danger if it’s the government deciding what is and isn’t misinformation, we could end up in the classic Orwellian nightmare of Newspeak. However, there is also the fact that there is a genuine problem with misinformation. I mean, we’re talking about something that’s misinformation by it’s very nature and surely – just as there are laws against slandering a person – it’s reasonable to expect that people should not be able to say whatever without consequences. Does free speech give you the right to shout “Fire” in a crowded theatre, etc? Well, obviously, yes if there is a fire, but surely you should have to explain yourself if you did it for some other reason. Rather than a mature debate about what we should do about actual misinformation, we end up with political point scoring.
Actually, I did find it refreshing during the Voice debate to hear so many Coalition MPs tell us that – not only did they oppose the Voice and Treaty – but they were dead against truth-telling as well. One of the few times we’ve had honesty from that bunch of liars!
While scepticism about what the media and the politicians tell us is a sign of a healthy democracy, this doesn’t mean that cynicism is the next logical step. And that’s the trouble with the whole fake news schtick of Donald Trump: anything that threatens our worldview can be dismissed as fake news, while we’re happy to believe the anecdote about some outrageous happening and generalise it to all schools, all politicians, all churches, all LGTBI groups, all inner city people, all Americans…
And this isn’t good for healthy debates about real problems that nobody has the complete answer for. It doesn’t help when people don’t know the difference between “communist” and “totalitarian” as in the comment about Jeff Bezos which I put at the top. It’s pretty hard to believe that the richest man in the world is running Amazon like a socialist collective in any way.
Perhaps Winston Churchill got it right when he said: “Democracy is the worst form of government apart from all the others.”
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