An Open Letter to Australian Voters
Dear Australia,
Isn’t democracy fun? I know I’m a rarity in my love for politics but even if you hate politics, I still think elections can be fun. Think of your vote like a shopping trip, but instead of buying new shoes you’re going out to buy your future. What could be more fun than shopping for your future? And you don’t even need your credit card.
Australians usually do a pretty good job of their election shopping. Australia is an awesome place to live. But every so often, like three years ago, we make a really bad choice and choose horrible futures, such as the recent past we’ve had to endure under the Abbott/Turnbull government. We have a chance on Saturday to correct this mistake and I’m just hoping you’re awake Australia, ready to make the smart choice.
Please don’t fall for the great catch-cry of the uninformed who say there is no choice between the two major parties. There is a reason these people are uninformed; because they don’t have the capacity to inform themselves. If we’ve learned nothing else from our UK cousins making the Brexit and now the Regrexit decision, who were madly googling ‘what is the EU’ after they’d already voted to leave, it is that it’s really important to be at least a little bit informed before you make your choice. Here is one plank you can use to bridge the information gap.
You could vote for a Liberal government. You could go to Bunnings, buy a hammer and smash yourself in the face with it. You could pretend that even though you hated everything about Abbott and every idea he ever had, that Turnbull will change everything as soon as he gets the magic word, and then everything will be alright again. Even though deep in your heart you know Turnbull would have changed everything already if he really wanted to and the only reason he hasn’t is because he actually agreed with all of Abbott’s policies when he sat in Abbott’s cabinet, and the only thing they disagreed about was which one of them should be Prime Minister.
I know it’s disappointing that the end of the whole Abbott debacle brought no relief to the horrors of Abbott, and that Turnbull has been so piss-weak, letting Cory Bernardi run the government while he flaffs and waffles and spins and shakes his glasses at you to mansplain why he’s smarter than you are and you should just shut up and stop asking questions about views he previously claimed to have which have disappeared as quickly as a raw onion in Abbott’s lizard-like-grip. Life is disappointing sometimes. Do you know what I find disappointing? People voting for Turnbull, pretending he’s not exactly the same as Abbott and pretending Turnbull’s wish to scrap penalty rates isn’t evidence he would bring back WorkChoices in the blink of the eye if you give him even a sniff of a mandate to destroy wages and conditions.
You could vote Liberal and get a cheque for your footy club facilities whilst ignoring the contradiction of apparent debt-and-deficit disaster and the shower of pork-barrel-bribes during an election.
You could vote Liberal and pretend that you don’t mind the rort of a Direct Action Policy paying polluters tax-payer funds whilst failing to reach emissions targets because you actually don’t mind climate change destroying your future, nor do you mind Australia coming last in the race to build renewable energy industry which could have created a well-paid job for you or your offspring had it not ceased to exist under a Liberal government.
You could vote Liberal and tell yourself the three-word-slogan ‘Jobs and Growth’ is all the evidence you need of an economic plan, and that a $50 billion tax-cut-gift-to-the-rich-just-like-Turnbull-who-use-offshore-tax-havens-and-mostly-don’t-even-live-in-Australia will eventually trickle down to you and make you gloriously rich when deep down you know this will never happen and that it is fantasy to think it will and that really all this tax cut will do is make the mostly offshore rich richer and you’ll end up paying the difference in loss of essential services and increase in your taxes, possibly through an increase in the GST down the track even though Liberals said they wouldn’t do that, since Howard did exactly the same thing when he said he wouldn’t bring in the GST and then did anyway.
Are you an unemployed young person? Vote Liberal and earn $4 an hour doing who-knows-what and don’t you dare complain nor Murdoch’s flying monkeys will come after you.
You could vote Liberal to keep the boats stopped even though the net impact this policy has had on your life is to make you feel a little warmer in your nastiness towards people who don’t look like you, where you enjoy picturing five year old children living indefinitely in squalid conditions to the point where they’re so distraught they want to kill themselves.
You could vote Liberal and rip up Labor’s Gonski funding model, denying perhaps your children, or your friends children, or your grandchildren, or the children you haven’t had yet, and the economy as a whole the chance to be as smart and productive as it has the potential to be.
You could vote Liberal and be charged more to go to the doctor, more to buy medicine, more to have a pathology test, and be happy to rip billions out of presumably what you hope to be high quality care in hospitals when you need it most. These are the types of choices that make the starkest difference between a great country and a mean-spirited-user-pays-and-if-you’re-not-born-rich-that’s-your-problem-just-f*ck-off-and-die country.
You could vote Liberal and get a National Broadband Network which leaves us languishing behind our trading partners in internet speed, and keeps you three episodes behind on Games of Thrones thanks to how long the bloody thing takes to download. You could vote Liberal to unleash the bigots on gay couples in a $160 million dollar plebiscite which Turnbull’s team is busily finding loopholes to completely ignore. You could vote Liberal and keep being outbid at auctions by tax-payer-subsidised investors who will knock down your dream home and sub-divide for profit, so they can buy their unborn children three homes each.
Or you could vote Labor and get the opposite of all of the above.
The choice is yours Australia.
Vote wisely.
Yours Sincerely
Victoria Rollison
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Return to home pageOk I will.
Ican actually agree with the OP on this subject. Well spoken Victoria Rollison.
How do we get that across to those that don’t land on this site?
exactly Robert Dodgson, most of those don’t read anything other than MSM.
We just have to keep on trying to find them and change them
OR we could vote for someone else that is far more representative of what we want our country to be… I’ll take option 3 the ALP & LNP can have there pissing competition elsewhere as we are sick of them… as contrary to what you say there is very little difference. Again BOTH are following the neo-liberal agenda, trickle down economics (that doesn’t work) and austerity measures that is increasing inequality, slowing growth and creating higher unemployment.
Marcia Langton had the final say on Q&A tonight. She said she wanted young people to be more involved in the political world and vote. And get a good education. If you vote for the Conservatives the world will continue to be dumbed down and only the privileged will be able to afford an education. And may I add; life is about taking some risk’s. Many Australian’s just seem to want fit in and never rock the boat.That’s why we are the the sad and sorry state we are in right now.
The calming thing is the poor bastards who will vote liberal can bask in the success because they will never be told of their failure.
Marcia will see the failures in the eyes of her fellow Aborigines and I will in the pensioners who voted for turnbull.
Will I be strong enough not to say serves you right? yes and the poor women will vote for him again in 2019
wonder what pk means post koitus?
Unfortunately, Ms. Rollison isn’t a rarity with her drive by hypocrisy.
Would that she were.
We’d all be better off.
Still putting greens first and Labor second. Put LNP last!!
Remember that FASCIST Campbell Newman in good old conservative Queensland, well ahead in the polls, bent over and f**ked up the **se on the day…..
We live in hope!
Gee what a surprise. Victoria is having a go at the Brits for voting for something they don’t really want and then encouraging Australians to do the same.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/06/26/why-malcolm-turnbull-is-so-scared-of-people-voting-independents/
“History shows that in fact power-sharing Parliaments are often quite stable and reformist, as was the case during the 43rd Parliament. It’s also extremely arrogant for the Prime Minister to try and tell voters that they shouldn’t give their vote to an independent or minor party candidate and that the only right way to vote is to vote for him. Essentially, Mr Turnbull is saying that the almost one third of Australians who don’t vote for the major parties are wrong,” Wilkie said in a statement.
“Comments like this are terribly disrespectful of the democratic process which allows every Australian to vote for whichever candidate best reflects their views.”
“The Prime Minister needs to realise that there’s a reason that people are moving away from the major parties in droves…The Prime Minister, and the Opposition Leader I would add, should stop blaming everyone else for their troubles. That Liberal and Labor are on the nose is entirely the fault of the Liberal and Labor parties.”
Here’s a novel idea. At this election, perhaps people should actually vote for what they want. Vote for the party or individual that best reflects their views. I know it seems strange that an election should be used for such a purpose, but give it a go anyway. Voting for second worst all the time hasn’t really worked in the past and there’s no reason to expect that it will be any different this time.
“You could vote Liberal to keep the boats stopped even though the net impact this policy has had on your life is to make you feel a little warmer in your nastiness towards people who don’t look like you, where you enjoy picturing five year old children living indefinitely in squalid conditions to the point where they’re so distraught they want to kill themselves.”
Rudd started Offshore Detention, and Shorten isn’t promising to end it…
Chris, maybe it’s time to inform yourself. Labor will end indefinite detention and will better fund UNHCR for a regional solution. Rather than muddying the waters about purist, simplistic responses to a complex policy area, maybe do some reading.
Chris, we also have to add that the ALP voted with the coalition to impose up to 2 years jail for those that let us know what happens in the concentration camps.
I voted yesterdays and The Greens where my first option.
Regardless which party wins I hope that the senate will do what it can to protect the Australian people of draconian laws.
Well said @Vic_Rollison. Even though the parties have similarities, it is clear to me that Labour is more vote-worthy than Liberal – especially since the Libs are likely to lose their marginal seats (whose MP’s voted for Turnbull in the leadership spill) and even if they don’t lose government they may just reinstate Abbott as leader. Now wouldn’t that be a pickle.
Thanks for the patronising advice, Victoria.
Apparently you think I’m ill informed. I read a lot.
Skepticism and experience lead me to note a significant gap between “…will end…” and “…has promised it will end…”, and between “…indefinite detention…” and “…offshore detention…”
Experience with the last three governments (five PMs) has shown us that election promises (from both of the major parties) can prove somewhat elusive once the counting is complete.
I hate the LNP ad line on stable government. I think it will fool a lot of disinterested voters seeing as things under MT has been ever so much less antagonistic.
The LNP will be less stable. As the 2014 budget stuff is still around and the LNP is seeking a mandate they will not get (I hope) I’d be expecting a lot of political instability. Morrison will be rampant about we have a mandate for this and that.
The only expected instability in the ALP is on the refugee issue – but personally I regard that as a relatively minor issue policy made bigger by politics. It annoys me that the LNP uses refugees to distract from excessive immigration – some folks think the nasty policies or the abusive implementation of necessary refugee policies means that the LNP will lower migration, when they are increasing it quite a bit via 457 visas. The refugee issue in part allows them to get away with the lie of the necessity for Jobs and Growth – a non issue with low immigration.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jun/29/majority-of-australians-say-refugees-who-arrive-by-boat-should-be-let-in-poll-finds
Hahaha That ought to put the major two in a tailspin only days before the election.