Democracy and Survival

Australian manufacturing jobs are going offshore at a great speed in the midst of the world financial crisis, with fear and uncertainty prevalent.

A tax on emissions without any exemptions, which seems fairer, has been scrapped in favour of an emission trading cap scheme, with exemptions for trade-exposed industries. In addition, industry is resisting the scheme’s commencement before 2012. Sounds like too little, too late.

The solar power industry which might have turned out a good employer and exporter, along with wind power, has suffered without government encouragement of investment! Here, it seems, another worrying provision negates the advantage of private power production. It appears that heavy polluters will be able to simply increase their emissions by the amount of private power production until 2020. Private power ‘helpers’ are not one bit happy.

All the while, science is increasingly worried that we are failing to control the damaging rise in sea temperature. Droughts and storms are exceeding historical levels, underlined by a more severe bush fire season. Polar and Tibetan plateau ice are diminishing further, beyond expectation, threatening warmer sea temperatures, which would certainly accelerate climate change.

In the middle of all this it would seem logical to have government in Canberra acting as a unified cooperative parliament, drawing relevant people and all their intelligence together, to give us our best chance of winning the many battles before us.

But no. At each and every level of government we see the principle of cooperation and unified action continually flouted in favour of that of competition— for individual and party advantage—routinely and revoltingly displayed in the television ‘show’, Parliamentary Question Time.

It achieves nothing of value, disgusts visitors and viewers, adult and child alike, and should be replaced by programs in which those government policies and actions with which we who vote are most concerned, can be sincerely and clearly explained. To that we are entitled.

Our democracy may yet survive the depredations of party politicians on our territory, if we but stand up and be counted.