Toad hunting … how John Hawkins saw his joust with Greg Hall …
Governance and governments: the system
We have always been “governed”. In the past by the upper elite of our society who ruled over those with little or no education, no power and no vote.
Women had no vote; it was a male preserve and Governments were smaller. Those standing for election had to stand in public places to make their pitch directly to the people they were to serve – no minders, no spinners and no advisors.
The media of today rather than the person is the new informant. Look at any nineteenth century Tasmanian newspaper (no TV, no mobile phones, no Internet, no Facebook or Twitter) and spot the difference as to what “news” was imparted to those who could read, write and think.
Many could not read, so their only avenue of protest was to fill the Hall and make their voices heard. Today in Tasmania a figure approaching 40+% of people are either functionally illiterate and /or not numerate and there are no candidates willing to fill those Halls.
It is my belief that governance at the local, regional, state or federal level has been so debased that it has become a joke amongst thinking people; as a result we are now in serious trouble; not just in Tasmania, but worldwide.
I believe we are at the end of the two-party “Westminster System” and what we know as “democracy” (see The Age 11 May 2012).
What we really have is big business on the one hand, with the public service and unions on the other. We are at the end of the way we have been governed over the past one hundred, to one hundred and fifty years.
The people have become disrespectful of both the system and those who operate within it.
At issue is the very system or process of government and the quality of the politicians who implement the process. They are different but interrelated issues.
Politicians: Those who lead and those who govern
Daily there are reports in newspapers of the personal lives of politicians; even leaders who have fallen on their swords because of behaviour, often profoundly disgraceful.
Are these the people fit to lead us?
The changes have happened in just over one hundred years; but with a sensationalist press the speed of discovery has become more rapid. What do we want, what do we think we once had, who do we want as our decision and law makers?
Let’s put up a case as to what the top of the “bar” might be. If we take the Queen (still the head of state in Australia), she has served the people unstintingly, whatever one thinks of the House of Windsor.
I believe she has lived a life of duty to her people; an impeccable example to follow.
If politicians of all nations did that, think how different our world would be.
Her values were probably dictated by her being the head of a Church, a sheltered upbringing under a Royal flag and a life of privilege. But if we look at the “values” of her life, from church and state, and tease some out, I think we arrive at what has been lost in present society.
Here are some: Ethics, not-for-personal gain, consistency, loyalty, morality, commitment, dedication to office, reliability, responsibility, courage, truthfulness, honesty, self discipline, a world view that has compassion, combined with quiet determination to achieve … I could go on.
These are values we expect of politicians as servants of the people. Their behaviour in “serving” should be exemplary.
Their first duty is to serve the people they represent. This in many cases simply does not happen; think the politically expedient non-core promise. We even get the notion that their personal lives and their “career” lives are two separate unrelated matters and that the personal life is somehow not connected to what they do in their job.
I hesitate to link state and religion; but think of past history where that separation has been an honoured, long laboured; a well fought out principle that stands. However in passing I would write that it’s through a religious upbringing that one has the potential to learn a great deal about “values”; which include morality and of how to treat one’s fellow.
Probing deeply enough into the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy Will be done”, can move a person deeply to a core understanding that it is not the individual’s will that should prevail, but that of the common good.
We live in an increasingly complex world. To be able to understand this complexity and confront difficult intellectual matters with a skill born of experience requires a serving politician to have a university level of education.
He or she also needs to have actually been employed, or been business people out there in the “real” world. What is required is an “informed” person with a degree of intellectual rigour and a wide work experience of “being savvy” and of knowing how a business functions.
Running a State is no different to running a public Company; they both can go bust.
Career politicians must be out; those who have served as staffers etc. are out; those who come solely from unions are out.
I suggest that even our present parties are “out”. We can now see where one hundred years of party politics has taken us. Today politicians spend most time not serving their electorates or the country, rather serving the party and throwing insults at those opposite.
What is being propped up, promoted and bound by “a policy” is a “party” and gaining or retaining power; nothing else. The good of the people is of no consequence. We hear so much about “the right thing to do.” The right thing to do is serve the people first not a party.
I would like to think that back one hundred or more years, we had ethically, honest, committed-to-duty, informed, trusted, governments in Tasmania, who saw themselves as stewards taking the island forward, of forging a future for everyone. I can look back at Tasmania around 1880 and think it was going places….. so different from today where it is going backwards. The role of a politician, though, was to serve, to be committed, and most likely to do it “without fear or favour”.
We in Tasmania are over-governed. Forty politicians who cost the taxpayer $33 million per year, over a hundred media advisors; 29 Councils of local government, with a population of 500,000 (many children); we simply can’t afford the luxury of all of this level of governance. We need fewer and better quality politicians, not more. We do need people in charge who are very competent, very well informed, rigorous in their approach, and ethically honest. “Deals” are out.
Media
Europe is far more “mature” than we are here in Australia when it comes to voting.
Think of the plethora of parties and the compromises that have to be done to obtain power. We do not have the maturity born of experience to manage a “hung” parliament, either in Tasmania or Australia.
Major parties have been able to capitalise on this ignorance of what voting means to the individual and why we vote. This is clear in Lib/Lab Tasmania; behind them come words like “corruption”, engineering, manipulation, etc.
Standing behind the major parties are the media and we can see the influence of that in Britain over the phone hacking scandal. It’s not dissimilar in Tasmania, given what is written about by the Examiner; and increasingly also seen by many as the compromised ABC. There is bias, but while the populace is disengaged, is uneducated in relation to what the vote, their vote actually means, it will continue.
It is much better to sell newspapers through a diet of sport, (in all its manifestations) celebrities, trivia, dramatics, than to actually engage in rigorous intellectual, well-written articles. We do not have the journalists to write such material and if we do they are muzzled, retire or they move on; Wayne Crawford and Sue Neales come to mind. Certainly we no longer have a single “research” journalist in this state.
All of the media including increasingly those who were more concerned with serious journalism are simply serving up a diet of titillation, drivel, comics, local photos, sport, and inconsequential rubbish.
Media seems to be for “thoughtless pleasure”, rather than the serious pursuit of “knowledge” or of informed discussion. The Examiner for example both misreported and misrepresented my brain dead comment first published on TT four days before the election, seeing it as sport, hype and news rather than a taboo subject worthy of further thought or proper investigation. Ten second grabs prevail. We are supposedly information-rich; we are in effect, information-poor.
Intellectual rigour and the vote
We’ve lost any intellectual rigour. We’ve lost the significance of what good government means to us individually. I suspect most people in the electorate are disengaged from politics; if they did not have to vote, then they would not; this brings into question the informal vote.
If we look at the “vote” itself, the right to vote has over the past one hundred years gone from something a suffragette would die for, to a worthless piece of paper. A serious question is why do people think this way and why does their right to vote mean so little?
I suspect that the continuation of the system is because of the way that “power-over” is exerted by those in the parliament. The “over” is an important concept of how power can be corrupted. It has always been that way, but now I think it has reached very high levels of distortion.
In Tasmania there is perception in the community of “deals-done”, deals which favour individuals, or the party, select organisations, or those individuals who have the ear of government.
Processes are ignored, a plethora of decisions that are made without any public knowledge, and which in the end favour a few, rather than the many. There is this under-belly of dark deals, full knowledge of which escapes the general populace. So decision making is not honest, not open, not committed to the people, but rather committed to a selected cohort who benefit personally, in maintaining the “power-over.” It threads its way across families, through parties, religious affiliation, and is the cancer that is dragging Tasmania down.
People do not “whistle-blow” as per Nigel Burch’s story (TT: Toe the line or you don’t work in Tasmania), because to do so, means loss of a job, and worse. People I suspect can be “bought” so as to be silenced, or alternatively – like Nigel Burch – pilloried. It is the person, not the system who is attacked, with a vengeance and that can be scary. Tasmanians are easily “heavied” into silence unless one is prepared to be a public figure which most are not.
Maintaining the silence supports the current system, think literacy, think logging, and think corruption.
My standing for Western Tiers was in a measure to counter that silence, the silence of the lambs who cannot comprehend their pending slaughter on an island controlled by the few who exert and enforce power over the brain dead who are willing to accept that on the day “It’ll- be right mate”.
It will not be right until the people are prepared to treasure integrity, courage and honesty and exercise with intelligence, through the ballot box their hard won right to vote.
Absence is proving the kiss of death to democracy.
I would like to thank a number of TT friends who have helped me with the above.
John Hawkins stood for the Legislative Council seat of Western Tiers at the May 5 election, recording an 8.6 percent swing against incumbent Greg Hall in a vote described by psephologist Dr Kevin Bonham as a beefed-up version of the Greens vote. He has been a regular writer and contributor over many years to Tasmanian Times. Details of his campaign and his regular articles are collected under the Category, John Hawkins
