http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D0VhS8qXT0&feature=player_embedded

And then we get to vote…

I love democracy, but it seems to me (on a purely rational level) that a bunch of ignorant people making decisions can’t possibly be the best way to go on some issues. This is why referenda are very poor decision-making tools.

Dunno… just saying…

I’m quite amazed at this. I cannot think of a SINGLE good reason to allow this, and there is currently a committee in parliament discussing changing this. What is even more amazing is that there are certain seats around the country which were settled on very fine margins at the last election, and where thousands of non-Australian citizens voted.

I’m sure there is an interesting story behind how this special dispensation came to be, but I think it’s a joke. Honestly, what other country in the world permits non-citizens to vote for their government?!

Curiously, although Australia has passed legislation to allow for dual citizenship, and also the High Court has clarified that British citizens are in fact aliens (in the technical sense!), we have literally thousands of British citizens who have chosen over a 25 year period not to become Australians (even though they could still maintain their British status), and yet still felt quite ok about voting in our elections… doesn’t make sense to me… seems somehow inconsistent. I’m surprised this has continued for so long.

And, yes, I AM a republican at heart…

“More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.”

I don’t want to believe it, but I’ve had enough conversations with certain types of Evangelicals to know that it has the ring of truth, and it’s very disturbing because it couldn’t be further from Jesus.

Torture is stupid, not just on moral grounds, but because it doesn’t generally work. The CIA has some interesting case studies of Vietnam-era examples of the manifest failure of torture to provide anything other than extraordinary examples of the human ability to adapt itself to survival.

What seems even more ridiculous is that the tax money from the alcopop flip flop will apparently go back to the alcohol producers. This seems absurd since it was a tax… in other words, it wasn’t paid by the distillers but by the people who bought these drinks, so why should the money go back to the distillers?!? This money should go back into taxpayer coffers, not the alcohol producers.

Sometimes, truly, the law is an ass…

I decided to run the tool over Obama’s recent inauguration speech, and here’s what I got:

“America, in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words; with hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come; let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.”

I think it actually did a pretty good job of grabbing Obama’s big ideas of hope and legacy.

“The world, Matt, is a jumbo jet”, he whispered.

“The Americans are in the cockpit and First Class. Everyone else is in Economy and we [the Brits] are in Business with the possibility of an upgrade.”

This is both funny and not funny, and likely quite an accurate reflection of world politics.

It does raise the question about where Australian bootlicking foreign policies (going back to the 60′s) place us on the plane…

We’ve had a situation a few times in recent history where independent senators have held extraordinary influence, and I don’t know if I’m the only one, but it bothers me that a single (or perhaps couple) of independent senators (who in reality often reflect the views of very few of us) can have such influence in our political process which is meant to reflect and represent the views of “the people”.

Flipside is that I also found the total majority situation that the Howard government enjoyed a dangerous thing because it gave them a blank cheque to pass legislation without solid debate and review.

Representative democracy is such a fascinating system…

Apparently, here in WA we’re
to be confronted with yet another vote on daylight savings in May. This is ridiculous!

When are we going to have a government in WA that will simply exercise leadership and do the thing that needs to be done? On purely economic grounds, and especially in the current situation, can we afford to head back to the old scenario where you can’t do business with anyone over East (in our own country!!!) for half the day?! I remember some days when the window for eastern state contact was as little as 3 hours, depending on lunch breaks, etc. That’s crazy!

I like daylight savings for a range of reasons, but even if I didn’t, it just doesn’t make sense for us not to have it in place. And yet this is where modern democratic, poll driven “leadership” lets us down… politicians who are afraid to make the hard decisions because it might make them unpopular and hence remove them from “leadership”. So they exercise this “check-the-wind” style of following not leading. This daylight savings issue is a classic example of it in this state.

I can hear some saying, “But, it’s what the people want…” Baloney! The people might also want massive tax cuts and free trips to Hawaii too, but that doesn’t make it possible or right. Leadership is about doing the hard thing, about making decisions that are for the overall good. This daylight savings thing has been a stupid issue for 3 decades now (in my memory) – just do it for the benefit of our state. Be leaders.

Having said this, I must confess to having little hope that our current state government has the capacity for this sort of leadership, so off to the polls we go… again…