So Who The Hell Do We Vote FOR?

G’day Pete, I feel your pain about the state of our body politic, man – hence my taking a stand, despite the massive interruptions to my hermitude, my garden projects, my renovations, my music time, my reading time, and to my general early retirement blissfulness.

It really is, as you say, a matter of who can we trust, knowing, as all readers here do, that no matter what is promised at any time in the election cycle, the final result will be something different.

While I’m sure there are career politicians and political wannabes who genuinely want to help their family, their friends, their community, and their nation, something always seems to go awry in the final execution.

It’s fairly easy to blame those failures on the deals made in the back corridors, intended to create some form of agreement or consensus to enable a particular piece of legislation to pass, but I’m starting to think that our processes are a little more tightly controlled by external forces than we might think.

Hence the theory I will explain here, based purely on my observations and a process of eliminating other probabilities.

IIUC, in Caesar’s Rome there were “bronze or gold” offers made to sitting Senators.
Bronze was a dagger between the ribs.
Gold was a sack of currency.
The metal of reward was based on performance.

After firearms were invented, “bronze or gold” morphed into “lead or silver”.

These days the “lead” is an anaesthetic accident or a single-vehicle car crash or the sudden and unexpected death of a loved one.
“Silver” is a sweet position on a company board that requires three hours meeting attendance per month for $300k pa in remuneration.

Who makes these offers? I dunno, but I’m sure you can connect the dots.
How can we tell an offer has been made? A sudden reversal of a previous policy position, followed, after a respectable break, by a sweet board sinecure is a pretty good indicator.
Do you know of former politicians who fit that profile? Yeah, me, too.

So how do we change that?
In a perfect world we’d recognise the staggering size of the mistake our nation made when we took the decision to build Canberra.
If we’d understood the damage that giving a home base and centre of power to “lobbyists” could do to our political integrity and to the quality of our representation, we would have opted for a parliament that met in the various state capitals on a rotation roster.
Anything that made it harder for these nefarious forces to get into our representatives’ personal space would’ve been better than the mess we actually created.

We could fix some of the damage by converting Canberra to a museum town and parliament house into a hotel, and adopting the idea of a travelling parliament.
We could legislate that a lobbyist can only lobby an MP who is the representative for the electorate in which their primary residence is located, and only lobby a Senator who represents the state their residence is in.
We could probably even mandate that meetings with lobbyists are broadcast live in real time, although deep fake AI technology might make that problematic. At the least we could include multiple eyewitnesses.
The point being we need to insulate our representatives from the threat of these offers.

As things stand, every elected rep is at risk, regardless of original affiliation.

When I’ve explained this insight to others, and they ask what I would do in those circumstances … it stumps me. It’s something I’ve pondered at length but been unable to resolve to my own satisfaction.
I certainly wouldn’t take the silver … but if the lead was to be applied to my child’s child?
I dunno … it’s tough.

So, we have to fix our broken system.
We have to ditch every last sitting MP and all the Senators up for reelection in this round, and the rest of them the following round.
We need to insulate our reps with patriots loyal to this nation in the interim and eliminate Canberra and vast swathes of the public sector’s senior executive service with it in the medium term.

Anyway, you get the idea.
As to Clive, I’m a fair way from the centre of that wheel, but IIUC he handed in his life membership, and he’s impressed me greatly over the last few months.
There are three new policies being announced at the official launch in April that are absolute ball-tearers.

To channel old Joh, “You just wait and see.”