Stop the static, dump the lot

I never used to vote for one good reason: none of the talking heads that were either incumbent or aspiring politicians deserved my vote.

Ever since I was a teenager, I remember wondering why it was that so much of their energies were devoted to trying to whip up interest in what to me was nothing more than static.

As I grew older, I realised that this was what populist politics was. And the old saying, “we get the politicians we deserve”, seemed not quite right for some reason.

After an election campaign too many, the penny finally dropped. What the saying should really be is: “We might deserve the people that go in one end of the sausage factory of politics, but we definitely don’t deserve what comes out the other end”.

We still don’t and never will – nobody, latent stupidity and selective ignorance notwithstanding, deserves to be treated with the contemptuous disregard that has become the hallmark of Australia’s politicians.

Politics is very much a sausage factory, and in this respect, it could be argued, by the plutocrats and their offspring, for instance, that our politicians are really nothing more than silly sausages.

But a more sobering and infinitely sadder argument is that it’s hard to muster an argument in defence of a populace that has allowed itself to be duped, deceived, lied to, ripped off, downtrodden, dumbed-down, disempowered, mocked, insulted, oppressed and appalled, time after time, the way Australians have over recent history – by populist plutocratic politicians in the name of populist plutocratic politics.

If I were a church-goer – the real name for a person who boasts that they are “Christian” - I would say our current crop of political leaders was spawned in hell.

If I were a fisherman, I would say they are nothing more than crab bait.

Like fishermen, you toss away what is of no use to you. That’s what we should be doing with this lot.

That way at least the static would stop. What happens after that, is too hard to predict. But it’s a tantalizing prospect and one we should act upon.

A few previously unseen things might even start to blip on the radar. Real debates, ones thrown into the good old public arena, could flare – imagine that?

Issues such as the War on Drugs, the lunacy of zero-tolerance policing, and the evils of our sectarian and religiously-influenced education systems might once and for all be wrested from the control of the plutocrats, and be subjected to real scrutiny.

As I told Magistrate Dick “Zealous” Wallace, before he sentenced me to a five-month stretch in the stripy hole in 2003, you may say I’m a dreamer.

But I’m not the only one :)