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View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.
You are excited at voting but dismayed at the choices you're going to find on the ballot papers. You are not alone in this - nearly one in five eligible voters aged between 18 and 24 have not bothered to enrol to vote. Why don't people trust democratic process to change the things they think should be changed? One reason is that the kind of politics we have is devoid of any great moral clash of ideas.
Abbott successfully damped down his glee in the taunting and negativity which he aimed so cruelly at the first woman prime minister, when she withdrew from the internal stoush she couldn't win. In the first round both he and Rudd offered the most boring, stagey and value-free 'debate' we have witnessed since the days of Billy McMahon. But the blokes got aggro and personal in the second.
Kevin Rudd says we need a 'new politics' or a 'new way'. Tony Abbott says we'll only get a new way by electing a new government. What is missing in both statements is the recognition that what we actually need is a new kind of economic democracy: a reconfiguration of our economic prioritising away from individualism towards the common good, and towards the participation of all rather than the exclusion of many.
Australian cycling great Stuart O'Grady says using drugs was the only way he could be competitive at the 1998 Tour de France. Graham Richardson — famed for his 'whatever it takes' approach to politics — says Labor's PNG solution is cruel but 'politically brilliant' and has given the party a competitive edge. In years to come, Labor party elders will realise the cost of this competitiveness.
Most voters think that when they fill in a ballot paper they are choosing between the prime minister and the opposition leader. And the fact that they think this makes it so, regardless of the niceties of constitutional theory. The system Rudd is proposing would narrow the gap between voter perceptions and the power of parliamentary blocs to ignore them.
One of Kevin Rudd's key points of difference with Julia Gillard lies in his determination to project a business-friendly image for himself and the ALP. This may have something to do with his decision to dump former parliamentary secretary Andrew Leigh, who is Australia's leading inequality expert and clearly unsympathetic to the demands of big business on government.
13-24 out of 47 results.