The indefatigable US presidential candidate and Covid hero, RFK Jr – who needs the full name when everyone knows the initials? – recently summed up why people are pissed off with their governments and with the administrative state, the managerial class and the ruling elites. He said:
People know they don’t own their government any more. It’s rigged against them.
Kennedy described the current system as an oligarchy designed to strip-mine wealth from the … middle class …
Quoted by The Vigilant Fox, Telegram channel.
It seems a reasonable interpretation of the trajectory of modern democracies, where governments and oppositions agree on most things, when these things are opposed by the silent majority, and when the ruling class gets its way by other-than-democratic means.
They are flipping the bird at the people.
What happened to the idea of mandates? When governments sought our “permission” at elections to do what they wanted to do in office? The mandate theory of democracy has been defined in a Parliamentary paper:
Briefly put, the mandate theory asserts that the government has both the responsibility and the right to have the Parliament enact the legislative proposals that its party or parties had championed during the preceding election campaign.
If the government fails to pursue enactment of those proposals, it fails in its obligation to the electorate and it breaks the links of democratic governance. Those links involve a clear and simple logic: a party seeks support from the voters for its program; the voters endorse that program by voting for the party and giving it enough seats to form the government; and the party then has the responsibility to enact its program into law.
The Parliamentary paper continues:
This is essentially the argument that Prime Minister Howard made after the 1998 election:
I have a very simple view about the political process in this country. And that view is that elections are opportunities for opposing political forces to lay their plans in detail before the Australian people and when the Australian people have made a decision it is the obligation of the victor in that political contest to implement the plans laid before the Australian people. There is nothing complicated about it.
An imperfect version of democratic theory, to be sure, but workable. (One of the things that complicates mandates is the practice of voting for non-government parties in the Senate. If anything, this is a reflection of voters not wanting governments to have or claim unlimited mandates, and a practical means of limiting state power. John Howard found this out in relation to the Goods and Services Tax after the 1998 election).
The converse would seem equally to apply. That governments do NOT have the right to do things not covered by its “mandate”. That they do not have the right to make it up as they go along. The British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan is once reputed to have explained how things can change between elections:
Events, dear boy, events.
Response to a journalist when asked what is most likely to blow governments off course. The quote is also given as "Events, my dear boy, events",
True enough. But do these “events” mean that governments can ignore clear voter intentions? Of course, there will be debate about this. But, in the end, I think not. How are we going now in the 2020s in Australia, in relation to elections, mandates and democracy?
Well, we know that every government in Australia shut down democracy for two years in order to deal with a minor flu-type infection. And made up their own rules. Lied about lockdowns. Outsourced decision making to compromised unelected public health officials. Spent a trillion on zip. Did deals with Big Pharma companies known to be career criminals and which are now being sued for all sorts of crimes against humanity.
What else has been happening?
Four ways that governments can screw the voters and so screw democracy are:
· Breaking electoral promises;
· Doing things you do not have explicit permission to do;
· Flipping the bird at the public by doing things that you know or suspect they do not want;
· Flipping the bird at the public by doing things they explicitly told you not to do.
On the first. Governments have been breaking promises and so, letting citizens down horribly, since Caligula was a boy. These days, the legacy political parties are simply promise-breaking machines. Why, they don’t take any notice of their own party members. They don’t give them a say, either.
On the second, where to start?
The British Tories have been doing it for a decade. Likewise, the post-Tony Abbott Liberals in Australia. Who knows what the New South Wales Liberal Party thought it was doing in office? The whole creeping managerial state has only grown without voter permission. Expanding Commonwealth powers. Mass immigration. Giving $600 million to Papua New Guinea to start a footy team. Closing down coal mines that keep us all in power. No one said “okay” to this. You do not have permission in a fully functioning democracy to do things no one wants you to do.
On the third, just think mass immigration (again). As the British Tories are about the find out. But there are other, very recent examples, very close to home. Two Labor former premiers just got to put the letters AC after their names. Two of the most divisive political figures in recent times. Between them, Covid thugs who by-passed the Constitution, created military police and imposed lockdowns and vaccine mandates that were as lethal as they were useless. Had their police shoot rubber bullets at the innocent on the streets of Melbourne. Closed state borders.
On one of them, Mark McGowan, retired from politics in 2023, The Australian Financial Review recently reported:
‘Exhausted’ McGowan has four jobs, including one with Joe Hockey.
Good Lord. Only four?
At least he didn’t say that he wanted to spend more time with his family. Joe Hockey, a chronic under-achiever in Australian politics who, like all the other has-beens, has gone into “consulting”, selling his core skill set of having favours owed and access to the levers of power promised.
In an internal note to employees obtained by The Australian Financial Review, Mr Hockey said the former Labor premier would join his team as a senior adviser based in Perth and “making the occasional visit to the east coast and beyond”.
“Of course you would all know Mark as the recent former premier of Western Australia,” Mr Hockey said in the note.
“Mark recently retired with massive public support (the best way to go) after serving six very successful years as premier. Mark is advising both BHP and Mineral Resources as well as Bondi.”
If Hockey can come to these conclusions, post-Covid, well, what possibly can be said about him? The conclusions about McGowan’s tenure reached by many voters would be at variance from those of Joe Hockey.
Then we have the other Companion of the Order of Australia recipient. Daniel Andrews. It is hard to say anything new about this creep. But, wait …
Daniel Andrews resists handing over phone records from day of crash with cyclist Ryan Meuleman on Mornington peninsula.
That was the poor bloke that either Andrews or his wife ran over in 2013.
The gongs given to these two goons dishonours the purpose of the awards. It demeans the currency. It corrupts the system. It reveals – as if we needed reminding – that crony socialism is alive and well. It suggests that this is the main purpose of honours systems. It confirms that time served in the political system is a mere staging post on the way to post-politics rewards. Anything that eases their passage is okay. Everyone’s a winner, baby. That’s no lie.
The point here? Well, who on earth thinks that the Albanese Government had the right to do this? It is kicking sand in our faces, n’est-ce pas?
On the fourth, The Guardian reports (no doubt, with glee):
Anthony Albanese open to Makarrata commission for truth and treaty for Indigenous Australians.
Hello? Didn’t over 60 per cent of Australians just flip the bird themselves – at Albanese, the voice and all of its component bits, like the Makarrata and the treaty? Perhaps we didn’t shout loudly enough. I thought we did. The vote against the voice, a thumping majority, was almost as substantial as the votes not in support of Albanese at the last election. A clearer (negative) mandate on ANY issue is harder to imagine.
Yet Airbus Albo has the following view:
Anthony Albanese says he will attend Arnhem Land’s Garma festival in August to “talk about a way forward” on Indigenous policy after the defeat of the voice referendum, keeping open the prospect of setting up a Makarrata commission to advance truth and treaty processes.
But key advocates for the referendum have urged the government to move more quickly in outlining its new agenda, including honouring the prime minister’s election night pledge to implement the Uluru statement from the heart “in full”.
Ah, so getting 32 per cent of the primary vote at the 2022 election is a mandate! And having the same thing rejected by (again, nearly two thirds of the people) turns out to be a speed bump. Democracy is reduced to a hurdle to be overcome, by whatever means available. I assume Albo is one of those China admirers who laments the way “the people” slow down the implementation of ideology. There is a word for people like this. We call them dictators. It doesn’t excuse the man just because he is as thick as two short planks. That some of his pages are stuck together.
Flipping the bird at us. I think we know what to do in return.
He said also:
“So of course, as we said … if it wasn’t successful, it wouldn’t be just replaced by something the next week or the next month,” he said.
In other words, give it all time to settle down. Then we will come at it afresh. He either doesn’t understand, or, more likely, fully understands but chooses to ignore – actively ignore – the fact that over 60 per cent of us are fed to the back teeth with the ubiquitous Aboriginal ideology and industry.
As I said, we are a speed bump. I don’t believe the founding fathers had this in mind in 1901 when the Australian colonies, in some case reluctantly, gave up their own democratic powers to what was to become Canberra.
It might be argued, well, if governments do these things, we can always kick them out at the next election. It worked with Whitlam. And it may well work with this current lot.
There are problems with this, however. One is that all those voters who don’t want the major parties in office cannot agree on what they want. So, the clear majority who do not like the overall direction of travel don’t have … dare it be said … a “voice”. Certainly not in the parliament. As the Brits are about to find out. They are about to get a government even worse – is this possible? – than the previous one. It is the electoral system. Whether it is first-past-the-post or preferential, the vast majority will continue to be screwed. This is disenfranchisement on a grand scale.
It is possible to believe two things simultaneously. That we should kick the awful government out. While fully realising that we don’t want the new lot. This is why Australia got Albanese. And why the Brits will get Starmer. With a thumping majority, it seems. The protest voter is on a hiding to nothing.
Yes, I realise, you can’t change the electoral system. Because it is in the interests of the two major parties and their puppeteers to keep the corrupt cartel going.
The only, admittedly very minor, compensation we have is that we know what they are up to. It is all we have at this moment, apart from our own truth-telling, community-based resources and our alertness to the scam that is being perpetrated upon the populace. There is evidence, both in the United Kingdom and in Europe, that the peasants are revolting.
Who knows where this might lead?
Paul Collits
19 June 2024
They are laughing at us. Pure malice. Amr
The reasons I call myself a political orphan.