It’s been a turbulent week in the news, to put it lightly. In the US, Trump’s associates continue to experience worsening legal woes, while over here, our own PM was ousted (again) in a party coup.
I remember last time it happened, someone changed the Wikipedia page for Australia to show that our national sport was actually ‘Leadership spill’. An amusing alteration, but humour goes only so far in masking the seriousness of this government’s inability to retain a leader for a full three-year term.
Australian politics itself doesn’t really interest me as much as it should. I’ve met Australian politicians on a few occasions – Linda Reynolds and Paul Papalia for example here in WA – but the tediousness and aridity of the political issues that plague Canberra fail to really ignite any dormant passion within me. This is more an indictment of my own character rather than of Auspol, but currently that’s where I’m at.
Reflecting on it now, the only real talking point that I’ve been thinking about lately is how difficult it really is to assess the quality of a sitting government. It really depends who you ask – there are those who say that ScoMo as PM is great for reasons x, y and z, while others will cry out that he is hopeless for reasons a, b and c. Australia’s prosperity is surely the result of a multitude of factors that stem from different points throughout history, the results of decisions made by former governments on both sides of the fence. We can point to individual issues that capture our attention – Operation Sovereign Borders, GST, Banking Commissions etc – but these are just small parts of an entirely larger whole.
The problem is, the denunciation of a particular government at a particular point is equal in fervour and vehemence to the support of that government by someone else. Each action has an equal and opposite reaction, and this seems to hold true for politics as much as it does for physics.
Which leads me to ask – where is it reasonable to be on this spectrum? If I read an article, and this article contains a certain number of facts that pertain to a certain position on a certain issue, I’m reasonably confident that elsewhere an article is written with its own facts and take that counters the one I’m reading.
This isn’t always the case – and indeed, one of these articles could be predicated on falsehoods or half-truths – but is it reasonable to expect the voting public and people like me to go the lengths required to determine which article is more reliable? And is it reasonable to assume that once we have the knowledge, that we are wise/impartial enough to actually believe it?
I find that once all this has been taken into account, I’m more lost than I was when I started. I might just be particularly easily confused, which is possible, but if I’m confused after I’ve read more than most of my friends – who are well educated themselves – how on Earth do we expect the average person to be making the right decisions on behalf of the nation?
Anyway, in the meantime I’ve decided to upgrade to WordPress’ Personal plan, which includes a custom domain: tjdempsey.com. I’m not too sure what I’ll do with this site yet – I’d like to learn some more skills in web development and maintenance, but I don’t really have the time or dedication to delve too deeply into that at this stage.
Thanks for the site WordPress.
TJDempsey 