Democrazy

Well, I'm off to vote. Might have a bit of a sausage for lunch at my local primary school too. Aside: are there any other countries in the world where an election day fete is such a common occurence? I thinks its lovely - go make your choice on governance and help out with the local kiddies facilities too..

Always a bit of the old cognitative dissonance at election time. Fundamentally, my life is awesome. Free, rich, comfortable, dignified, wide open with choice, mostly equal gender-wise, and shared with quite a few people I like thank you very much - you know who who all are - only pity about the distances in this wide brown land, but luckily I can afford plane fares.

But however fundamentally unsatisfied at how the national 'hood has been run for the last few years.

How can this be? Is it the cult of personality that is seeping through the web of supposedly universal sufferage? Is it the isolationism (did I just make that word up..) that perhaps was doomed to swamp an island nation afer a couple of hundred years? Is it the sneaking uncomfortable suspiscion that just maybe not everyone has it as easy as me, and that there is a web of invisible forces keeping those without without and those with with..? Perhaps its the nasty creeping virus of thinking that governments should act like groups of individuals that make product.* Is it maybe the soundbite, slogan, and strobe of visual grabs that pass for public discourse? (oh shit, I just used the word discourse on a blog - time to wrap it up).

Okay. Best outcome for tonight for me - that the house ends up a dog's breakfast, full of random independents, and Labor has to form a coalition with the Greens to from government. That the senate is so all over the shop that these big kids who have forgotten why they wanted to be there in the first place, actually have to listen to each other and try to find a way to work around their differences to get any laws passed, rather than snuggling down into comfortable bunkers of entrenched positions of "who has the numbers".

Ahhh - free speech- it feels gooooood.

* bzzzt. wrong wrong wrong. Governments serve the people, companies serve to the people - subtle but important difference, John, Bob, Michael, Steve.