hard to believe a person educated in law could be so profoundly ignorant of reality. i suppose his mother told him about the emperor's new clothes, but clearly he did not re-visit the idea in philosophy 101.
perhaps he didn't do philosophy 101. he certainly never examined '1984' and the application of newspeak to australian english.
australia is not a democracy. not even close. it is legally a dictatorship of the governor general. that is the fundamental law of the land. it is daily flouted by the politicians who run parliament. when the leaders of society despise the rule of law, they are bandits, themselves contemptible.
the reason they operate in this shadowy, wink and nod fashion is simple:
the only two sources of legitimacy in society are god and the will of the people. as the british aristocrats had no intention of sharing their dominance of the monarch with the plebs, they preserved the monarchy as a conduit for god's approbation of their rule. the monarch got the appearance of relevance and status, parliament got the reality, and the plebs remained in the sheep pen.
the british had no need to call this state of affairs 'democracy', and didn't. churchill only insisted he lived in a democracy when he needed americans to help him fend off hitler.
in oz, this culture is preserved with a few superficial additions from the u.s.a. there is no democracy in it, for selection of leaders by voting is not democracy, it is elective oligarchy.
democracy will not breakout in oz anytime soon. oligarchs don't give power away, and the polititians guild has several regulations they all subscribe to, notably: pollies rule! the people of oz will have to take power if they want it. they don't, any more than sheep want to run the station.
parliamentary rule will continue to be ineffectual in meeting the challenges of global warming and resource exhaustion. the people of oz will suffer in result, but oz culture can not be active suddenly, when everyone in it has been raised to submit to the power of parliament.
Posted by DEMOS, Friday, 8 February 2008 7:38:31 AM
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