Wonderful thoughts James - if only. Indeed; the world IS a cynical place. Rather than actually DO something people would rather blame and label. Very tired of the labelling that goes on in this forum such as, rabid right and luny left. These labels are often used when a poster is being dismissive rather the making a contribution to debate.

Neither one holds the ultimate truth.

We need a balance.

We need capitalism - in the form of smaller competitive business rather than controlling monopolies which exhibit all the malaise of too large government.

We also need to be responsible for more vulnerable people - they can contribute too if given a fair chance.

Problem is - soon as we provide support networks to assist vulnerable/low income, someone claims government is nanny.

Well at the present time multinationals is the world's nanny but unlike grandma doesn't have the interests of human wellbeing at heart.

How can we have positive politics when politics are beholden to big business?

speaking of "puffery",
have you been smoking something wacky?? !

('Left' & 'Right' remain simply because they have been useful terms of description in Western [so-called] liberal-democratic societies. The issue is surely with the way the terminology has been abused. To remove them altogether not only neglects facts of ideology which underlie our political philosophies and history, but ignores the true motives of the parties/movements/interests in question. It is not the terms themselves that have become problematic but the TIMES: it is a negative feature of our current 'real-politik' that these terms can be both skewed and also called upon inconsistently at the convenience of the -mostly- low principled politicians/commentators of this overwhelmingly Rationalist "new world order" period.)

James, Are you suggesting we all be inducted into group therapy sesssions where an evangelical motivational speaker tells us all to be more positive? Will this be deductable through my medicare card?

I agree that we need to break the deadlock of cynicism (of both left and right, but I also agree with PABRU's timely pocket book analysis of your use of L/R) but life is much more complex and requires us to think much more deeply.

Simply adopting a pan psycho-social pathology of all things for all people might feel good and allow you purge yourself and turn that deep and meaningful chat you had over a few beers with Mirko Bagaric at the last Law society conference into a piece of prose - but your colleagues over in the social sciences know that anxieties (and beery chats) are one thing, social and political analysis is another animal altogether.

Dr Michael Hogan (School of social sciences)is someone I would highly recommend.

Remember, even Karl Marx proclaimed that we wasn't a Marxist.

But perhaps I'm being too cynical and anti-positivistic? Bar Humbug!

This *life with meaning* thing is, I think, more important than fretting over the (always) artificial labels people use to categorise things.

We need a political discourse and practice that aims to help us all live lives of meaning.

How to do that? It starts with us just doing it - and finding others who do as well. And helping others along the way.

Political movements are, after all, /just/ like-minded people doing things together.

I agree there’s not much difference between the main political parties in Australia these days. Although I’d say its largely due to the Labor Party shifting towards the right more than the Liberals playing with ‘left’ ideas.
However, after reading about how the world’s financial system functions, how the Reserve Banks are run for private gain ,how inflation is purposely built-in and how money that doesn’t exist yet is loaned, there’s no wonder that economies are forced grow at the expense of ‘leftist’ ideas which naturally puts a big-business spin on everything.
I wonder how much control governments really have. I doubt they have many ‘big’ levers they can pull. I feel like countries are forced to play ‘The Game’ according to certain rules forcing a certain flavour of socio-politics.
I want to be positive about politics, but its difficult when so little is being done to address unsustainable growth and our long-term future goals by either major Party. Luckily in Australia we have lots of resources so we should fare ‘relatively’ well in the future although by ‘we’ I mean the corporate ‘we’ not the actual people.

Well done James you've writen this with out actually talking about your subject. Maybe is comes from your "reasonable doubt" POV. What is positive politics? What would we do, don't say what we wouldn't do.