“And, should we humble peasants dare to speak, they will simply treat us like ... well, peasants. Why? Because they can! “

And why can they? Because people allow it and turn a blind eye and don’t support each other, nobody is required to care. We are not even required to care enough to be fair!.

I believe that there is a proportion of the public that is apathetic but, as a member of the public who has lodged serious formal complaints and allegations in relation to how serious allegations of misconduct and corruption by a Government Department are being handled and dealt with and covered up, my experience is that most people don’t want to get involved and even go so far as to totally ignore you and avoid you. Those that do choose to comment and get involved tend to harrass you and use bullying tactics in order to help shut you down and silence you, they attack, insult, discredit and abuse and pretty much everybody turns a blind eye and just allows it to happen.

That is what you get if you want to blow the whistle on any form of corruption or misconduct in Government Departments and as a result you stand alone, ostrasized, depleted, vilified, battered and bruised. Usually also broke. There might be Laws to protect whistleblowers within Government Departments, but members of the Public are left to stand alone to face the big guns, vulnerable and with no protection.

Until that culture, process and attitude changes, nothing will change. The system has set up the process of administration so as to cover up their failures and their misconduct and they use bullying tactics to send the clear message to not mess with the big guns as you wont win.

That is the culture that needs to be changed.

Apathy exists on different levels. You could even argue that passionate people who write on OLO under a pseudonym, but don’t make other attempts to directly deal with the issues they care about are apathetic. You can be passionate and deeply concerned, and apathetic about doing something that has a chance of counting. It may sound like a strange contradiction, but it isn’t.

Another huge problem is that people tend to be passionately concerned about individual issues and somehow incapable or completely disinterested in the bigger picture or in issues other than their pet hate.

Then there is the problem of people feeling utterly powerless to contribute to solutions on the really big issues. They can see the essence of the problems but never make any attempt to have a meaningful input.

And then there is the old tragedy of the commons problem, whereby those who practice frugal and sustainable lifestyles or whatever it is that eats away at them as a matter of principle, place themselves at a real disadvantage in many ways and are not appreciated by the rest of us for their efforts.

People should be required to care.

Maybe if there was some sort of test where people had to demonstrate a certain level of knowledge of our political system and certain level of input into it before they could get a driver’s licence or a rental property or own a house or have an electricity account or whatever. Sounds a bit Draconian, but it has merit.

Make people sit up and take notice and we will surely have a much more accountable political system which would hopefully translate into much better long-term protection of quality of life.

"People should be required to care. "

NO that is an impossible BS that only serves the immigrationl gerrymandering Status Quo. Ludwig again comes across as a Labor Party devil's advocate.

People should be SHOWN how to attack and remove corrupt governments like NSW Labor.

The Answer is SIMPLE. You attack the little lies that have crept in with a long 10 year incumbency and due to perverse laziness and incompetence.

People of NSW, you can start by demanding that the RTA change its LIE, "Keep Left Unless Overtaking" signs to "Keep Left Unless Travelling At Speed Limit".

The current signs are tacitly meant to mean "Keep Left Unless SPEEDING" and are meant to allow loopholes for Labor elitists and trucking companies on deadlines to treat NSW highways as AUTOBAHNS. If that is what NSW Labor and the RTA want then they should change the signs accordingly and take the electoral consequences. But NSW citizens must not tolerate this or other little lies that have big consequences for public safety and which are inherently corrupt.

I assure you that if you enforce a change-to-truth in those signs, no gerrymander on Earth can save NSW Labor from defeat at the March 2007 election. The embarrassment involved at being caught red-handed in such a simple but deadly lie will destroy them both with the Public and their Big elite minority backers.

KAEP, how can you be critical of the notion that people should be required to care about their governance and future wellbeing?

What is the alternative?

Just as we should all be required to have a certain level of competence in order to gain driver’s licence or a university degree or a CEO position, so we should be required to understand and contribute to our political and governmental systems.

I am sure you will agree that there are some pretty major problems with Australian politics. Well, if the populace cared enough, the bastards would be kept honest and many of these problems wouldn’t exist.

Apathy is extreme. That doesn’t mean that people don’t care about a lot of things happening around them or things completely removed from them that they hear about on the news. But it does mean that they don’t care enough to have input into these issues. The net result is a government essentially owned by big business, a government that has implemented absurdities such as compulsory preferential voting and the baby bonus without much outcry at all, and a government that is taking us in precisely the wrong direction in terms of sustainability and protection of a harmonious and intact society

Re: HOW do we demand better?

Thanks for responding to my post. In a perverse way, it's reasssuring to hear that others, also, have tried and failed!

Ludwig, what I find puzzling in your response is that you apparently accept you have no answer to demanding better and are frustrated by that, and yet - in dismissing the rest of us as apathetic and uncaring - you seem loath to consider that many thousands of Australians might merely feel exactly the same as you - impotent.

I don't think there's any doubt there's a deep longing in the community for better leadership. But for many of us who - like you - are painfully aware of our individual impotence, the options seem limited to waiting for the right leader to emerge.

I guess the question then becomes, where is that leader? And why, in Australia, does it seem to have become so damned difficult for a true people's leader to emerge?

Lucy

""KAEP, how can you be critical of the notion that people should be required to care about their governance and future wellbeing?
What is the alternative?""

Ludwig,

I answered that question in absolute clarity. You either did not read my post or as I suspect you have an interest in obscuring the truth.

As I understand it you are a minor political aspirant out of SE QLD. Like Newman and the Democrat there, you are probably bought. Only, I gather from your posts that you are using weasel tactics and pretend to protest UNFAIR IMMIGRATION distribution into SYDBRIS by using weak, irrelevant arguments, ignorantly blaming elecoral apathy and feigning mock frustration. I can tell you its not very convincing.

To all others,

If people attack the clumsy little lies like the "Keep Left Unless SPEEDING" situation with the demonstrably corrupt NSW RTA, corrupt governments will crumble and their successors will need to think twice before they believe an election win gives them a mandate to betray their own people in favour of private interests