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The politics we deserve : Comments
By Peter McMahon, published 19/6/2006Why is politics in Australia so debased? We should be demanding better.
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The flawed common assertion is “Australia is one of the most over governed nations in the world”. Assessing its credibility depends on those nations that Australia is compared with. It seems valid to compare Australia with nations of relatively equal levels of development and prosperity rather than those that may be considered substantially underdeveloped and/or with high proportions of substantial poverty. A comprehensive comparison of Australia with 17 robust, wealthy liberal democracies including nations such as the USA, UK, Germany, Italy and Sweden (Tiffen & Gittens 2004) indicates the assertion is not credible.
Australia is the 4th least taxed nation of the top 17 liberal democracies. Australia spends the 4th least proportion of total GDP on government.
Interestingly, Australia has the second lowest level of membership of political parties amongst its population and, Australia has the highest concentration of newspaper ownership of these top 17 liberal democratic nations and the fifth lowest newspaper circulation. How many of us obtain most of our political information from this narrowly constituted media without an alternate source?
Despite a Federal system of government that translates into 2.5 tiers of government, Australia also has a relatively low level of political representatives per head of population compared with other OECD nations and the combined employment in the public sectors around Australia is also relatively low compared with other OECD nations.
There are certainly many flaws in Australia's political system but over-governance is debatably not one. Perhaps it might be fair to argue that along with our concentrated media ownership, we also have concentrated political power. Maybe there’s too few rather than too many representatives with their fingers in the pot of power in Australia?