COL ROUGE... and now you know why I am neither an Anglican nor a Roman Catholic. (though I am not averse to enjoying fellowship with any who name Christ as Saviour) Further, I would never recommend any particular 'tradition' other than that where people feel comfortable spiritually.

Pericles... the Athenian Assembly ?

"The Assembly" was the regular gathering of male Athenian citizens (women also enjoyed the status of “citizen,” but without political rights) to listen to, discuss, and vote on decrees that affected every aspect of Athenian life, both public and private, from financial matters to religious ones, from public festivals to war, from treaties with foreign powers to regulations governing ferry boats."

No wonder the book of Acts chapter 17 describes the Greeks as follows:

[20You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean." 21(All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)]

yes.. if all the people gathered in the assembly and had to discuss say...our taxation law... sheesh.. they would be tied up for centuries.

[Trivia]
I also see from my reading why Greeks are so adamant that Macedonia is part of Greece.. because it enables them to lay claim to the exploits of Alexanda the Great..who happened to be Macedonian :)
In fact he subdued Athens as well.. duh Greeks, c'mon.. get real about your history, and learn humility.

MY GUESS... is that whether it is an athenian style assembly, or a house of mis-representatives, their will always be the struggle of vested interest, which brings me back to my last post and its reference to the spiritual solution.....boring eh.

Listening to Parliament yesterday concerning lack of Australian skills training and the resultant flood of "technical work visa's" in the vicinity of 250,000 confirms my long held conviction that we are doomed :)...*reaches for the sandwich board*

It was actually Ireland that had the first real workable Democracy (pre-Roman?)on Earth. In Greece it was all philosophy, and only partly practiced. The Greeks also had slaves and didn't exactly have basic human rights for all. They gave us great philisophy and great ideas.

We don't have the balance of power that the US has: the Judiciary can at any time impeach a President if he is found unfit to Govern for reasons of curruption. Then there are the 25th and the 28th ammendments that put their leader under congressional scrutiny.

Our GG and PM have no such accountability.

No PM since the Gough Whitlam, has been faced with real accountability to any section of Government. He faced dismissal. Since the changes of ettiquette, John Howard can do what ever he likes, a quasi inquirey or two, and the ALP is too stubborn or stupid to have him dissmissed.

They had at least 4 opportunities to do so under the old agreement, but the ALP on principal refuses from the professy of St. Gough and Howard knows this. He even stacks the quasi "independent inquiries" and does it regularly. The Senate only blocked bills. South American countries must be writing notes: brilliance in dictatorship!

We have no Bill of Rights in Australia, the only OECD country not to. The two pary system will be erroded, there will be more chaos, which is why things like balances of power between the Head of State, the Judiciary, and the PM should be more defined, and our rights need to be guaranteed by constitution.

If any politician misinforms the country, or is corrupting the system in any matter of national interest, then the High Court, the Head of State or the GG, and the Senate, should in a combined majority, have the right to dismiss any of them, including the PM. Leave Queenie out of it.

The Federal Govt is in serious danger of losing the next election because of their ill planned IR reforms.They need to immediately remediate the present situation to make it fairer for vunerable workers.

Their longevity in Govt has made them arrogant and remote from the real world of survival that ordinary folk face daily.Labor under Beazley however are now in the grip of nutter union minorities that will take us back to the dark ages of persecuting business who will just move off shore.

It is time the pollies did what is good for Australia rather than pandering to big business or union slothfulness.

AWA's Mining Council of Australia - John Howard

Priminister John Howard said that Labor opposition leader Kim Beazley should listen to the comments made by the Australian Mining council.

The Australian Mining council are concerned that the abolishment of AWA's for its industry could spell disaster and fine balance of profit and loss they made.

It was quoted that the mining industry was currently running in deficit and it would make this problem worse which would spell job losses.

It is a concern when our mining industry quotes that they are running at a deficit.

The deficit means that the Mining company will avoid paying tax because of this deficit.

It has been statistically noted that the mining industry has some questionable reasoning on how much it costs to dig our resources out and then sell it for less than what it costs to mine it.

Fuel is another industry example where Australia can produce it for 0.06 cents a litre and it is being sold at the bowsers at international prices for $1.45.

Perhaps the Mining industry needs to get this sum right before it expresses its dismay at not being able to control its costs on the backs of the average Australian worker.

Another point to consider is the majority of Australian Mining companies are majority Foreign owned.

The Mining Industrial criticism of Labor's stance on Industrial Relations could also be indirectly because of their stance on "No" more Uranium mines in which our international brothers need to fuel their nuclear power plants in their best interests.

Mr Howard has added another hazard into this Wages dispute by Businesses ability to source cheap foreign labour, gagging the average workers ability to debate this issue as a community democratically should.

In todays news a NSW coalition representative set upon his own comrade calling him a d.ckhead because the AWA's did not go through the "No disadvantage test" which had apparently disappeared from the process of its registration.

I like it, Peter McMahon. A few home truths expressed in a straightforward manner.

To me the most obvious problem is the intimate relationship between government at all levels and the vested-interest profit motive of the business lobby. This means that governments are forever pandering to continuously increasing everything – the size of the population, humanised landscapes, all sorts of developments, and ever-increasing or at least maintaining high rates of productivity, often beyond sustainable limits.

This is where government most badly lets us down – by not balancing this growth momentum with the necessity of sustainability. We are still absolutely entrenched in a continuous growth paradigm, which is insane given our knowledge and concern about resource issues, environmental degradation and sustainability in general.

I reckon our governments are pretty effective facilitation mechanisms for taking us rapidly away from sustainability and towards the precipice.

For me the most disgusting single aspect (and there are many disgusting aspects) of our political system is something that no one has mentioned on this thread. This is compulsory preferential voting, which means that your vote can often end up counting where you have no intention of it counting. This is antidemocratic and needs to be outrightly condemned, especially when optional preferential voting, which a number of states use, works perfectly well, and is fully democratic.

I don’t have a strong opinion on whether voting should be compulsory or not, but one of my strongest opinions on any subject is that compulsory preferential voting is rotten to the core and that any system of government that uses it is not much better.

All considered, I think we are in a pretty nasty state of affairs. Our very loosely democratic system of government is pretty profoundly screwed up and as things become tighter as they will with peak oil, ever-rising population, evermore degraded environments, ever harder and more expensive to obtain resources, etc, this system is really going cost us big time if we don’t find a way to adapt it to deal with these enormous issues in a meaningful manner, and quickly.

Well said, well written, Ludwig.