Shorbe, the most extraordinary part of this business is indeed the lack of interest in the general community. If the community gave half a hoot, governments wouldn’t get away with this blatant duplicity, or even with underhanded and surreptitious duplicity.

While I have been pleased to find support for my concerns over things like this on this forum, I am at the same time dismayed that even amongst the good conscientious OLO contributors, few actually seriously care about our appalling state of governance and its absolutely terrible consequences, most significantly the overall momentum of our society so strongly and blatantly away from sustainability.

It is a huge quandary that I just can’t get my head around.

Good'ay Ludwig, see you're still on the right track as usual. But what can we do with our PM flitting around still trying to run the war in Iraq backed by his persistent 'I' rather than 'us' or 'we'. It is so incredulous that with all the increasing mess in Iraq, with killer chemicals now being used by the insurgents, and the next thing a tiny life and mind destroying nuclear device, Georgie Boy Bush and his Anglophilic offsiders will still be sure they know what the're doing.

Personally, having lost my wife, am getting too old and lonely to care. Certainly praying won't help because the Good Lord we used to rely on seems now to vouchsafe all that is going on. Going by Bush, Blair, Howard and chief prayer-man Abbot, anyhow.

Possibly the best thing we can pray for these days, is just plain commonsense and fair play.

Cheers, George C - WA

LUDWIG - Well said.
Sadly though, 'people power' under the current system is insufficient to effect change.
The only time when real change is effected is during times of war or invasion, in between, we sacrifice our liberty and place our wellbeing in the hands of bureaucracies and government.

We are continually faced with a situation far removed from democracy, where we are forced to elect those whom we inherently mistrust.
There is no alternative, therefore, short of civil insurrection, things will not change.
The holy grail is supposed to exist at the end of oblivion, so onwards we march like lemmings where the almighty dollar and individual gain are the gods.

Discussion and concern means zilch unless coordinated into force which will address our concerns.

I urge people to have a peek at the Liberal Democratic Party (ldp.org.au) and see what we stand for.
PC

Can I suggest that the alleged relaxation of political donation disclosure law is seen by all significant political parties, in the present climate of public opinion, to be an unavoidable necessity?

If it was not relaxed, what would we see? Would we see a steady decline in the number of separate donors? Of the donors left in the field, increasingly would they be being seen to be donating to several significant (and notionally opposing) players at the same time? An ever contracting group of corporate and private interests propping up not merely a particular party, but an traditional political party structure, a structure from which the rest of the community is steadily withdrawing both participatory and financial support?

The alternative to corporate and private funding of political parties is presented as being public funding. What do you think the public response would be to any proposal by any party in government today to increase public funding to political parties? Round condemnation, perhaps?

How is it that nobody proposes immediately totally cutting public funding? Such might force the unrepresentativeness and unresponsiveness of party organisational structure and operation right into the limelight. One good reason for not proposing it is that the whole show, across the board, is largely operating under a massive long-term system of electoral deception that has been working quite well for those administering it.

Operating exclusively with public funding would, of course, represent the ultimate in such hijacking of political expression. The organisation proposed by a naive few to administer it, the Australian Electoral Commission, has a dismal record of performance with respect to operating within the requirements of its own Act. Hard to forget the dog-in-a-manger attitude of both the AEC and the Queensland Premier when a minor party took "their" public funding from a major player. Hard to forget the ingratitude when private contribution totally re-imbursed the Queensland taxpayers money that would have otherwise been lost to major political parties. Not a word of thanks. Par for the course.

There is an incremental approach that will improve matters. This is to allow us all a say in how we spend taxes. Impossible you say? Well no it isn't and we have an example of what can be done with our compulsory superannuation surcharge. Another way of looking at the superannuation surcharge is to see it as giving control of taxes for old age social security to the consumers. The "normal" way has been to collect taxes then distribute to people when they need it as old age pensions. The super surcharge approach is to leave the taxes with the people BUT require them to spend it on their old age.

We can do the same with education, health, roads, water, broadband, etc. Anywhere where a government now spends money on public goods we can give the taxes back to the people for them to spend. We have to have ways of controlling and monitoring the expenditures but we leave that in the hands of elected boards that control the expenditures. That is, we disburse democracy so that we can vote for people who are helping us look after our own taxes.

For example everyone in Australia could get 8 cents a day to spend on public broadcasting. The boards of the organisations to whom we give the money are elected by the donors. This would get rid of the nonsense of the PM theoretically being able to appoint everyone to every public board and bring diversity and more accountability to the spending of funds on public goods.

Do this and the opportunities for corruption of the system diminish plus we will get much better value for our taxes because it will be us spending our own money on ourselves rather than some bureaucrat spending our money on someone else.