Dave, you said "Australians will only stand up for their rights to watch things while lying down on the couch. The only "Light on the Hill" of any interest comes from a flat-screen TV".

I think such a comment is a bit of an exaggeration. Just remember how much Australia has changed in the past few decades, although we may still have a long way to go in terms of the policy mix we need.

Dave,

Get used to it. Like it or not Australia is a sports-mad country. It's the place you live in and it is unlikley to change.

Sport gives people enjoyment, an escape from reality, and sometimes from the mundaneness of life. Sport provides that for many, many people. It also provides advertising revenue for the free-to-air TV stations and I don't begrudge them that. I want sport on free-to-air TV.

Sure there are many other much more pressing issues, but we get hit with those day-in, day-out to the point where you could just sit in a room and cry about the stupidity and self-serving self-destructiveness of the human race.

You can wring your hands as much as you like about it, but people need that release. My gut feeling is that it is healthy for society, and not only from a physical perpsective, but definitely a mental one.

I would fight for enjoyment in life over many other things, otherwise what is the point of living? Surely not just to sit and cry over our own human stupidity.

I'm not arguing against the availability of sport on TV... I'd actually enjoy seeing live broadcasts on free-to-air of every Cats game.

But... the article was on political engagement, what gets the submissions rolling in, and the counter-intuitive notion that the sports fans write submissions but not letters to the editor, while the self-styled intellectual elite seem to put more effort into grandstanding among fellow-travellers rather than engaging directly in the political process.

Remember, while I may not agree with the fervour of the sports buffs, I certainly gave them brownie points for effectiveness.

As I said, I think delving further into various indicators about submissions versus other activities that take the same amount of effort (writing a few paragraphs and emailing it). The difference between a letter to an editor and exactly the same words as a submission to an inquiry is that the politicians have no responsibility to read letters to the editor, nor are letters to the editor held within "gov.au" domains, kept forever under the various archives acts, etc.

With the excellent work of Nicholas Gruen and the Gov 2.0 taskforce, I'd imagine that in a few years it will be possible to mash up "for/against/equivocal" tables for submissions to inquiries about bills, and compare that to what the likes of senate committees and parliaments actually did. (I did something like this at http://balneus.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/saving-the-goulburn-murray-bill-overwhelming-support/ on the "Saving the Goulburn Murray Bill", where the definitely "for" was 23, the definitely "against" count was 2, yet the bill was voted down by the committee - public opinion not even mentioned in the majority report - and dismissed by the parliament).

Something similar happened to the NT intervention bills that used the Andersen-Wild report (see http://balneus.wordpress.com/2007/08/17/dont-mention-the-andersonwild-report/).

If the nattering classes bothered to make submissions, action by politicians against the vast majority of submissions would become obvious, and maybe the politicians could be held accountable for going against the wishes of the people, as expressed in submissions.

Thank you for the article and the post, Balneus. (Balneus is Dave Bath, the article author.)

It is ironic that this article was first published on 4 November 2009 (as we are advised in the footnotes to the article, on the author's blog, 'Balneus') the very day that the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet's Electoral Reform Secretariat opened a public forum on the government's Green Paper on Electoral Reform.

Initially, that forum was to run for only five days.

Needless to say, early posts thereto all made mention of the ridiculously short fuze both for submissions (closing date for submissions is 27 November 2009) and for forum discussion. The forum has since been announced as being kept open until 27 November 2009. See: http://forums.pmc.gov.au/Electoral_Reform_Green_Paper

Balneus says in his post:

"The difference between a letter to an editor
and exactly the same words as a submission to an inquiry is that
the politicians have no responsibility to read letters to the editor,
nor are letters to the editor held within "gov.au" domains,
kept forever under the various archives acts, etc."



If only that were true.



The 'kept forever' bit, that is. You should look at what seems to have happened here:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=3212#76523

The pages of the Australian Electoral Commission Virtual Tally Room relating to the 2007 Federal elections have been reworked. The original ones that were able to be seen by persons following the count at the time have all been taken down, it appears. Anomalies noted and recorded at the time of the count on this very Forum, OLO, can now no longer be referenced!

Elections in Australia are everybody's business.

Sadly, it seems that what they say about everybody's business being nobody's business is being reliably depended upon within the AEC, and perhaps elsewhere in the apparatus of government. Australia may be well on the way to becoming a politicianist-supremacist dictatorship.

Good to see your article in the OLO 'today's most popular' display, Dave Bath.

"Forrest Gump"@4 was talking about the "kept forever" assertion I made about submissions.

Formal Submissions and the like come under various archives acts... they might not be kept in the same spot, but they are to be managed in accordance with naa.gov.au guidelines. Submissions to parliamentary inquiries (at least at federal level) are definitely to be kept.

The other thing I should have mentioned is that submissions to parliament, once published by the parliament, are covered by parliamentary privilege - so you can say things in a submission to a Senate Committee that you cannot safely say elsewhere.

I agree, there are a number of inquiries that are poorly run. The NT intervention one was open for a little over twenty-four hours, had no explicit invite to make a submission, yet over 100 people had quickly got off their butts and did the right thing. Most of these, according to Andrew Bartlett's minority report and subsequent speeches, were "verballed" in the majority report. (Just follow the links in my previous comment and you'll find all the gory details).

But all this is a bit off-topic, although it is very important. I remember being asked into Tanner's office to discuss conduct of inquiries using new tools soon after the AGIMO report on the issue was brought down. One of the things discussed was the way of measuring how "good" an inquiry was. That's probably a topic for another post here or at my "home", which I'm happy to "fast track" if anybody expresses interest.

BTW, and more related to the main post, the barbeque stopper of the week is probably the proposed changes to sports funding all over the front pages today, and inner pages, and the sports sections...