OtG,
I'm sure you meant the herd, not the heard. Your post seems totally nail on the head stuff to me.

Actually Foxy I personally am suspicious- as the Labor Party (and the Liberals) are both blatantly corrupt and work only for paying lobbyists.

The only question is- how many of those lobbyists are pushing this? As they'd all have something to gain from harming our access to global information;

Poirot is right the “dark satanic mills” is from a line in a hymn
http://poetry.eserver.org/new-jerusalem.html

Oscar I am not sure of your age but your questions have been asked by thinking individuals since the dawn of time and as I am about to hit the big 60, I offer these views as my own observation, for you to absorb or to discard, as you see fit:

The world does not care!

It is not inherently corrupt, as you seen to view it,

just indifferent

Whilst you can take no credit for the good in it, all the bad stuff is not your fault nor your burden to shoulder either

God did not set us an easy path he did give us free will, to grow and aspire to the limits of our imaginations

You are responsible for your own actions and aspirations

And you can only take pride or credit for
Or be held responsible for those actions and aspirations

So I would seriously suggest

Act according to your inherited ethics

Be tolerant of others and
Expect others to be tolerant of you – but also expect to be disappointed

Remember the person who steers the conversation is not the one with the answers but the one with the questions

Karma, not socialism, is the only great leveler and what goes around really does comes around

Defend the rights of others to disagree with you but argue your case with sincerity and passion and rememebr, being in the minority does not make you wrong.

The state is a dead and soulless edifice, only individual people can be loving, compassionate or generous.

Trust only people, never the state.

Remember wealth in life should be measured on the full range of experiences illustrated by Maslow and not just those things on his first level.

Finally be fully the unique individual your DNA makes you and be prepared to defend that individuality against those lesser folk, who seek to regulate us into conformity with their mediocre dictates,

By defending your individual rights, you defend everyones individual rights

Dear King Hazza,

I'm a little more optimistic.
I feel that our system allows people to
try to influence the way individual
legislators vote on specific issues.

We can collect petitions, advertise in
the media, organize floods of letters,
donate money to election campaigns, in
other words use loobying tactics ourselves
to try to directly persude decision makers.

Of course - many legislators "toe the party line"
and aren't subject to much external influence.
So I suppose if any Party has a majority
in the Senate, it can rely on a majority vote,
minus any legislators who are not able to attend
on virtually any vote.

But at least - we (the public),
in this country are given a
genuine opportunity to affect the law-making
process - and it is up to us to seize that
chance if we feel strongly enough about any
particular issue.

You are right Foxy- it's just going to be an uphill battle as we're not quite the first people our representatives ask for opinions on their policies, so the only way to really get them to listen at the moment would be to either bribe them even more money than their other lobbyists, or convince them that their constituents WILL vote against them if their party goes ahead with these proposals- often, they do things their constituents (or those of the opposition) won't like, but not QUITE enough to change parties over.

Of course, they might have organized a deal with a company offering them an executive job in exchange for such policies- Bob Carr getting into Macquarie Bank after selling our infrastructure to them cheap being such an example.
Which would make the threat of losing their government job nothing but getting their private job sooner.

I take it from the posts that people prefer Tonay Abbott as a Prime Minister over Kevin Rudd and that people welcome a religous perspective within our government to enable us to reclaim some of our rights back and instill family and human rights values away from this relentless individualism that is now part of our society?

Would I be correct in saying that?