Australia is about to go the polls and all signs suggest we’re going to fuck it up badly!

03 Sep Australia is about to go the polls and all signs suggest we’re going to fuck it up badly!

What greatly concerns me is that while the rest of the world slowly progresses towards informed progressive policies and away from unfounded fear based reactionary politics, Australia is about to take one fricken GIANT leap backwards with the appointment of a homophobic, conservative bigot who has executed an election campaign dripping with lies, one liners and fear mongering.

This wouldn’t normally be an issue if Australia had a discerning, cynical population that was capable of dissecting the hyperbole to find the small nuggets of fact.  Sadly this isn’t the case.  It seems a great deal of our population are “A Current Affair” watching simpletons who still believe that the Murdoch owned press provides “news” and “journalism” rather than the barefaced self-serving bullshit that appears on their front pages every day.

Even with the advent of media sites like The Conversation (http://theconversation.com/au) which “Provides a fact-based and editorially independent forum, free of commercial or political bias,” the majority of our fellow Australians still haven’t woken up to reality.

What then is the answer?

There was a great article the other week the made its way around the web.  It’s basically a scientific study that has found right-wingers to be less intelligent than those that lean to the left.  You can read all about it here: http://dailym.ai/zzZrHf

I guess my question is, at what stage does equality become our undoing?  Would we allow a janitor to perform a delicate operation on a loved one?  Would we allow a blind person to drive a car?  Why then do we allow people who are driven by irrational fear, or who don’t have the faculties to discern fact from fiction to vote?

Australia ‘s economy is the envy of the developed world and yet through the successful fear based rhetoric of the Australian Liberal Party married with the ignorance of our fellow Australians we’re about to elect a Prime Minister whose beliefs belong in the last century (possibly earlier).

Women got the right to vote in 1902.
Indigenous Australians got the right to vote in 1962.

Perhaps it’s time we took the right to vote away from those unable to grasp the nuances of grubby election tactics and egomaniacal media tycoons.

The only possible silver lining to this very dark cloud was provided to me by someone on Twitter this morning who wrote…“The Rebel Alliance didn’t really hit their stride ‘till Vader and Palpatine took over!”

Good luck Australia, may the force be with us!