REPOSTED FROM
Date April 23, 2014 Luca Belgiorno-Nettis SMH
"Ten years ago, in 2004, I [Luca Belgion-Nettis] decided to jump off the merry-go-round of political party fund-raisers. I found both the rubber chicken and the political offering equally unappetising. My Liberal and Labor party hosts, on the other hand, seemed perfectly articulate and competent.
Yet for me, they came across as salesmen more than statesmen. When I asked once whether there might be a better game plan, my host’s retort was Winston Churchill’s: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
Churchill damns with a challenge: “that have been tried”. It’s probably true that, in the modern era, other forms of government have failed, but I asked myself, why stop there? If the actual work of politicians is to negotiate our differences and facilitate consensus, then I think, today, they are failing us miserably.
But it's not their fault. They’re not "bad people" – they are simply responding intelligently [as does the voter] to an adversarial political framework that discourages dialogue and consensus.
The main engine of our political framework is the election contest; fund-raising is just a necessary subset. The core problem, in my view, is not fund-raising. For as long as there are elections, campaigns will need to be funded, with private and/or public money. The discussions and legislation constraining fund-raising and influence peddling are crucial within the current framework; but why are we not addressing the adversarial core? "
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