Election Flatulence
The State election is nearly upon us (Feb 26th) and I cannot help but be detatched from all the accompanying hoo-ha. From Colin Barnett’s hair-brained, unresearched and unjustified scheme to build a canal to bring water down to Perth from the Ord River, to Geoff Gallop’s same old same old… nothing changes and it all seems pretty irrelevant anyway.
The thing is, none of them have the guts to actually, fundamentally, change things to stop the erosion. I really don’t believe any of our politicians have the good of the State (or country, or whatever level of government they are meant to be representing) at heart. It’s all a power trip and a case of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”. Actually, I think there are worse than Gallop. Yet, even a Premier with a genuine concern for the State is limited – as are chief executives of companies, for that matter – by their 3-year term. Goals are, necessarily, going to be short term to provide tangible, in-your-face results for voters (or shareholders) within that term of office if they want to keep their jobs.
And, at least with politicians, well… we know promises are made to be broken!
Nevertheless, we still have to choose who, as far as we can tell, will be the best leader, and as far as I’m concerned Barnett has just lost the plot. Hopefully we won’t get a chance to discover what other heights of stupidity he can reach. (The canal idea may or may not be stupid – what is stupid is that the plan is totally unresearched and uncosted and that Barnett thinks the voters are too stupid to know that.)
And maybe they are. I just hope Western Australian voters show more sense than the U.S. ones did recently. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
