Uncivil wars

But the days of an underclass or peasant revolution are gone. Today the weapons of the winners are too good: surveillance, police, prisons, constricting the drip line for social services, and all the statecraft to create a growing underclass with sham democratic rights. Thus while homeless numbers grow, some MPs and their fellow treasury-robbers will acquire more and more houses with blatant shoplifts from our “common wealth” under the euphemism of negative gearing. And all this while the winners’ big lie that it is all the fault of the poor themselves has taken root, especially amongst some in the dwindling class still hoping to join the winners at the top.

The losers, ever more despondent, might every so often behave irrationally, intemperately – uncivilly we might say! But who could blame them? 

They might exhibit what could be said to be contempt towards the winners. In an attempt to bolster a sense of dignity they might pour scorn upon the ostentatious rich. And the winners when affronted, to bolster their position of privilege and to legitimise their ill-gotten gains, might pour unalloyed contempt.

The feeling of mistrust, the division of them and us, is mutual. But the winners always win, with a grin, and they are becoming more powerful by the day.

Thus an undeclared war is ever present.

Starting with Tony Abbott, the self-declared “junkyard dog”, we have lost a decade to political and cultural wars: climate change; oppression of women and especially on rape where the accused can refuse to be interrogated in a court while his hired gun, a King’s Counsel, interrogates the alleged victim; black deaths at  heavily fortified hands of white police; political weaponizing of terrorism, real or imagined; Islam; China with its “authoritarian” ways and anything else that protagonists on either side can employ to vanquish the other.

It is a culture that our 2PP-WTA warriors in Parliament have engendered – a continual spectacle choreographed for the barrackers, reflected in the institutionalised, money-inspired aggression on the footy fields.

The May 2022 elections are over, but the skirmishes continue. At the drop of a hat the two old parties are already launching missiles. The budget of course is the first target. More targets will be found, as the war drags on before the next federal elections.   

How could we urge “patience, reciprocity and free exchange” to revive our democracy when with the complicity and implicit imprimatur of our elected representatives the winners have mortgaged our democracy to private interests?  The losers, like any cornered living beings, might spit and bare their teeth, but their handlers always have the upper hand.

Our beleaguered democracy needs a Disruption.

Proportional representation may well be the answer.  

It is not a panacea - Italy and Belgium come to mind. But our cousins across the ditch in Kiwiland seem to have triumphed with the Mixed Member Proportional system which they adopted nearly 30 years ago. Their government is way ahead of us on democracy and on transparency – freedom from corruption.