French President Emmanuel Macron and democracy

Fraser immediately arranged for budget supply bills to be passed in the Senate and called a double dissolution election. On 13 December 1975 the Labor Party was soundly defeated. The result was a disaster for Labor, the party's worst election result for decades. The coalition won 91 seats to Labor's 36; the Liberal Party won enough seats to govern in its own right. The argument for years has been that the dismissal of a democratically elected government was wrong. The Constitutional crisis of 1975, often referred to as 'the Dismissal' represents one of the most turbulent periods in modern Australian history.

We can add a fourth country, Germany during the Nazi years. Hitler's Nazi party had the largest elected support in the mid-1930s. In 1932 Paul von Hindenburg was re-elected president by opponents of the Nazis; however, his advisers considered the Nazis useful, and in 1933 Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor. Hitler then introduced a number of decrees that gave him absolute power,

Were then Plato and Aristotle correct? Should we give away the will of the people as our overriding political principle? A 1974 book by the American political philosopher Robert Nozick. Anarchy, State, and Utopia won the 1975 US National Book Award in category Philosophy and Religion, and is possibly the optimum exploration of this issue. It has been translated into 11 languages, and was named one of the "100 most influential books since the war" (1945–1995) by the UK Times Literary Supplement. Nozick argues in favour of a minimal state, "limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on." "Individuals have rights," Nozick writes in his opening sentence, "and there are things no person or group may do to them without violating their rights." On his opening page Nozick states "The state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection."

The work that follows has been described as a sophisticated and passionate defence of the rights of the individual as opposed to the state. But this writer disagrees. He believes that the state can use its powers to protect people for their own good, Speed limits, anti-covid masks, the burning of coal are examples. But that overall, the will of the people, democracy, must dominate,

So how do we ensure that the will of the people is sensible, in the interests of the common good, not self-serving? So that we can be assured that democracy gives us answers that are in the best interests of the majority.

The answer is our education system. One in which we learn to distinguish fact from opinion, the value of evidence, assessing that evidence. Along with that learning a set of moral rules that tell us what is the right thing to do. Such moral rules have been established for over 2000 years.

"Do no harm, help others" is universally applicable to all moral issues. And most political questions.

But we have to learn how to resolve these issues. The complexities of this learning will stretch school children. And many even mature adults. After a lifetime of a non-thinking job - cleaning the streets, serving coffee, making these decisions in the optimum interest of the majority – would stretch most of us. We only have to read the multiplicity of confronting opinions on the internet to realize that the world is not in agreement over many issues. Maybe we have another government Diktat. That sometime in our lifetime, before we get our pension, or super payments, we do a three-week course on political decision making in a democracy – how we decide what is the truth, on sorting fact from fiction, how we evaluate evidence. After this learning, and now mature adults, we pass this learning onto our friends and family. And then, if we are Frenchmen, will we agree to Macron's retirement age?