[LINK] all hail the president. i mean president minister. erm, prime minister.

[Steven Clark]

  On 18/08/2010 4:13 PM, rene wrote:
> It might well be high time that both major parties got a wake up call by
> means of two hung houses of Parliament

this would be a political nightmare. one in which *we*, the people, 
would suffer.

what we need is more *engagement* with politicians and better, 
wide-spread *understanding* of our political processes so that the 
masses don't just suck up the political spin as if it bore any 
relationship to reality. therein lies the best hope of making 
politicians (and their parties) accountable to us - as they are 
*supposed* to be.

a hung parliament could lead to weeks/months of messy argy-bargy and 
bribery *between* political parties ... leading to an uncertain 
resolution that could well see us back at the polls before christmas. 
with all the electoral joys that would bring.

our system copes poorly enough with 'balance-of-power' minorities in the 
senate, without having that in both houses. even the montagues didn't 
have that to deal with. the gulfs between the alp and the greens and the 
lib/nats and the greens is much wider on many issues than makes for good 
governance. entertaining politics, perhaps. possibly even interesting. 
but not the kind of day-to-day excitement that gets much of anything done.

as it is, with either main party bloc in power, the greens are likely to 
hold sway in the upper house. thereto we can look for moderating the 
major party policies we dislike (so long as we don't also dislike the 
greens or the compromises that will have to occur whomever else holds 
government).

i am looking forward to the end of another 'great beige' - this one has 
been even more beige than previous tedious crawls to the 
box-with-the-slots days. i am hoping for a clear outcome - even if it is 
close. otherwise the whinging about mythical 'mandates' will begin just 
after we've had the mythical 'vote for x/y as president' palaver.

-- 

Steven