Tannin wrote:If they are not better, David, they are certainly less worse. They come from an organisation which, for all its faults (and there are many), is honestly dedicated to the betterment of Australia and Australians - often wrongheadedly so, no question about that, but the Labor Party has many very genuine and honest members. To get the nod as a candidate, an aspiring Labor politician has to be genuine and honest (most are) or else fool the bulk of the membership. Some manage this, no question, and others start out meaning well but power corrupts them.
Contrast this with the Liberals, where the membership is overwhelmingly comprised of shallow, greedy slimeballs - the sort who will trick you and do you down on Friday and turn up to church on Sunday singing hymns and tellling you how holy they are. I am not kidding: these types join The Party because it is a way to meet up with others of the same ilk, and they go on the local council because it gives them the contacts they need to get their dodgy subdivision through, wink wink nudge nudge.
A very different kettle of rotting fish, the Liberal Party. Labor has mostly honest men (some good, some stupid, most a bit of both) with an unfortunate leavening of crooks and slimeballs. (In NSW the slimeballs got the upper hand for a while.) The Liberal Party has greedy self-intrerested slimeballs with the odd more-or-less honest one for contrast. We are seeing the truth of this assertion that demonstrated, yet again, right now as we discover the things they have tried to claim on the taypayer's dollar, such as flights and luxury 5-star accommodation for Abbott so he could enter in an iron man race, or (another example) his "fundraising bike ride" which turns out to have been a rort on the public purse.
The US is been dealing with this very argument at the moment. Politics is generally dirty and thuggish, so both sides always provide cover for each other's misdeeds. But at the end of the day only one side is trying to block the provision of improved health care to its citizens like deranged zombies.
David, start with the assumption that politics is dirty and thuggish; there's no other way to get into power given human limitations, and politics attracts the shady and power hungry (Pinker gets to the gnub of the matter here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS4xVcko9qw ).
Once you start with that premise, you discover that you have to elect, inevitably, people with such limitations. If so, the next thing you look for is people pushing in the right direction as best they can despite themselves. The Gliberal Party is
never ever even trying to push in that direction because it's nothing but a sham and a front for old capital and old power. The left, in contrast, is at least somewhat prone to good ideas despite the muck of politics. Hence you get Hawke-Keating's economic reforms; Hawke-Keating's multiculturalism and alignment with Asia; Mabo; the Redfern Speech; the Apology; vilification legislation protecting minorities; opposition to Work Choices; an effort to implement an NBN, carbon tax and mining tax; increased disability funding, and so on. All that on top of decades of rights, education, social security, gender, minority, infrastructure access, knowledge access and capital access reforms on behalf of women, children, average workers and the vulnerable. Only one side of politics ever pushes these things with serious conviction, while the other side jumps up and down like possessed trolls time and again trying to block them, only ever jumping on the bandwagon once history has long passed them by.
In other words, the salient point is not that politics is dirty and thuggish, which it is, but that governments committed to socio-economic development and progress, as painfully infrequent as they are, can only ever possibly come from the left. The left might disappoint most of the time, but the Gliberal Party is not even playing the right game on the right planet. The lumping of the two together by the far left might make more sense in a virulently backward country like the US, but it makes less sense in Australia, again, disappointment aside. That doesn't mean we have to lose our independence, become party hacks and talk the nonsense of politics, but it does mean the claim that there is no a material difference between the two sides of politics in most advanced democracies is false.