Do you think we have lost our moral compass?
From destroying the habitat of Koalas to horses participating in a race for life or death to electing politicians who are not role models for anything but how best to incite everything that is ugly in the world.
Farmer and very wise man Peter Mailler has written a very important OP-ED on the Changing Face of Democracy and invites us all to have some serious conversations
An extract
A functional and robust democracy can only exist if the electorate is well informed. We must be able to trust the government for democracy to truly work and to trust the government, it must be trustworthy.
Many politicians, parties and lobbyists are deliberately dishonest about what they have done, what they will do and what their opponents have done to influence voters.
In such a corrupted environment, there is little hope that the electorate is well enough informed for democracy to function properly. The dishonesty undermines trust in the government and breeds discontent in the electorate.
Governments develop and enforce laws that ensure business people and companies can’t engage in false or misleading behaviour for commercial gain. So why is that standard different for people, parties or interest groups engaging in false or misleading behaviour for political gain?
It is past time for truth in advertising laws that hold political actors – politicians and/or influencers – to the same advertising standard as the business world.
It should be an unambiguous, punishable and punished offence to deliberately mislead the electorate for political gain.
Beyond the lying, democracy is in crisis as election outcomes are increasingly influenced by the resources available to the contestants, as opposed to any genuine contest of ideas and issues within an electorate.
Vested interests are channeling significant resources into major parties that are likely to form government, or hold the balance of power to effectively ‘buy’ influence.
This picking of winners by vested interests reinforces the structural bias of the electoral system to larger and better-resourced parties.
It is anti-competitive in its nature.
Read the full article here
If you are like me and don’t like the way we are all being manipulated by the people with the power ( power we gave them) are using it how do we come together to design and deliver a system with integrity?
