August 24, 2013
Rob Garbutt
The Northern Star
IT SEEMS as though we are once again choosing between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
This election has lost nearly everyone’s interest. It has been on since January and aside from brief excitement when Kev13 was subbed on, it’s as exciting as listening to static.
Here we are, a democracy with a two-party system, and rather than having strawberry and chocolate to choose between we’ve got Blue Ribbon vanilla and Peters vanilla. Not that I have a problem with either of those vanillas, but I do have a problem with two leaders vying with each other over who invented vanilla first. It’s just not that interesting, or stimulating. If you have democracy and a choice, gee it would be good to have one.
What do we get instead? Kev steals the Pacific Solution and turns the volume up to 11, then Tone comes back with a humungous sub-woofer designed to scare the most desperate of neighbours. Tone reckons he’ll make the Northern Territory a new economic zone (aka a tax haven for creative accountants) and then Kev says, “I’ll see you a tax haven and raise the level of the Ord River dam”.
But if at the next election we get to choose who gets a slice of the cake and who will miss out (which is the case), or who defines how we are seen as a nation and how we see ourselves (which is also the case), or what happens in our own Cowper and Page backyards about things like health, education, infrastructure or CSG (true once again), then surely we should be interested. Don’t you reckon? That sounds important and worth knowing something about.
So this is my pitch. Act as if this matters. As if which vanilla we choose is a real choice, because it is.
Because if we don’t care what they go on about, if we don’t see static as a smokescreen, we will get Kev13 and Tone13 and their successor clones, furiously trying to look like each other, but with their fingers crossed behind their backs.
Courtesy of The Northern Star