Class Struggle

An acquaintance of mine is a staunch supporter of the Labor Party because it is the party of the working class person. I almost laughed when he said that, because I have for some time seen it as an amalgam of unionism & socialism - an uneasy alliance. He, however, believes that, by definition, the Party is there to fight for the rights of the common worker, etc, & that the fight is far from over.

On the other side of the coin, the Liberal party is an uneasy alliance between the landed conservatives & the middle class greasy pole climbers.

This is where it gets interesting.

Those who support the Labor Party expect structure - bureaucracy - layers of society or administration, where they start at the bottom, & some lucky few can be hoisted to the heights of political recognition. This takes a party headquarters that works like a war office on the basis that unions are always heavily organised, & therefore the party structure has local & regional gatherings, etc, layer upon layer.
Labor party members believe in their structure. They believe that there needs to be structure. They believe in the public service because it's just another structure. They believe in a sizable government, because that's what it takes to run a country.

Those who support the Liberal Party don't like structure. They believe that it holds them (personally) back, oppresses them, stunts their growth as human beings, impinges on their freedom of expression. They believe that the party structure should be flat, & that government should be small.
As a consequence, they believe that they know better than any structure, because they are cleverer than the working class, & don't need structure to protect them from big bad business.

The independent thinking of a semi-educated middle class will always be its own downfall. Fundamentally, they don't know better, & they refuse to be taught.

I am reminded of C S Lewis' "Forbidden Planet" series, where one of the characters is writing for the newspapers. He only needs to write for papers that aim at the middle class. There's no point writing for the upper class, because they can't be told anything, & writing for the lower class won't be understood. The object was to write in such a way that the middle class was convinced that it was coming up with the ideas for itself, & then they would embrace the notion as their own.

This is the basis of shock-jocks, who are always right wing - they convince middle-class people of what they are thinking, encouraging a particular point of view (only), as if it was a ground-swell of awareness, rather than a version of broadcaster push-polling.

So, my acquaintance is correct - the Labor Party, in all its unionist bureaucracy is the party of the working class - the kind of party that workers can believe in, because it is the kind of structure that they need to believe in, producing the kind of government that they expect to make decisions for them.

Taxing Facts

Sometimes I think of myself as too conservative to be a socialist, or too left-wing to be liberal. Think of that what you will. My politics don't follow party lines, so I'm just being me.

I was thinking about taxes. I don't care how much I get taxed, because I see that as a part of society that I contribute to. I don't like the tax dollars being wasted, but can't see how it is. In fact, I suspect that the professionals in the public service do as good a job as they can.
Make of that what you will.

The fixed price for carbon, which became known as the Carbon Tax in Australia, was considered at first a step in the right direction for bringing down the production of carbon emissions by increasing the cost of producing said emissions.
In theory, this is a direct effect.
The reality is that the increased cost of producing the service that produced the emissions was passed directly on to the consumer, & the consumer was then compensated for the increase by the government that collected the revenue ... but there was no correlation between between the rise in one & the offset of the other.

Fundamentally, although the idea of taxing the polluters is a good one, it doesn't encourage anyone to do anything about it, but shifts the money around. I believe that there was an effect on carbon emissions, but this could be more about people looking for cheaper alternatives & lowering demand, rather than any polluter changing their ways.

To ensure that things really change, you need to encourage investment in, & therefore availability of, alternatives. You can also discourage investment in pollution.
The easiest way to do this is to change the way that people are taxed on the profits in carbon-emission-oriented industries.
That's radical. It's also time-consuming, because it requires an assessment at the polluters end to determine how profitable the carbon-emitting aspect of the business is, & therefore what tax should be applicable to the profit of the company.

This sounds too hard, but the theory goes that people (investors) will move away from those companies who aren't investing their energy into lower-emission alternatives.
Tax concessions in green energy (for example) companies' profits would redistribute that investment appropriately.

Rather than applying a tax to the primary producer, hitting the secondary investor would have less of an impact on the end user, & would seem to be less of an administrative nightmare because there are fewer people involved in the process overall.

The end user would simply see less availability of high-emission products, or else cheaper low-emission products. Do they need to care more than that?

Now you see my political dilemma - I'm fundamentally all for climate change awareness & taxation, but don't believe it's been done right so far.

Government - What's it good for?

Here's a fundamental question, especially in a country that has just gone through elections - what does the parliament do?
You can see that the title I used above is different. At first, that's what I was thinking - "government" - but then I realised very quickly that I didn't mean those that don't get elected. There are public servants, appointments, etc, who get on with the job they were expected to perform (to some degree) with interference only from those that we, the people, elect.

What has evolved as a parliament has a strange history from the two conflicting needs to counsel the monarch & to ensure that the monarch doesn't overstep the rights of the people. Here, of course, "the people" were those with property & money, with things at stake.
As soon as you have reviewing the monarch, you end up with a monarch who is always trying to test their limits, & thus parliament becomes a shaggy dog.
Essentially, we can't get rid of the one we've got. It's also grown since its inception to take over the roles of many other political functionaries.

Direct monarchy doesn't happen in Australia, & even the Vice-Regal has very fine teeth. Therefore, the parliament isn't counselling anyone - it seems to be a self-perpetuating process of navel gazing, that is, reviewing itself.
This is all well & good if it had well-defined functions on which to base its review. It seems to be there just "to rule".

Other things that happened to Australia is the true separation of Church & State, & a theoretically independent Judiciary.
The latter is not quite true, because the laws (the Queen's Law, in fact) come from the parliament.
The interpretation is left to judges, whose experience is relied on thereafter - unless the parliament decides to do something about them as individuals.

There is no Church. There are some left-overs from a once-Anglican dominance (we talk of parishes within an electoral boundary), but there are now so many churches that there seems no relationship between any one of them & a given parliament.
This, to me, means two things - there is no social cohesion on questions of morality & ethics (or even debate), & the parliament thinks that it should step into the gap (heaven forbid!).

I think gay marriage is a classic example here. Why does the parliament decide on the social representation of people's relationships?
Can a church not recognise & perform gay marriage within its separate articles? How can a parliament then say what marriages that church can perform (or will be "recognised")?
Australia is a special case where de facto relationships are already recognised by the parliament (& the government) as equivalent to marriage.
How can the parliament interfere with a church in that way?

If a bunch of ordinary people elected to create laws (or review them) is given the power to determine what a church can do - or the judiciary - then they have too much power, & surely we should have some kind of review on that process itself to ensure that the parliament doesn't overstep the rights of the people (not just those whose support got them there).

This seems to be going around in circles - meet the new boss: same as the old boss.