The main thing that I don’t like about politics is that you too often have to choose between the lesser of two evils, when in reality you would rather have nothing to do with either of the choices you are presented with. Take the current upcoming federal election. There are only two parties in Australia that have any chance of getting into office. They are the Labour Party and the Libral/National Coalition Party. Each party generally has a vastly different set of opinions as to how Australia should be run but at the same time needs to provide for the needs of the people. Each party will therefore have many similar policies that they tell us they will put into place should they be elected, such as better education, better health, more superannuation etc, but there are also a series of policies that separate and differentiate the two parties.  A couple that I wanted to mention are:

For Labour :

• National Broadband Network
• Internet Censorship

For Liberals:

• Scrap National Broadband
• Bring back Individual workplace agreements

Traditionally Labour has always been for the people, meeting their needs and looking after them.  Traditionally the liberals have always been about business and keeping businesses running.  I think the National broadband network is a much needed set of infrastructure to up grade to the next generation of communications technology.  It is expensive because they are putting it in all at once. It would be no less prohibitive if they had to roll out the entire electricity grid from scratch all at once, but it is an infrastructure that we are going to need more and more and it will keep us competitive with the rest of the world.

The liberals however want to scrap the national broadband program and for that alone I am inclined to vote Labour.  However Labour would misconstrue that vote as saying I am FOR internet censor ship which I most certainly am not.  If I wanted to live in communist China where we are told what we can and can’t view I would move there.  The problem with internet censorship despite being marketed as a way of protecting children, is that it is not transparent.  There is a list of web sites that a group of people at the Australian Communications and Media Authority have compiled initially over a period of five years from 2000 to 2005 (http://www.efa.org.au/censorship/mandatory-isp-blocking/#SS_4a) which will require all ISPs to prevent access to.  We are not allowed to see this list, nor are we allowed to have any say in what rules are used to classify a web site and get it put on that list.  In a society that is suppose to value freedom of communication that does not seem appropriate to me.  Therefore I would not like to vote Labour as I very much do NOT want internet censorship.

I also do not want individual work place agreements which is the reason that the liberals were voted out at the last federal election.  I suspect they are just trying to ride on the loss of popularity of Labour and get themselves and their individual workplace agreements elected back in.

And so this is the point that I am making, you have a series of choices, each as bad or worse than the next.  You have to vote for one, but you don’t actually want to vote for any of them.  So in the end you will choose one just because you don’t like the other one more, but then that winning party will take this vote as a tacit agreement with its policies , which is just not true.

I often wish you could have more say and that the parties would listen to how we, the country, would like things run.