On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 09:25:52PM -0300, juan wrote:
On Fri, 14 Oct 2016 10:50:58 +1100 Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net> wrote:
It is rare that any politician gets a standing ovation.
He's a politician. A murderous thief at best,
This is the first time this man has ever been in parliament. One Nation party is renegade, at least from the establishment perspective, and so them getting 4 seats in the senate is a fair shift - they may well hold the balance of power on many issues. Previously when Pauline Hanson (founder of One Nation) looked like she would storm the senate with a number of seats, a retrospective law was brought in - by both of the two "lame stream" parties, to stop her - and they did so retrospectively, putting her in jail because her fledgling One Nation party had only 700 members, and the new minimum was 900 or so, and this was a jailable offence. They achieved their unlawful, illegal, despotic and anti-democratic goal by putting her in jail (stopping her from being elected). Now, many years later, she's back. And this time, they have 4 seats - Pauline is one of them, and this ex-farmer guy is another. If you read his speech, you will see that, at least at this early hour (his maiden speech), he is not "a politician" in the depressing general conception of what that means. So for us Aussies, this is actually really good stuff - the possibility of just a little bit of something sort of resembling representation of constituents might be seen over the next few years. Yes it's a slim hope, but I do hope. There's a saying "those who don't involve themselves in politics are destined to be ruled over by those who do" - forgot the attribution right now sorry. When a farmer is elected for the first time, yes, he is then a politician. And yes, we have nothing like a representative democracy, let alone something representing ongoingly the actual will of the people (direct democracy). Yes our system needs some fundamental overhauls (pathways to start from scratch risks chaos, which I personally prefer to avoid).