I follow a lot of people on Twitter who are very politically aware to the point of being a bit nerdy. They’ll defy a hangover to get up and watch Insiders and tweet about it; QandA is the highlight of their week and they mourn the retirement of good politicians like normal people do when football stars hang up their boots. I admire their passion, which I share to a point. However, I note their political romanticism seems to cloud the reality that politics is severely hampered by politics. Australian politics is not something that flows along and inspires like an Aaron Sorkin script. There is no wonderful oration, wunderkind political aids who are there to do the right thing for the country, or an intelligent media to keep the public properly informed. It isn’t about idealism and good ideas, it’s about reacting to what agendas are set by unpredictable events and ensuring one gets the rhetoric right.

There is no better example of the absurdity of Australian politics than the asylum seeker issue. The facts are clear. Australia has a relatively small number of people seeking asylum. The number is a fraction of Australia’s migration intake. There is a trickle of asylum seekers not a flood. And the situation is being well managed, though it could be better handled if the government wasn’t afraid to use detention centres on the mainland to process refugee applications. It shouldn’t be as big an issue, but it is because the Liberal Party has made an art form of turning it into a border security problem; while pandering to those concerned that the skin colour of those arriving allows for further fears about the impact on Australian culture. This bullshit could have been nipped in the bud a long time ago. Instead it has been allowed to fester because we have a media organisations that by and large doesn’t question such claims, but happily reports them to suit their own agendas.

What results is a chicken-egg situation where one side of politics thinks it has traction on a particular issue and runs with it. The media whips it up verbatim with little analysis apart from op-Eds that usually preach to the converted. The public is then made to think it’s a big issue and then add their own emotional comment further inflating the supposed importance. The politicians and media then turn around say this is an issue of great public importance. So, how can we expect a government to make decisions that do not have to take all this into account?

Read the rest of this entry »