Letter

In response to Roundtable will fix nothing unless we can all park our self-interest

Power without purpose

Governments in a West declining in importance in an emerging multipolar world seem to see, at some basic level, that their time in the sun is now ending. The problem is they have no idea of how to respond to that reality. So they are reduced to gesture politics and to acting as though nothing has changed at a geo-political level.

Australian Governments of the past couple of decades are a good illustration of that, actually dealing with the clearly identified problems that we face at political, economic and geo-political levels with gestures that will meet with daily media and community approvals but simply fail utterly to deal with the problems they are supposedly addressed to, or even worse compound those problems.

You get the feeling that they know what the real solutions are, but know that they will be unpopular and therefore do not have the political courage to engage upon those solutions.

What Ross refers to is one of those problems, which on past experience will remain unaddressed. Hence the party platforms are simply window dressing to a cavalcade of leaders committed to achieving “power” without purpose!!

— Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041