John Menadue recently asked Pearls and Irritations (P&I) readers to suggest how to go about raising the bar in relation to content and relevance.
My response would be to suggest that P&I facilitate a means to achieve a true democracy here in Australia; by harnessing all of the intelligence, observation, nous, wit and political awareness expressed by the authors that P&I has managed to gather, with the immediate goal of articulating the means to save planet.
There has to be a viable political alternative to the shallow options that the current duopoly presents us with. The world is in crisis and we urgently need a nonviolent solution.
We are all treated like mushrooms by the media monopoly. Every so called democracy is struggling. Are Trump and Biden really the best that the US can do? Do Elbow and the Truncheon represent the zenith of political thought here? Can either Sunak or Starmer offer a palatable solution to the UK masses?
There are many who believe that the Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber approach can’t, doesn’t and won’t work. It never has – and it never will. The Left isn’t right. And the Right, unfortunately, are brain dead.
P&I is one of the very, very few places where I can access points of view that reflect my own. I’m constantly appalled at the pro multinational bias in the mainstream media. Of the packaging and presentation of the news as though it were being written for a reality TV programme.
I often wonder what would happen if my favourite P&I authors (Johnstone, Kostakidis, Kelly, Sainsbury, Coco, Patience et al.), could get together and thrash out a truly representative equitable political structure. One built on sound policy, not on personality.
A political organisation that willingly deals with the big issues, and drills down to expose the entrenched corruption at our society’s core.
One that doesn’t just pay lip service to the climate crisis, the control exercised by freeloading multinationals, the environment, the lack of genuine representation, the media monopoly and its bias, the working poor, free access to quality education and health care, the fallacy of unlimited growth on a finite planet, inadequate housing and transport options, profit sharing, self-sufficiency, planned obsolescence, the fundamental flaws built in to both capitalism and socialism, the ever widening gap between the rich and the poor and the insidious interconnectedness of these issues, etc, etc… The list is endless.
If such an entity can’t be achieved here then there is little hope of it happening anywhere. And we’ll all suffer the fate that Hanrahan predicted.
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Peter Hehir was a co-founder of the first Green Party in Australia, the Sydney Greens. He is a past secretary and president of the Rozelle branch of the ALP, who was expelled for opposing Hawke’s backflip on uranium with Labor’s endorsement of Roxby Downs. He was also a member of the now defunct Nuclear Disarmament Party. Peter no longer has any political party affiliation.
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