Last night’s 4 Corners followed the first few weeks of this campaign from the perspective of a few swinging voters in Penrith.
There’s already been quite a lot of argy-bargy about the piece, which I found quite fascinating. I am part of the political class — that mix of journalists, politicians, staffers, commentators, think-tank workers and other fellow travellers who dominate politics in Australia. The political class spends its days drenched in policies, polls and political history. Frankly we are far removed from ordinary voters, as shown by last night’s “The Undecided”.
A lot of the political class today has reacted with barely-disguised contempt towards the people featured in the piece. This itself I find contemptible. Voters are regular people with other things to do, other priorities. The political class find politics fascinating, all-engrossing, and wonder at how others don’t. A similar thing occurs amongst certain kinds of computer gurus: “they don’t know about having to regularly defrotz the gerbilsplitzen.sys ini file? Idiots!”
Yet people seem to get by without regular defrotzing. In fact they seem to get by without devoting every waking minute to following politics. The problem arises when the defrotzing would prevent your machine from becoming unusable; and the attention paid to politics would have prevented bad policy.
And so, the challenge for candidates from the LDP is twofold: first we must encourage people to care enough about politics to elect us. Then we must reduce the size of government enough so that people can go back to ignoring it, this time safely. When that day comes I will be able to go back to focusing exclusively on my first love, computers, and the quest to educate my long-suffering family about the necessity of defrotzing.
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