Currently in WA Politics

Its a real mess, in all parties, on all sides and as a result WE THE PEOPLE will pay the most. Some more than other others but benefits to the state, to the electorates will slide down.
The comment is often we have a tough arrogant government and a weak depleted opposition so we're in trouble & the real variance in the mix will be how much sugar is sprinkled on the optic as there's little or nothing the people can do but ride out the storm as best they can. That People Power is going to have little effect for quite some time, the Government will do what the Government wants & the Opposition cannot stop them. 

All correct but there is another thing that's often forgotten. 
The Pendulum.

The pendulum ALWAYS swings. It gets bad one way, it shifts and often swings too far the other way but it swings, it always does. Only thing that varies is the variation in the swing speed & the onluy real concern is how much damage is done between swings. At the moment it appears the duration of swing is great & the amount of damage isn't over & might determine how big a swing is coming.

The date of WA State Elections is set. Its 1 year, 6 months & 18 days until the next State Election on March 8th 2025. So we know when the pendulum will be apparent. And like share prices, the election results reflect the position on that past date. Yes there is a small opposition in Parliament, yes one Party controls both houses by an enormous majority, so much so they do not need many of their MPs to sit in the chamber. In fact the Labor Party MPs need only attend enough sittings to qualify for their salary. They need only attend one minute of sitting time on & not attend for months. I assume Labor MPs are many in whatever office rooms they can use doing other matters, with their chamber on the speakers in their room & they need but a small sprinkling of MPs in the actual chamber. In fact, go onto the Hansard Video. It's not uncommon to see very few cabinet ministers in the chamber. It's extremely rare to see half the cabinet in the chamber at the one time. They are not taking the actual parliament very seriously, they have full unfettered control & can destroy any opposition amendments to any bill. 

This means a ruling elite can construct a Bill without many of their own party even aware its coming until they get word. 

We also have a growing list of ministerial failures. 
The Pendulum will swing but such is the horse trading for positions in the WALabor Government there's going to be a near on punch up if the Premier even so much as entertains a cabinet reshuffle.

Here's what's lost.

1) In the "old days" wiser parliamentarians who wanted to stay elected for a longer time knew and operated wisely. They knew the next election campaign starts the day after an election campaign result is settled. Every day between elections WAS the campaign. 
That's now lost. Now there's four and a half day news cycles. If you want to announce something with less fuss & criticism you make a soft announcement long before that doing "x" was a very likely possibility depending on advice and better forecasts as they become available. That's code for, we've already decided & amongst the decision is this dead cat bounce pre-announcement to lessen the blow...and we'll likely make the real announcement around midday on a Friday when all the news outlets are well & truly into full Sport Mode for the weekend. During AFL season is the best time for a weekend softner, Monday morning it'll be time diluted due to reporting on weekend sporting results.
Unsure? Well the dead cat bounce softner announcement for removing the State of Emergency (SOE) has happened already. Thats the SOE we already know is not based on Health Advice. They'll be fishing for every softner coupled with every distraction they can muster.

2) Parties are corporate governance black holes. All parties have Machiavellean players with way too much influence and control, with way too many people getting out of their lane & into the Over Reach Freeway with little or no tension or pull back. 
All parties need Corporate Governance reviews & widespread party reforms. The one party (like them or hate them) the Liberals, is well under way in a review & a reform. They & the Nationals should have both undergone full blown review, reforms, recalibration & then reboot in 2015. I say that now because I was saying it at the time.
7 years later, MPs have been controlling their Parliamentary Party (which is fine) but sadly they've also been controlling their organisations. All parties are in this predicament. It has several resulting problems. Machiavellean acts increase. Corporate Governance declines. Good people trying to effect good improvements will be targeted & be tipped under the bus and MPs will have very little accontibility in the organisation itself. That is, they are less answerable to the lay members & their equivilent of a board, the group that run the organisation, the ones who are repsonsible for Strategic Thinking are either over run, bypassed or stacked to the point they cannot deliver good governance & their proper fiduciary duty. That or they just do the MPs bidding & lay members get token double speak.
No party is free of this problem. None.

3) As good people leave the volunteer roles, the organisation's elected positions due to being targeted, undermined so to do other good people donating time to help the party do what they assume is the aim, help the state & the most vulnerable. Leaving with them is volunteered time, skill & experience...and cash donors. The reliance then goes not to bread & butter mums & dads, but to large corporate donors most often they'll be property developers, media owners, mining entities (mostly the mainly foreign owned) and other larger special interest groups. Leaders will have high buck dinners & soirees with advocacy groups and other corporate players. You won't see them have black tie paid access booze ups with P&C groups, WA SHire Presidents, Drug rehab providers and advocates...only the big money in the big end of town. The spiral begins, human nature takes over and they accelorate their dive into corporate dollar pursuit.

These things not only take over, they push aside a party's culture, their actual core values get diluted or worse still completely lost. Those are the things that drive their strategic thinking, that directs their strategic planning & worse still when the parliamentary side gains greater control of any party, the Machivellean creeps in & the accountibility to its members fades away to a forgotten memory. All that remains is the scramble for election & re-election at the expense of the reason why people come together to put others into Parliament.
Now, the career is more important than the values of the party & the benefit to the electors. 
Now you have a greater amount of politicians not legislators who talk for hours under water with a mouthful of marbles & say very little. Politicians who can work the room when things are tough to keep critics one on one, not in a group where the politician has to yeild, to listen & to improve. In the group setting the poltiician needs only great oratory skills to help motivate the room, to entertain & inspire even though its smoke, mirrors and a deliberate made up performance.

If a pendulum were to swing it needs to stop swinging from one tribe to the other. It needs to swing from poor governance, poor strategic thinking planning, poor accountibility & greater control of the political optic & swing towards World's Best Corporate Governance, properly known policies, properly known procedures, properly known lines in the sand within the parties to halt over reach & manipulation. 
Its only then will we get back to Wise Progressives vs Real Conservatives in the Legislature. 
Until then we will be stuck with factions, Machiavellean thugsters, political theatre props and grifters after personal gains ala restructuring the personal debt, elevating their previous lowly go no where careers & building a retirement fund they could never do on their own. Too many grifting thespians with above average debating skills.



FWIW - Many people get turn off as soon as they use the words "Ruling Elite" as a critical descriptor, but they sadly it is a valid descriptor & turning away only gifts more control to the grifters at the top.

The Premier is one of the more successful election leaders WA has seen. He ran a Labor tidal wave result in 2017, when the pendulum swung against the Colin Barnett Government. Then in 2020 McGowan followed it up with a monumental Political Tsunami despite Labor's less than stunning performance. No infrastructure has been signed off under Labor except MetroNet which is billions over budget & years over due. I think all the new schools, the Optus Stadium and hospitals were signed off under Barnett. Health Portfolio is very sharp decline into a far worsening crisis. Poltiical masterclass, governing disaster. 1200 Ambulance ramping hours under Barnett was rightly described by opposition Health Spokesperson Roger Cook as a crisis. As minister it regularly hit above 3000 hours and Cook described it as operating "fantastically" and operating at full capacity. 
People died though. And now under Sanderson its set to hit the first ever record high of 7000 hours and sections of hospital corridors are taped off to keep patients on gurneys for treatment.
To then have such a massive swing in 2020 was a political master stroke...despite the actual poor performance from 2017-2020. Such is our problem, political optics trump performance.
In this landscape, when the pendulum swings it will swing too hard, too far the other way...
We may end up with boom crash style stability as any traces of Statesmanship are lost. Taken out the back & shot by Public Relations gurus & media manipulators.

Proven - Corruption in the Australian Media

Yes, that's the claim, the Australian media is corrupt, is full of corruption. The Left control the ABC, The Gaurdian & maybe one or two of the commercial TV channels. The right, controls anything Murdoch, anything Sky and some of the commercial networks.

The thing is, it's never actually been proven & if it is provable what can be done?
Well I'm going to have to go look & find out because if there is corruption, even intellectual corruption it has to stop & it has to be called out.

Sky gets called right leaning, yet Graham Richardson is on there. He's never slammed Sky & don't be fooled, "Richo" is no boby's bitch & he is not without money or influence. 

ABC gets slammed with being left leaning. Well maybe it is or maybe very few conservative commentators go there or not invited there. Some of their shows do try for some balance...

I think the greater problem is the same old problem that we see in politics. When you're thinking skullduggery by all means seek it out, look under the bed or behind the curtains for LWNJs & RWNJs...but remember ot never under estimate incompetence and the easy headline.

Roe v Wade blew up & somehow here in Australia it went ballistic, even though the decision to over turn Roe v Wade had constitutional validity & many commentators ignored the 10th Amendment that the Supreme Court Justices did not. Somehow here, lazy politicians cranked up, including some so called conservatives & missed the point. The decision was not about Abortion being legal or illegal, it was about the validity of if being covered under the constitutition & that in overturning it returned it to being a matter for the states to decide & legislate. What it did was halt a federal government committing over reach & over ruling a matter that is state law. We remember this here as the concept of federalism. I heard many MPs, journos, political commentators crank up and get this so horribly wrong & talk about a woman's rights to her body. Totally, completely unconnected to the over turning. Overturning Roe v Wade was not about abortion, it was about State Laws vs Federal Over Reach.
Fact that so many journos, MPs & commentators missed this...no not a conspiracy it was just very lazy...no very sloppy & lazy thinking (or not thinking) where people made up their mind & then tried to prove it.

Trump Raids. I'll wait & see but here's the thing if this turns out to be a political raid there's some people who will need to be charged & someone will have to go to jail. At this point I do not agree that Russians were involved in electing Trump nor electing Biden. One minute Trump "stole the election" next it was claimed "Biden stole the election" with Russian help.
I think Trump was the man they need to be in the White House at that time, they need a great disruptor. In many ways the USA did better than it had on a number of things when Trump was there compared to Biden. But next election I hope Trump, Biden & Kamala Harris are not in the White House. They & therefore we in the rest of the world need to see an experienced politician, one with many straits of Statesmanship if we're all to do better.

I think if the Trump raids do turn out to be a political raid it not only presents a sign of immense danger already within their political system it also means Trump is more likely to run & far more likely to get elected as President at the next election. It may yet turn out to be the biggest backfiring political act of treason.

What I hope happens is Trump rides the raids out & whatever happens pursues full justice on whoever is in the wrong & decides to not run. The criteria for running for President is pretty simple, have to have been born in the USA and have to be over 35 years of age...and thats about it.
The disqualifications are pretty straight forward & in their constitution too. Most don't realise you cna actually run for the office of President even if you're in jail but I think ineligible if its a serious crime like murder or rape.

Trump is going to have to be charged, that leads to the idea lawyers call "discovery" and that will show the intent of the warrant, what the FBI believed was there. Anything else they find might lead to charges but if there's no 'whatever the warrant cites' there...well I think there's a good old house of cards about to not just fall but burst into FBI flames. Especially is they do find out the Hunter Biden LapTop was given a hidden snow job as Biden was running his Presidential campaign. I don't think the media is corrupt on that matter either, but largely incompetent. I have seen a number of video memes that show US commentators from many different networks using the exact same language on many topics. Lot of lazy parrots in the US ranks.

So no, I do not claim there is corruption in the Australian or US media. If that were true then there is definite corruption in both State & Federal Parliaments in Australia & the USA. There might be but there's no reason to think there is at this stage. There's some really good journos, commentators, broadcaster, Senators, Members of Parliament & they kinda stand out because they're so few. They'd stand out more but I think their percentage is so low they are a lesser voice in all the noisey din.

I also am not sure, at least in Australia anyway how a news network or media giant can be so one sided and therefore influence the outcome of an election. If the ABC/Stokes is so far left & Sky/Murdoch is so far right wouldn't they only be pitching to one side?
Wouldn't they be preaching to the choir?

Another mystery (with hindsight) is how Joe Biden became the most voted for President in their Nation's history. Yup I'm sure the negative side of Trump helped cause that but do you really think Biden was so much better than Obama?
I guess there were many people from the centre & many more "never voted before" electors who registered to vote to get Trump out. I think some of them might be suffering voter's remorse. Maybe a 2nd term of Trump might have been better than his first, maybe it might have been worse than the current Biden one...we will never know.

We do know, Kamala Harris was not even good enough to get passed their first round of Presidential debates & pulled out but somehow was better than all the other runners up & made Vice President.
Think about that, all the candidates bar maybe one laid waste to Kamala Harris & she somehow ends up Vice President. How, why?

Because Joe Biden declared from the outset he would choose his Vice President running mate & it would be a black woman. She was chosen because she's black & she's female.
It is very likely that America Has Fallen some time ago, the Trump Raids and their ensuing wreckage will determine it once & for all if it has.

I think the same is happening here, we have maybe 10% good MPs spread across all parties. The rest are either restructuring their pre Parliament debt, professionally elevating themselves far & well beyond their pre-Parliament prospects & enjoying the attention, influence & invites they never would have got Pre Parliament. I think too, some are there for the retirement package. The number of very low to medium level managers in government & quasi government entities is amazing...and scaring many of us.  

Albany Advertiser Article the Referendum on Voice To Parliament.

Here's the article in question. page 3 Albany Advertiser 4th of August 2022.

The article headlines as a comment from Liberal MP for O'Connor Rick Wilson. To be fair the paper also sought comment from Albany Indigenous identity Lester Coyne. I thought that was more than appropriate considering you want as many sides as possible given space. 

First up disclaimer, I have met Lester Coyne twice but I can't say I know him. I only have spoken to him twice and both times it was at polling booths during an election polling day. It was very cordial but far too brief, as I like to get get indiginous knowledge & history whenever I can. I'm from the Avon Valley so the Menang people are well outside my sphere where I grew up. In any case, don't think I'm wrong in saying Lester is a thoroughly likeable bloke, seems a genuinely good bloke despite our differing political leanings. I'm from the conservative side & he's a Greens Party man (or was when we spoke) and I'd have to say he's probably the most reasonable Greens person you might come across. He talks his view & won't bulldust you. You cannot ask for anything better than that.

Lester being a good bloke is great, bu like minded or differing we need to challenge our own thinking as well as those differing. So on his comments in the article I do think he's messed up. 

First he wants more details, "What sort of voice, whose voice?" 

Then claimed Lester said he's worried people "will get too caught up in details as a way of delaying it".

I'll make a prediction, the referendum as it's currently framed will fail. I'm not even sure if it's being deliberately framed for failure or whether its purely incompetence by the Albonese Government. With the political lens applied with strong focus there's an argument for saying the Labor Government could gain political capital if its passed or if it fails. Failing it can claim some are racist, uncaring & any other negative guilt term but in the end Indigenous Australians will have been given the hope of a promised something & it will fail them. To an extent I think that will be the result if the currently framed referendum push actually passes. But as to whose voice & what sort of voice well that is known.
Lester wants detail then says he's worried detail might be used to delay it, whatever it actually is.
Then suggests we read the Final Report of the Referendum Council (*link below) which it sort of looks like he hasn't read it or he's forgotten what it says. Well I had read it. It says whose voice it is. Aboriginal & Torress Strait Islanders. It also says what sort of voice.

It appears to be non binding (at this stage) upon the Parliament. It will not interfere with "parliamentary supremacy" & would "enable the First Peoples of Australia to speak to Parliament and the nation about laws that concern them" We don't know what "concern them" actually means, whether its anything that interests a significant number of them, all of them, how they arrive at that point of concensus or if it's only matters that specifically impact Indigenous Communities. Its a little open ended. There's also the thought that if legislation if being formed at what point do the "People of the Voice" get involved. Once its drafted, once its tabled as a motion? If the people of the voice only get involved once it's tabled does it have to be shelved until they've had time to go through whatever consultation process they need to enact amongst First Peoples of Australia? I can see the time table of processing some Bills into an passed Act is going to blow out. Or is there a elite group of indigenous leaders elected by & acting on behalf of all Indigenous Peoples? I think this detail is very important & stunned it's missing. It might end up being a First Nations Parliament that influences what the actual Parliament passes. Or...? The scary part which I think will be a nail in the coffin is that the voice, will have its structure & its functions determined by the Parliament through legislation...by the ruling party & subsequently it can be altered by the Parliament. That is THE most important detail of all details. The majority political party in Government will set the structure & function and any ruling Government afterwards could add, delete or alter it if they have the numbers. A CONSTITUTIONALLY ENSHRINED BODY REPRSENTING ONE RACE GROUP WILL HAVE ALL IT'S STRUCTURE & FUNCTION DETERMINED AFTER THE REFERNDUM AND A RULING PARTY CAN ALTER IN THE PARLIAMENT AS THEY SEE FIT. You hopefully see this. A Constitutional Side Step. An enshrined constitutional mechanism will need absolutely no referendum of all Australians to be changed. It will be a referendum on side stepping the constitution on constitutional amendments. Big no vote for me.

Now add into this...the Uluru Statement website (** Link below) stated this...

So for some at least, maybe the Government maybe not, we don't know...the aim is 2 seperate sovereignties but one has its membership based purely on race, the other is based on Australian citizenship regardless of race, creed, colour, religion, location within Australia etc. This is another big No Vote for me. It suggests values & identities are seperate & non compatible, both are protected & a voice is given in policies and laws made by one sovereignty (Australian parliament). As well meaning as this may have been by some I think it's aims are out of control & out of the realm of bringing unity & will could potentially slow down the passage of laws dramatically. Once a voice on a Bill has been given, what then if it's ignored or deemed not of value to the greater good of the greater number of Australians? Of will the lesser group by virtue of their race having a binding veto type say? All this lack of detail is counter productive & I think it will lead the referendum to an assured failure. Maybe then there will be detail. Referendums are extremely difficult to get passed. To quote the Parliamentary Education Office "Since 1901 there have been 19 referendums, proposing 44 changes to the Constitution; only 8 changes have been agreed to"

44 changes, 8 approved by the Austrlian people. That 18% success rate is unlikely to improve with this detail barren plebiscite. Those that have passed were to approve the changes that would Parliament enact...all detailed in advance. It was not a blank chequed signed off. Put it this way, when you apply for job would you be fine with all the terms & conditions not being outlined in the Job Advertisement nor at the interview? Would you be fine with agreeing to any & all employment details like salary, duties, hours worked per week ALL being sorted out AFTER you signed on as an employee?

If this referendum passes it'll be an absolute surprise to right thinking people. Its as if its been wilfully designed to fail. As for whose voice, it is going to raise the question who is a first nations person now & in the centuries to come. That is going to upset people greatly but there's already wide division just amongst Indigenous people over the suggested non Indigenous person Mr Pascoe & his claims regarding his tribal membership (I'm told its changed several times) & questions about the accuracy of his version of Indigenous History. This is the real problem, when power, control & influence is based on race amongst one race it's then claimed their ruling elite benefit greatly & the monetary trickle down is barely a trickle. I think even if passed in its entirity by every single Australian & then passed in Parliament however the Labor Party chooses to I don't think its going to bring any benefits to people in remote communities or other semi remote regions. I think it's going to go down as "The Big Fat Lie" that let all of Australia down. * https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/final-report.html#toc-anchor-conclusion ** https://ulurustatement.org/