THE new federal cabinet bears little resemblance to Australia’s actual population. It is a cabinet of mainly private-school educated white men aged around 50.
As magazine Marie Claire asks: Do we really believe all the cleverest people in the land just happen to look the same and have penises?
The latest edition of Marie Claire points out that that women make up just 5.3 per cent of Tony Abbott’s cabinet – compared with 50.6 per cent of the population. There are more women in Afghanistan’s cabinet.
And only 22 per cent of the new cabinet attended state schools – compared with 65 per cent of all Australians.
The average age of the cabinet is 52,8 years compared with an average age of 40.4 in the population.
No cabinet members identify as having Asian ancestry…but one in 10 Australians do.
Also, 89 per cent of the cabinet are married. 51 per cent of Australians are married.
And 47 per cent of the cabinet are Catholic. Only 7.2 per cent of the Australian population identify as Catholic.
Bryan Patterson's Faithworks 
?? “Why do these politicians all look and sound so similar?”
Asked and answered, I’d’ve thought. 🙂
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On that basis “compared with 50.6 per cent of the population.” fleas should be running the world.
……or bacteria ~ except their lives don’t depend on the ingestion, digestion and dissemination of shit……and they’re probably intellectually over-qualified anyway.
For one thing, they’re too intelligent to vote!
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That’d be right:- “There are more women in Afghanistan’s cabinet.”
…and look at the state Afghanistan’s in!
This whole feminist/PC thing’s gone gone way to far.
I see in the media this week the second-biggest issue is that good ol’ perennial breast-feeding ‘controversy’, based on the fact that ‘it’s natural’.
So is mounting any female that takes one’s fancy, and pooping on the footpath.
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Don’t ask me:- “Do we really believe all the cleverest people in the land just happen to look the same and have penises? ”
Ask the voters,
……..more than half of which ~ as you point out ~ are women. 🙂
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,,,,,and it’s not even Sunday!
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Federal politicians taking RAAF-operated VIP flights are costing taxpayers $50,000 for every hour spent in the air. Documents obtained by Fairfax Media call into question the Abbott government’s insistence that using luxury air force jets to shuttle ministers and MPs to Canberra from as far away as Perth is often cheaper than individual commercial fares.
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What?
Are you suggesting the drive to ‘work’ on tax-payer-funded roads instead? 😦
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He’s suggesting they fly on regular commercial planes, you twit. If they drove to work with their current mentality they’d probably do it in stretch limousines with fully stocked minibars.
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I’ll ignore your quick-witted reply because you’re too new to the scene (of the crime), elsie, to know that our Bryan has a ‘thing’ about the validity of taxation because without it we wouldn’t have roads to drive our cars on.
What’s YOUR favourite reason for paying taxes?
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So where does the money for the roads come from Dabbles? Did someone perhaps tax the tooth fairy?
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So have there been politicians who ‘looked different’ who were denied a place? Who?
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Women ~ until relatively recently.
But then they decided to become blokes. 😯
…and the males have become ‘delicate’…. and ‘teamplayers’ (a typical girly posture.) Menzies et al would be spinning in their graves.
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Only certain types of people want to put themselves forward for preselection. There has to be a better way.
Perhaps they need to show qualifications, and experience such as having served in local government or public service. No employer in their right mind would hire people on the same basis we use in voting.
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Snap again!
(except of course where PC (affirmative action,etc.) demanded they do.The culprit is the Party system. On paper easily the best system of ‘democracy’ ever devised was that of the USSR….Not that I’m a fan of democracy; a ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ is none-the-less a dictatorship.
The fault, as always, lies with the dills who are conned or coerced into electing them and paying taxes to support them. The same ones who ~ with the same motivation ~ think it’s heroic to march off to the other side of the world to butcher complete strangers who’ve never harmed (or even threatened) them.
Never mind god: the one thing our species has in common, that will identify it to any investigator, until the end of the universe, is its gross stupidity.
……it’s the only arena where ‘Equality’ reigns.
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Quote – On paper easily the best system of ‘democracy’ ever devised was that of the USSR….Not that I’m a fan of democracy; a ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ is none-the-less a dictatorship.- quote
Perhaps you should have tried to live there for year or two.
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Hey Dreamweaver,
Not a bad idea – you could at least start with a selection panel, Have candidates submit their resumes and then interview them. Then select the best two or three for branch members to vote on.
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If memory serves, there are a few places where prospective politicians can be formally quizzed by the electorate before some elections, and their responses held to commit them in regards any relevant legislation arising. (eg California)
There is (was?) also a ‘recall’ process whereby a petition with enough citizens’ signatures can force a by-election at any time during a politician’s term.
What would be better still would be to make any aspiring politician PERSONALLY legally liable to fulfil their pre-election promises/positions.
And a good first step would be to abolish ‘Party Politics’ in any form.
But only a medium-sized revolution by the citizenry would accomplish any sort of reform along such lines; and in Australia the population has neither the brains or the guts to make it work.
I sometimes wonder how more reasonable and motivated States (say North Korea or Somalia) would react to Boat-People refugees turning up on their beaches…. 😦
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1. The US primary system can have it’s drawbacks, such as the contribution to the rise of the Tea Party. Although open primaries (such as in California) do seem to mitigate that.
2. A term can run for three years, what if unforeseen circumstances within those three years affect a politician’s ability to keep his promises ?
3. What would you replace party politics with ?
4. Wouldn’t refugees be more likely to be fleeing FROm North Korea or Somali ?
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Hi Bubba, Briefly:-
“4. Wouldn’t refugees be more likely to be fleeing FROm North Korea or Somali ?”
….Not if they were coming from Australia and felt as aggrieved about this country’s ongoing drift into Police-State-dom as I sometimes do. At least the Koreans and Somalis know what atrocity they have to deal with. Between the media, native displacement activities and many other forms of conditioning we don’t. (or don’t care.).
Young people often are nebulously aware, and sometime rebel in various ways (as has applied to just about ‘civilisation’ in history), but they’re suppressed by their ‘elders’ who have long since given up, rolled over and now support a system upon which they’ve become dependent.
“2. A term can run for three years, what if unforeseen circumstances within those three years affect a politician’s ability to keep his promises ?”
He/she gets sued in the same way any contractor who fails to live up to his/her advertising gets sued: for physical damages (actual losses, etc.) and exemplary damages ~ with an opportunity to explain their failure in court, hoping to get a lesser penalty. It’d (a) stop fools from looking for a gravy-train-ride at the expense of others, (b) strongly encourage those who decide to stand anyway to tread carefully ~ and preconsider any so-called ‘unforeseen circustances’ in the same way as any other crook must do, which in street-lingo is called ‘insurance’ , and (c) produce better outcomes all around, since politicians, given the gang-mentality of politics, would ‘work’ much more co-operatively to ensure practical, productive legislation. …and at a price we can afford. Conspiracies with industrial/business/religious etc. self-interest groups/individuals would cease overnight.
eg. If you or I spent up big on the company credit-card (brothels, booze, cars, travel, home-renovations ~ (see: Juliar Gillard et al.) ~ holidays for the family, etc. etc. we’d be in the dock for fraud and a few other things. But when a politician gets caught out (and they’re so arrogant Blind Freddy couldn’t help but notice!) they simply get together, and ~ one way or another ~ declare it’s ok and will all blow over soon.
I think it’s another facet of ‘Parliamentary Privilege. And if they DO get caught out they should be dumped immediately and lose every cent of superannuation and the umpteen other perks to which someone (god??) has told them they’re entitled. (Proceeds of Crime laws!)
“3. What would you replace party politics with ? ”
Keeping in mind that I’m a devout anarchist, and therefore only speak ‘theoretically’ on matters of government, which is, after all, a relatively recent development in various human ( and ONLY human) cultures*, I can’t do better than suggest ~ as I have done ~ that the Soviet system of government is (on paper/theoretically) about the best option for government I’ve yet been made aware of; one which has served the people reasonably well all things considered, and which the Russians (and others: eg the Cubans, Chinese) consistently affirm is the most preferable system to anything they’d previously had.
(VERY briefly):- The idea was that the communist party decided all matters of a strategic nature: fiscal, economic, military, political, national identity, etc., and the Supreme Soviet (parliament) worked out how best to apply those principles/directions on a practical, day-to-day basis. (ie: legislatively)
The ‘members of parliament’ were chosen/elected by their peers, firstly at a grass-roots level as low as single factories, Collectives, universities, etc., and those people then moved up to the next level; from them were chosen the individuals who would represent the district (?), industry, city, etc. up to regional level….and so on up the ladder to the SSRs (from memory) ~ the number or Reps equating to how many people they represented, and all were independent.
….but why do I labour?I’ve just remembered Google! ~ read about it yourself:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Soviet_of_the_Soviet_Union
(as with any retelling there is always a more or less slight bias depending on the teller, but this seems reasonably accurate, according to what we understood to be the situation at the time..)
The other thing I liked (as an idea) was that featherbedding pollies didn’t get far; their pay was not much more than that of a ‘real’ worker (probably plus genuine expenses or a few other perks)…..I vaguely remember that it was somehow indexed to what they’d been getting paid previous to election), and that they were guaranteed re-employment in their previous jobs at the going rate plus any accrued (including would-have-accrued) benefits after they’d served their term.
The point is: there ARE options….which, if applied reasonably and fairly, would probably reduce my bitching about taxes markedly.
Nobody really objects to contributing to a fair thing ~ given honest distibution.
How’s THAT for ‘briefly’!?….Now I’m off to soak my strained typing-finger.
*and wouldn’t have been indicated at all except for (yet again) humans breeding in plague proportions.
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