Category: getting the middle over inertia

This is a form of corruption whereby people in office unfairly enable favourable access to state resources for their benefactors and abandon their duty to protect the state’s interests.

I follow the news of the sub-continent of my birth and read with interest the reports on “state capture” in South Africa. This is supposedly secret corruption which loots the government revenue intended for all citizens, inflates project costs and denies fair competition.

Government ministries, processes and security services have been corrupted by the appointment of corrupt and pliant associates, apparently at the direction of a wealthy  family that has spread its tentacles wherever government money is to be had.

In Australia, the curse of the resources boom blunted governments’ abilities to ensure institutions sufficiently robust to withstand the end of the boom.

The Labor party, dazzled by the riches of the boom and driven by Unions, embedded industrial relations structures that cemented employment costs at unsustainable levels. This has stifled enterprise and competitiveness, crippled essential services and generally hamstrung the political ability to change. Looks like state capture to me.

The recent squirms of the  Labor Party Transport Minister while being skewered over the recent train driver debacle in Queensland are interesting. Not surprisingly the whole issue had been engineered by union demands leading to a shortage of drivers. The union went on to talk about stop work meetings over the new arrangements …Talk about wielding the whip hand.

Then there is the ongoing kerfuffle with the construction union and its bunch of standover artists, holding up project schedules and threatening managers, which started over two years ago; surprisingly unresolved by the Labor government.

One wonders who is pulling the strings and for what purpose? Are the unions aware of the groundswell of opinion swaying to the right? Is the government allowing these infrastructure breakdowns to stimulate electorate outrage and thus justify smothering the unions?

The plot sickens.

When will the pain to the electorate drive government to break the power of the unions to enable economic and social reform to re-open pathways to growth and stability? Something has to happen.

The neo-liberalism of the 1970’s was essentially a swing to the right by western democracies to roll back the structures that socialism was building into society and the economy. Australia missed that bus, which was hidden by the rich dust of the resources boom.

We are now seeing another swing to the right, this time emanating from the electorate, who seem to be rejecting the status quo and the increasing faceless and ineffectual bureaucracies which are resulting in the abandonment of the middle and lower sections of society. Maybe Australia can catch this bus?

It strikes me that what government is all about is control of government revenue, expenditure and the benefits to be derived from the awarding government contracts, (read “backhanders”).

Reading about the patronage in the American Presidential election, makes me wonder if the South African politicians are just clumsy.

It certainly puts a new perspective on the need for changes.

A Mum proudly posted a picture of her son who painted his white face black, donned a dreadlocked wig to look like his favourite football player and won first prize at a local library parade where children dressed as characters.

She was torched by rants of outraged objectors who claimed the act was racist and she felt compelled to remove her post.

So the boy who won the prize, the librarians who awarded the prize, the boy’s mother who proudly posted the picture are all racists.

White people who imitate Halle Berry or Imam or Jamie Foxx or Michael Jackson may face similar condemnation. Should we ban sun tanning?

But Coloured people in Cape Town proudly and joyously parade in blackface in their own self styled Coon Carnival?

Of course just making oneself look like a black person is not ‘blackfacing’ is it? Shakespeare’s  Othello  has been portrayed by blackfaced Lawrence Olivier, Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins – to world wide acclaim.

 

There are too few presumptions of innocence and too much sensitivity to possible harm; too many ready to squeal as a means of drawing attention. Kneejerk reaction based on a single perception assumes harmful intent and attracts swarms of the righteous brigade under the cloak of outraged virtue and political correctness.

It is time that we hold to account the people who unjustifiably claim offence without substantial foundation. Media authorities should penalise publicised information that is based on puffery: that will cull some of the overblown, scandalised cries of hyper-sensitive attention seekers.

This type of one sided, righteous non-sense is what drove reasonably sane and normal people to vote for Trump and Brexit.

 

*picture by Rosalin Deuters