Hello there, smoggers! I’m back from holidays, feeling refreshed and ever-so-slightly sunburnt, ready to write another terms worth of articles on life, the universe, and rock music. So, how’s everybody’s subjects this semester? Just between you and me, my PE class is terrible, but I won’t tell if you won’t.


Moving on to the actual article…

Firstly, politics. It’s an area I’m interested in, but I haven’t been able to work up the enthusiasm to follow this election on anything more than a superficial level. So, in the finest tradition of procrastinators everywhere, I’ve devised a few ideas to get our politics a bit more interesting. Other countries do it all the time- from Kim’s Change You Are Mandated To Believe In to Palin’s ‘Africa is a country’ moment, we seem to be a lone dot of grey adrift on a political ocean of nutcases and revolutions, ancient tensions simmering just below the surface and continuous random outbreaks of violence and vuvezelas. South America has Colombia, North America has everything south of Kansas, Russia has spontaneous invasions of satellite nations, China has more civil unrest and human rights breaches then you can shake a riot baton at, and Africa has itself. Europe, or at least the West of it, used to be an island of civility and cricket; then Pauline Hanson moved, France banned the burqua and it went downhill from there.

Of course, those of you unfortunate enough to be cursed with things like common sense would right around now be thinking about the opposite point of view. It’s good, not bad, that Australia is boring. We don’t have wars, deaths, large amounts of discrimination, or a laughable stereotype involving camels. There’s no capital punishment, no political prisoners by most standards…the list continues. I concur, but this doesn’t mean we have to be so dull as to bore even the New Zealanders. Here’s some ideas I thought up on the spur of the moment to ‘liven up’ our politics.



1) Get cooler leaders.

I think that in this area, our two main teachers are Russia and the US. One is led by a former spy who is trying to return their country to Communism (Cue Soviet Russia joke here), while the other is led by a man who fist-bumps his supporters and wears aviators. We, on the other hand, are stuck with a ran-ginger- who lives in a flat with their hairdresser boyfriend and eats Chinese takeaway; the alternative is a marathon runner who thinks posing in Speedos is good publicity. Are these the sorts of people who inspire pride and interest in our political arena? I didn’t think so.



2) Get more crazy people.

Ignorant as this sounds, it actually makes sense. Having a few left-field thinkers in our political awareness encourages new ideas- a mental evolution, with the useless concepts such as invading Canada for water get thrown out, while smarter ideas like changing taxes and making Kiwi-bashing our national sport get taken in. After all, we’re one of the most sensible countries outside North Europe there is- we don’t have the equivalent of a Deep South, One Nation’s collapsed, our Socialist Alliance party isn’t nearly extreme enough to be classified as crazy; as a result, anybody with interesting ideas either moves overseas, or if they’re worried about ASIO surveillance of the airports, to Queensland.



3) Get better campaigns.

Interesting and completely pointless fact of the week- the second-place candidate for the Filipino presidency had ‘dancers ‘at his campaign rallies. Another minor candidate changes their name to Osama Bin Laden for publicity, while a third rebranded himself as a vegetable superhero, complete with 10 tights-mask-and-cummerbund-wearing mascots, his slogan being ‘Plants in the Senate’. All of these on a tiny South-East Asian island chain. Of course, it’s not just the Philippines with the ‘interesting’ campaigns; the Party of Conscientiously Work-Shy Elements won a seat in the Danish parliament after it’s campaigns involved giving out free beer and pies to all supporters. What do we have? Speeches where the most interesting thing is the cliché-per-sentence density, debates where the most interesting things are a squiggly line at the bottom of the screen and Julia Gilliard’s earlobes, and visits to factories in Western Sydney where the most interesting thing is trying to see how long a Canberra-based lawyer can pretend to be interested in slag alignment for.



And now, 815 words in, the article must come to an end before I bore you all to death. However, before I leave, here’s food for thought, or at least a light snack. If we’re going to remake our political system into a more interesting model, we need leaders who fit the categories above- who are cool, with great campaigns, and who are usually slightly insane. My suggestion as to where we can find these people by the committee-load is (you guessed it), Smith’s Hill High School. Think of our last few captaincy elections, and tell me if Australia would not become a prouder, greater, and wittier nation under the rule of Hillians- we would, if all else fails, be able to whip out a handy palm-card-sized periodic table at the G20, thus becoming the life of the talks; I’ll bet the contents of my wallet that Tony Abbott wouldn’t think of that.



Signing off,

Eric M.



1 Greenday, Skillet and Parkway Drive are all good, but Rise Against has a tendency to descend into screaming.

2 Which for me means limiting myself to political analysis under 3 pages, but I’m sure you get the principle.

3 Suffice to say they have nothing on Fidel Castro.


This article was written for Smog by a third party and does not necessarily represent the views of Smogblog or its management