Convoy in the media

The trucks are about to roll and the “Convoy of No Confidence” is in the media.

Mass convoy to make ‘real’ voices heard
Ean Higgins

FOR some it’s climate change alarmism; for others too much wasted taxpayers’ money on boatpeople, school halls, or pink batts; and for others still it’s the importation of Chinese apples, the temporary ban on the live cattle trade, or same-sex couples rearing children.

But the common thread in what is emerging as a national Tea Party-style revolt in the form of a "Convoy of No Confidence" to Canberra is a burning conviction that politicians of all persuasions have lost touch with the real-life needs of the common man and woman they are supposed to represent.

What began as a truckies protest against the carbon tax has grown into a mass alliance of those outside the urban elites who feel they have lost their voice.

It’s an amalgam of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers who are mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

Read the article at The Australian

UPDATE August 16:

From The Australian’s editorial:

TRUCKING blockades are nothing new. During the past three decades, the leafy avenues of Canberra’s parliamentary triangle and main roads in capital cities and towns have been jammed numerous times by hundreds of trucks, horns blaring in protest over fuel prices, the withdrawal of logging licences, tariff cuts and general discontent.

Such demonstrations, which cost truckies thousands of dollars, tend to be forgotten quickly. Politicians who ignore the underlying sentiments of such protests, however, run the risk of electoral backlash and driving support towards populist protest parties such as One Nation or Bob Katter’s Australian Party, which have little to contribute to policy but help aggrieved voters feel someone is listening. All politicians should be listening, but must not be steamrolled into simplistic, populist reactions.

…

There is no justification for the early election its organisers want. But the history of One Nation shows that such widespread discontent could cost the major parties dearly. Without bowing to populist pressure, politicians must engage with the vast constituency who increasingly feel forgotten and isolated in regional and outer urban areas.

Read the full text at The Australian

UPDATE August 18:

Convoy a revolt of working people

Gary Johns

Australia’s uprising is from workers. Workers, who every day drive trucks and travel in aeroplanes all over Australia to work in mines and on cattle stations and in hundreds of industries that service them.

They may be a little unkempt; they could afford to stand a little closer to a razor blade and a little further away from a tattoo gun, but what they lack in inner-city elegance, they more than make up for in a sense of proportion and reality. They do not like being treated as fools.

The federal Labor government has indeed treated them and millions of others as fools.

Source: The Australian

See also: "Winter of discontent" here…