A wish list

With things looking so abysmal on the political front, now seems a good time to indulge in a wee bit of hopin’ and wishin’ about what the next couple of years might bring.

Here’s a list of my top 10 politics-related desires for the next year or two into the future.

10. Queensland voters turf out Anna Bligh and her stale, too long serving Labor Party.

9. The MMP referendum in New Zealand, to take place at the same time as this November’s election, sees that awful German-inspired voting system rejected by the Kiwi voters. (This should be a dead certainty given how it has massively over-empowered tiny little parties across the Tasman and helped accentuate New Zealand’s relative economic decline, but the present Prime Minister Key has been a huge disappointment on this, and many other fronts and has not campaigned at all to rid Kiwis of this troublesome voting system.)

8. David Cameron actually exhibits any sort of backbone at all and stands up to the EU on something. Anything.

7. Julia Gillard takes the Labor Party to an election and suffers a near record loss. This is what happens in a democracy when a political leader clearly and explicitly lies to the voters. Ironically only Kevin Rudd wins a seat in Queensland for Labor.

6. Following on from that, a Bill to repeal the carbon dioxide tax is passed through the post-election House of Representatives and goes to the Senate, where the Labor Party (having suffered such a bad electoral loss) rolls over and helps pass the repeal Bill through the Senate.

5. Ditto, save that this time a chastised Labor Party suicidally opts to team up with the Greens again and to block the repeal Bill in the Senate. This leads inexorably on to a double dissolution election which sees Labor suffer further losses, the Greens get humbled, and the repeal Bill pass through both chambers and become law, ridding us of that bumper sticker moralising, achieve nothing Carbon Dioxide Tax.

4. Still on the same general topic, and this one my favourite, the two rural, socialist independents, Messrs Oakeshott and Windsor, both get thrown out by the voters in their constituencies. Mr. Oakeshott does so badly that he loses his deposit. Neither man is ever again elected to anything, not even dog-catcher. Parties are held throughout the land.

3. Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu recovers his nerve and agrees to repeal the democracy-enervating Victorian Charter of Rights. (At present he has seemingly rejected the view of his own MPs on the Parliamentary Review Committee, and worse has sidelined his own Attorney General, and all because he doesn’t want to offend the Charter Cheerleaders in the Universities and of the likes of Julian Burnside, all of whom are well-known Coalition supporters, right?)

2. President Obama follows the lead of former President Carter and becomes a one term president, being soundly beaten in the Electoral College by whomever the Republican nominee happens to be – it doesn’t matter, as long as there’s no more hopey-changey Keynesian incompetence.

1. A new Prime Minister Abbott lives up the promise made by shadow Attorney General Brandis and repeals s. 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, the free speech stifling hate speech law used to go after Andrew Bolt and to chill the scope all we Australians have to speak our minds in this country. And of all 10 of these wishes, this free speech one is, in the long term, the most important by far to Australia’s long term future. In fact I’d like to see a future Abbott government wind back all the speech stifling inroads of this, and former governments.