Senator Andrew Bartlett
Friday, April 01, 2005
 
Politics vs Truth

Regular readers of this blog may think I take the occasional unfair dig at the media, so I will try to balance that by pointing to an article called Why can’t politicians tell the truth… ever?

This article puts a lot of the blame for the dishonesty and non-answers involved in politics down to the perceived necessity for all politicians in the same party to spout exactly the same line on every issue. Given that the article is about British politics, we can safely say the problem is far worse in Australia where party discipline is probably the strictest of any democracy in the world.

Clearly, for a political party to clearly communicate to the public what it stands for, there needs to be a reasonable degree of commonality in the public statements from its politicians. However, I believe this principle is applied in a very unbalanced way in Australia, with far too little scope for diversity of opinion. This is not to say that there isn’t some, but I think there is still room for plenty more.

Speaking of diversity of opinion, I’m a big fan of the website I found this article on – a site called Open Democracy. It has thoughtful articles and discussions on many topics, from Iraq to poverty alleviation to improving economic prosperity.

There are some local websites which seek to do similar things, including On Line Opinion and Australian Prospect.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Friday, April 01, 2005 Permalink
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