Webdiary Meeja Watch announces the informal establishment of the Australian Alliance for an Honest Fair Go in Politics Public Trust Slush Fund. Citizens wishing to donate funds in accordance with the Trust Fund terms and conditions should contact their nearest main party Elected Representative to make their private pledge. For a fuller amplification of these terms and conditions, and information on the history, guiding principles and philosophies of this informal Public Trust Slush Fund, go to onegreennation.
S.J Robertson, Founding Trustee
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1. Third call for a public donation from Mr John Howard, private citizen
From: Jack Robertson
To: The Honourable Tony Abbott, MP, Leader of the House
Date: 7 September 2003
Subject: A Challenge to our Political Leaders – Part III
Information copies: All Australian Senators and MPs (via email)
The Parliamentary Press Gallery (via Webdiary)
Dear Mr Abbott,
As a proud Citizen of Australia, I write to applaud the Liberal Party of Australia for its civic-minded and selfless defence of our beloved fair go, following recent public revelations that your party welcomes the existence, as part of the Public Polity, of a private Trust Fund called ‘Australians for Honest Politics’, one reportedly designed to protect and nurture the vibrancy of our democracy. I am particularly inspired by the example of the various Private Citizens who, apparently out of nothing but their own well-developed sense of civic duty, contributed large sums of money to make this Trust the magnificent instrument of Public Empowerment that I understand it to be. As I have been unable to establish via the Australian Electoral Commission the precise identity of these fine, upstanding Citizens, I would be grateful if you were to pass on my warmest thanks to each and every one of them on my personal behalf.
Mr Abbott, I would also be grateful if you would advise the ‘Australians for Honest Politics’ Trust Fund benefactors that their shining Citizenly example has inspired me, with an almost religious fervour, to open up my own heart – and my wallet – in similar defence of Australia’s majestic democratic system. Oh, it makes me deeply proud, Mr Abbott, to attach for your consideration below: A Challenge to our Political Leaders – Parts I and II, and re-iterate those challenges now to your leader, Mr Howard, a third time.
Mr Abbott, like Mr Dick Honan and many, many, many other Australian Citizens who have donated money to our major political parties expecting nothing whatsoever in return but the warm inner glow that comes with doing one’s civic duty, I am very, very, very keen to give money to the Liberal Party. To that end, could you personally please ensure that your leader, who is obviously so busy defending our democracy that he has not had time to accept my donation so far, sees this now thrice-reiterated personal challenge with his own eyes this time? And then urge him to take it up, thus showing the nation by personal example – in this rapidly privatising world where all the rest of us have now had our retirement financial security placed, by successive governments, in the hands of Market Forces – that he personally has as much faith in the Free Market revolution he has helped bequeath to the ‘rest of us’ as that which the ‘rest of us’ are now expected to embrace with Citizenly enthusiasm?
Thank you very much, Mr Abbott. And keep up the good fight defending our democracy!
Yours sincerely,
Stephen John ‘Jack’ Robertson
Citizen of the Commonwealth, and consumer of the common wealth, of Australia
2. First call for a public donation from Mr Simon Crean, private citizen
From: Jack Robertson
To: Mr Mark Latham, MP, Leader of Opposition Business in the House
Date: 7 September 2003
Subject: A Challenge to our Political Leaders – Part III
Information copies: All Australian Senators and MPs (via email)
The Parliamentary Press Gallery (via Webdiary)
Dear Mr Latham,
As a proud Citizen of Australia, I write to applaud the Australian Labor Party for its civic-minded and selfless defence of our beloved ‘honesty in politics’, following recent public revelations that your party welcomes the existence, as part of the Public Polity, of a private Trust Fund called the ‘Fair Go Alliance’, one reportedly designed to protect and nurture the vibrancy of our democracy. I am particularly inspired by the example of the various Private Citizens who, apparently out of nothing but their own well-developed sense of civic duty, contributed large sums of money to make this Trust the magnificent instrument of Public Empowerment that I understand it to be. As I have been unable to establish via the Australian Electoral Commission the precise identity of these fine, upstanding Citizens, I would be grateful if you were to pass on my warmest thanks to each and every one of them on my personal behalf.
Mr Latham, I would also be grateful if you would advise the ‘Fair Go Alliance’ Trust Fund benefactors that their shining Citizenly example has inspired me, with an almost religious fervour, to open up my own heart – and my wallet – in similar defence of Australia’s majestic democratic system. Oh, it makes me deeply proud, Mr Latham, to attach for your consideration below: A Challenge to our Political Leaders – Parts I and II, and re-iterate those challenges now to your new leader, Mr Crean, for the first time.
Mr Latham, like Mr Dick Honen and many, many, many other Australian Citizens who have donated money to our major political parties expecting nothing whatsoever in return but the warm inner glow that comes with doing one’s civic duty, I am very, very, very keen to give money to the Labor Party. To that end, could you personally please ensure that your leader, who is obviously so busy defending our democracy that he has not had time to accept my donation so far, sees this now thrice-reiterated personal challenge with his own eyes this time? And then urge him to take it up, thus showing the nation by personal example – in this rapidly privatising world where all the rest of us have now had our retirement financial security placed, by successive governments, in the hands of Market Forces – that he personally has as much faith in the Free Market revolution he has helped bequeath to the ‘rest of us’ as that which the ‘rest of us’ are now expected to embrace with Citizenly enthusiasm?
Thank you very much, Mr Latham. And keep up the good fight defending our democracy!
Yours sincerely,
Stephen John ‘Jack’ Robertson
Citizen of the Commonwealth, and consumer of the common wealth, of Australia
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3. A Challenge to our Political Leaders – Part I
From: Jack Robertson
To: All Federal Senators and MPs, the Parliamentary Press gallery
Date: 24 July 2001
Subject: A Challenge to our Political Leaders
Dear Elected Representatives,
Attached please find a challenge to Mr Howard and Mr Beazley. With thanks for your time
A Citizen
A CHALLENGE TO OUR POLITICAL LEADERS
Dear Mr Howard and Mr Beazley,
Like many Australians, I regard the current state of politics with considerable frustration and despair. With both your political groups apparently intent on tackling the upcoming election campaign with the usual mix of muck-slinging and dissembling, I am finding it increasingly difficult to justify a personal Civic Investment in the future of Australia. I understand the conflicting pressures you are under, and the compromises politicians must make, yet I believe that ultimately, the vibrancy of democracy depends mostly on personal leadership by example. This is especially so right now, in a political climate in which all party groups seem captive to the same dreary, economics-driven agenda. I, for one, don’t want any part in creating a future for our kids in which the Almighty Dollar is the only surviving ‘god’.
To that end, I issue the following challenge. I understand that Peter Andren, MP, has been developing a member’s bill that would radically reform your Superannuation arrangements, in particular offering politicians the choice of voluntarily ‘opting out’ of the more generous (and inequitable) entitlements. As an ex-military officer, I am also entitled to a (largely tax-payer-funded) Super sum, worth about $110,000 – fully-indexed, but locked up until I’m 62.
In the interests of demonstrating by example that none of us are automatically beholden to the so-called ‘forces’ of economic self-interest, I challenge either of you to throw your personal weight very publicly behind Mr Andren’s proposal (and not any watered-down version, either). I promise to donate my lump sum to the party of whichever of you does. It won’t be until 2027 – unless you change the rules so I can get at it earlier (like you guys) – but if there is still at least one real democratic party in existence then to accept it, it will be well worth it.
We’ve got to give our kids something more than easy words to believe in. And the only way to do that is for all us grown-ups to start putting our bloody money where our loud mouths are, in my opinion. Come on, you guys – knock some bloody Oz perspective back into us all.
For your consideration, anyway.
A Citizen
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4. A Challenge to our Political Leaders – Part II
From: Jack Robertson
To: All Federal Senators and MPs, the Parliamentary Press gallery
Date: 8 August 2001
Subject: A Challenge to our Political Leaders – Part II
Dear Elected Representative,
Attached please find my repeated challenge to Mr Howard and Mr Beazley. With thanks for your time.
A Citizen
A CHALLENGE TO OUR POLITICAL LEADERS – PART II
Dear Mr Howard and Mr Beazley,
I note your recent, shared public enthusiasm for the lowering of the tax burden in this country, tactics likely to dominate the upcoming election. I can only assume that you and your advisers share fairly bleak assumptions about the role of voter economic self-interest in winning elections. You guys have smarter pollsters than me, I guess. Don’t you?
However, if your opinion-crunchers have convinced you that our hip pocket nerves do hold the key to the campaign – and given the dismissive snickering now inspired by any politician’s promise on tax – surely a far more successful way to exploit the Australian Public’s grasping base instincts would be for a potential Prime Minister to embrace the challenge on MP Superannuation outlined in my last appeal?
I repeat that challenge – I’ll donate my military superannuation to the party of whichever of you wholeheartedly throws his full support very publicly behind Peter Andren’s bill. All this bill proposes is that current MPs get the option of opting into a fairer set-up, so I’m not even [necessarily] asking anyone else to put their own financial future where their gobs are. It’s about defending the long-term credibility of our Parliament. (Frankly, it’s cretinous to pay yourselves peanut base salaries, attracting far too many monkeys, then compensate with gobsmacking Super so that we all think you’re greedy monkeys, anyway. Do yourselves a few favours, you dills!)
My thanks to those elected Reps who bothered to reply to my last email. Senator [MAIN PARTY] fairly pointed out that an ‘anonymous’ challenge is a bit wussy (although you went a bit quiet when I gave you all my details, Senator!). [Staffer MAIN PARTY], I haven’t heard from Senator [MAIN PARTY] yet, mate, and [staffer MINOR PARTY], likewise re: Senator [MINOR PARTY]. Senator [MINOR PARTY], Senator [MINOR PARTY] hasn’t advised of the [MINOR PARTY] ‘position’ on this issue as yet, so I hope you’ll understand when I place all those nice things I said about how you and Senator [MINOR PARTY] are trying to inject some meaning back into politics ‘on reserve’ for now, OK?
This is a genuine challenge. I know it sounds like high moral ground grandstanding, but consider the powerful ‘trickle down’ effect of leadership by example, in this babble-drenched and economically-cleaving age. One [mainstream] pollie – one – could spark a profound social shift (and, what’s more, win the election with a single soundbite.)
At least think about it, you guys?
A Citizen
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The Australian ‘honest fair go’ means, in the end, nothing more than this: that we ALL play by the SAME rules. As far as the unknown and unknowable future of the ‘New Economics’ revolution goes, that it turn means this: if the living standards of you and I and the ordinary Australian down the street are now going to ebb and sway, in our future retirement, with the vicissitudes and variations of the global ‘Free Market’, then the individual men and women who have remade our Australian society in this way over the last two decades MUST place themselves personally in exactly that same financial boat.
It’s NOT good enough to change the Parliamentary Superannuation scheme so that only TOMORROW’s elected officials will join us in that increasingly-rocky retirement vessel. John Howard and Simon Crean – along with most of the senior leadership figures now running both main parties – have been members of successive Executive governments directly responsible for these radical, largely-bipartisan economic changes. It was all a fait accompli? There was no alternative? Fine. But let’s see either, or preferably BOTH, of these publicly-elected and publicly-paid leaders – for I’ll happily split my miserable $110,000 lump sum between both main parties – now PERSONALLY demonstrate their continuing PERSONAL confidence in those radical economic changes they PERSONALLY helped usher in, by PERSONALLY opting out of their own now ludicrously-disparate, anachronistic PUBLIC schemes, and into PRIVATE ones of the kind the rest of us will have to make do with in our dotages.
Through boom and bust, with growth and ‘negative growth’, for Market better or Market worse.
If our Parliament’s main party leaderships want or need to vote our Federal politicians a huge pay rise and/or up their electoral allowances markedly to make this fundamental systemic change financially feasible for those who may have all sorts of commitments predicated on whopping Super, then I will support them to the hilt. Me, I happen to think we pay our pollies contemptibly low basic salaries, anyway. Me, I happen to think that even a lowly backbencher should be pulling in about two or three hundred grand a year as a very minimum. But what is crucial now – as the strategic economic outlook grows less and less readable – is the principle of manifest systemic equality. What is especially crucial, in a new and uncertain private-public economic paradigm that is only now starting to bed in and bite down on the old Australian certitudes, is that those leaders who rammed those paradigmatic changes upon the rest of us must manifestly embrace their long-term consequences right alongside the rest of us. This, in turn, now urgently requires leadership by personal example far beyond platitudinous inanities about ‘free markets’ and yet more requisite ‘future-securing’ reforms.
A fair go, John Howard? Honest politics, Simon Crean? Maintaining Australian trust and belief in stable, mainstream, two-party Parliamentary Democracy? Trust between voter and voted-in, trust between the private benefactors and the public citizens?
Fine words. But in the end, bullshit walks, money talks. Get your wallets out, boys. I haven’t even got a secure, fulltime job, and I’m itching to lob over a hundred grand into your future Main Party democratic fighting coffers – via this somewhat roundabout, dodgy and informal, ‘fringe party’ backroom funding mechanism I’ve called ‘The Australian Alliance for an Honest Fair Go in Politics’ Public Trust Slush Fund, with a labelling nod to you both. (We Citizens can play ironic little word-games just as easily as your grubby spin doctors and smooth marketeers, y’know.) And I bet there’s other Citizens out here who’d chuck a few bucks your main party way, just for the fun of watching a politician do himself out of an unearned quid for a change, too.
But like all natural-born followers, I require a main party leader to lead the way first. John? Simon? Cabinet? Caucus? Party fundraising ball’s in your democratic court, boys and girls.