At the railway station this week, there was a chap from the Liberal Party talking to people before they got on the train. He was putting his face before the public, in a run for a position as Ward 2 Councillor of Blacktown City Council, in the 2021 Council Elections. I live in quite a populous council for Sydney and you'd think that the media would care about who was running for Mayor in one of the biggest councils in the broader city but they seem uninterested. Given that there are 42 local councils in Sydney alone and loads more across the state, that is perhaps understandable however, you'd at least suspect that the media in Sydney might care about who was running for the Mayor of Sydney.
I know that this is an aside but since News Corp and what was Fairfax and now Nine Ent.Co. through their powers combined, acquired and then shut down all of the local newspapers (Go Captain Blackout!), we are completely surrounded by no local news reporting. In the olden days when local newspapers existed, mastheads like the Blacktown Sun, the Blacktown Advocate and maybe the Parramatta Advertiser would have reported on this but the Sun stopped shining, nobody Advocates for anything and if there is Advertising is it stuck behind a paywall.
Having said all of that, general apathy and uninterest might very well be a good thing. Apart from the very petty issues of where roundabouts and No Right Turn signs go, council politics is small and mundane. Councillors are the people who get stuff done on the ground and the whole entire swirling malaise of national politics is all the way up there somewhere. Down here in council land, there just isn't the visceral hatred that comes from the great political football teams yelling at each other from across the State and Federal Chambers.
Conflict and novelty is the bread and butter of journalism. Unfortunately, without that source of bile and venom being spat across a room, there isn't really that much cause to send reporters into council chambers; when the majority of their work happens to be deciding where parking signs and kerb cuts go.
Newspapers don't care about very petty politics. They currently demonstrate that they don't care about very petty elections. Before I move on though, let me tell you about an even pettier election; which i am still amused by some 26 years later. That is the election back in 1995, when I was in high school for the Student Representative Council election.
One of the tropes of media is that the Student Council is an absurdly powerful body which makes all kinds of executive decisions, when in reality, they have practically zero power at all. The School Captain might have ceremonial functions of making occasional speeches on behalf of the students to someone on an assembly but that's really about it. SRC Meetings from what I saw from the outside, were nothing more than a small number of students carrying on like pork chops in a blender. There is a lot of noise for ultimately what amounts to very little indeed.
In the 1995 SRC Elections, someone ran on the set of promises that he would do nothing if elected except drink tea and eat biscuits in the SRC room. I think that that has to be about the most truthful campaign in the history of ever. Of course the Student Representative Council is a body with no power and of course it is going to be populated by nobody other than the kids who want to be popular, the kids who are overachievers and want this on their resume, and by kids who have someone been hoodwinked by their friends. Going in with a set of promises to be useless in a useless body, is a practical response.
That same year, I ran a guerilla political campaign encouraging people both not to vote at all and/or vote multiple times. Somewhere down the line I had acquired a photocopy card with $11 on it and at 9c a copy that meant 122 copies; which for a 17 year old is an insane amount of power which would (and arguably should) absolutely be used irresponsibly. I found a book about the fall of communism in Poland, which had loads of lovely pictures of people being very angry; including some where people were carrying banners with the slogan "elections are rigged". Suddently along with various kids' posters saying "Vote For Me" because of X, Y, and Z, there were my posters saying "Don't Vote", or "Vote Ten Times".
The truth was that elections in a high school are a popularity contest where existing cliques are transformed into ballots and there's always an undercurrent of suspicion that because counting is done behind closed doors that it's all a sham anyway. If democracy's a joke then you might as well start writing punchlines, right?
I do not remember who was elected as School Captain but I do remember that our friend made good on the promise to do nothing other than drink tea and eat biscuits in the SRC room. I also remember that my campaign had been successful and that only 29 genuine votes had been made in that election; which means that practically anybody who voted for themself got onto that council. I assume that given that there were 12 members, that whoever the School Captain was, probably only polled about 8 or 9 votes at most.
Now I mention all of this by way of reference to the council elections in December. When the consequences are nil, it doesn't take that much effort to completely ruin what would have been a sensible result. When the consequences of the local council elections are perceived as nil by the general public, then the opportunity for absurdity is magnified. No doubt there will be people who see local council elections as a chance to get their foot onto the ladder of politics. The truth is that we already have a family in Blacktown City Council who have managed to get multiple members of their dynasty into council positions and when one of them tried running for Federal politics, he had no idea what the policies of his party were.
There will be those people who see the almost impotence of council politics and use it as an opportunity to see if they can get government sponsored biscuits. They might not actually run on a platform of doing nothing other than drinking tea and eating biscuits but they will see the local council as a chance to get on the gravy train and/or attempt to do some minor pork barrelling.
The complete absence of local newspapers and local media has meant that what should have been front and centre, isn't being reported at all. That is, that my opening paragraph was functionally a lie because while I said that "there was a chap from the Liberal Party" running for the local council elections, the truth is that formally there are no Liberal Party candidates in 2021 elections in Blacktown. Factionalism is so rife within the local branch of the Liberal Party because of that one family dynasty, that the party has elected to not formally run. Instead we get what's being called a "Blacktown Coalition"; in which the members are running as independents and who are more than likely being funded by the Liberal Party anyway.
The situation is as absurd as the 1995 SRC Elections except that it is less honest. There aren't people running on a platform of doing nothing and there isn't a campaign making fun of the election, even though this is beyond a joke.
I do not want to cast members of the various political football teams as villains because the political theatre that goes on belies the fact that even under the colours of the political football teams, there are people who genuinely want to act in the public's service. Then there will be those people who actually genuinely want to do things for their community. I would really like to know how we find these people because with the absence of local newspapers, there's practically no public scrutiny of local politics any more. Certainly the days when the local media would send someone to council meetings has passed and by default, council meetings are akin to star chambers where no-one else is in the room where it happens and nobody really knows how the parties get to 'yes', or how any of the political sausages are made.
Worse, without scrutiny from the outside; caused by an absence of inquisitive media, then who knows what goes into the blender, or what happens when people carry on like a bunch of pork chops, or even if there are any barrels filled with pork.
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