Or even looking overseas, to the so called leader of the free world the US. Their democracy is seeing the majority of the population become poorer and poorer, with at one point after the GFC saw 21 vacant houses for every homeless person in the country. Some houses were simply bulldozed as no one was living in them and the councils couldn't afford to maintain the utility connections for them. That is certainly a huge failure of the system. The system is obviously broken.
Personally I think it's more of a failure of the system to the disenfranchised, a perversion of democracy itself that sees corporations rule instead of the ballot box. Young people growing up now simply look at what's going on, with access now to vast info resources in the net, and decide that if this is "democracy" then it's pretty fucked up.
According to the spread generated by this year’s poll, only 60 per cent of the Australians Lowy surveyed believed that “Democracy is preferable to any other kind of government”. By contrast, 24 per cent of Australians held the opinion that “In some circumstances, a non-democratic government can be preferable.” Another 13 per cent felt that “For someone like me, it doesn’t matter what kind of government we have” and the remaining 3 per cent of respondents claimed not to know what their answer would be.
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Questions need to be asked – of our elected representatives but also of ourselves.
What do we mean when we say that “a non-democratic government can be preferable”?
Do we understand what democracy is and why it’s important?
Is our distaste for democracy merely a reflection of what the current Abbott government is doing?
Are the popular demonstrations and protests we’ve seen this year an indication that our disdain for formal, electoral democracy is already being replaced with a post-representative politics of participation? more
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