Bill Leak is among the best cartoonists in the world in my opinion, willing to stand up to the politically correct, the perpetually offended, and the prevailing lefty views which permeate journalism today.
But he’s just given us a cartoon which surely we can all agree on:
As one joker once said to me, “It was so cold in Canberra that I saw a politician with his hands in his own pockets!”
On a more serious note, one of the more useful definitions of ‘tyranny’ is “the degree to which ‘they’ can get away with what ‘you’ cannot”. And by that measure Politicians of all stripes are tyrants. They rort their benefits in ways which would get an executive fired or imprisoned. They do every day, week, and month, things which you and I would never get away with, and by and large they expect us to put up with it or even thank them for the ‘sacrifices’ they make in our ‘service’.
But then again, what do you expect? This is just a simple and logical extension of what the government as a whole does every day… take our money and spend it in ways that it sees fit. If that’s ok at an organisational level for the government, can we really be surprised when lifetime career politicians start to think it’s their right at an individual level?
Much sound and fury is being directed at the misuse of taxpayer funding for a politicians personal benefit, and that’s a great start, but this ‘entitlement’ problem will keep coming back until we address the elephant in the room: Government is built on, indeed exists on, a massive entitlement complex. We won’t be able to get politicians out of our pockets till we get politics out of them first.
Not wrong……
But it will continue until we start voting out politicians who treat taxpayers as a trough in which to dip their snouts.
Part of the problem is that too many of us accept this kind of behaviour as long as it isn’t us who are getting shafted , or as long as it IS us who are getting free stuff.
If they will rip off other people, they will rip you off as soon as it is convenient.
“This is just a simple and logical extension of what the government as a whole does every day… take our money and spend it in ways that it sees fit.”
To the extent that we live in a genuine democracy, what “it” sees fit is what we see fit.
“To the extent that we live in a genuine democracy”
There are two problems with this statement. Democracy cannot be shown to honour the will of the people in anything more than the loosest sense. And in the current climate where the political class can be shown to be very far removed from the ‘average Aussie’, there are often situations where there is simply no one to vote for who represents our views. How do you gain representation in a Democracy then?
The second problem is the one you implicitly point out, that we’re not really functioning as a genuine democracy in any case. For both those reasons I don’t regard the government’s will as representative of the peoples, nor the government’s spending.
Isn’t it true that a picture can say what a thousand words not always can.
You do need skill and talent and a lot of that old fashion Aussie Larrikinism. Bill Leak has it in droves. Unfortunately the left have a slipped-on-a-banana-skin sense of humor.
The 2017 Australia Day Lamb War is a definition of our times. The larrikinism went seriously missing and hijacked pathetically by the left. the sad part though was even though the righteous left were happy, those being punished were the innocent. The lamb growers. People boycotted lamb in droves without thinking that there is an underdog.
Everything we eat today is Halal approved… now even the days… Australia Day Halal approved.
And now hands in our pockets. The most frustrating thing about it is nothing is ever done because they are all into it. Even the Greens. I think Parliament House must be the most desensitizing place on earth or in Canberra’s case under earth.