Thread by @Pollytics

<rant> I look around at Australian politics at the moment and shake my head. On any specific example (big or small), if the ALP won't help themselves, why should they expect anyone else to step up and help them?

Let's have a couple of examples.

First off, a minutia thing (yeah, so unfashionable, but it's the building blocks of reality). Then a bigger Fed thing.

Palaszczuk's CoS got funding for a startup he has an interest in. He should know better(!) - BUT! - it wasn't a grant. It was a co-investment with private VC firms, where they effectively make the decision, and gov fronts up a maximum of half the investment dough.

This program is widely recognised as highly successful and a global leader in its space (who knew - well no one that isn't into minutia). But the Qld govt just lets the media (who don't know anything about minutia) call it a grant. When its not.

The Qld gov didn't defend the program, or explain it, or its decision making processes (Which could all be done as an aggressive "get your hand off it" thing) Nope - they keel over because they are hopeless, and surrounded by people even more hopeless.

Let's go Feds. The rate of Newstart is criminally negligent. It's bad economics, it shifts costs to the states and NGOs, it's an engine of human misery, a net detriment to human welfare, and *everyone* not dropped on their head as a child knows it. But!

The ALP are so fundamentally useless and gutless, that they have decided to let that other fundamentally useless group The Greens play politics with it through meaningless, irrelevant Senate bills. Meanwhile Newstart is remaining the same.

The Senate has power. Those powers can be used to build a case for change. Can be used to get opponents like the BCA, AIG, rural groups, economic groups, all on the record, all talking from the same page to state the obvious...

What is the obvious?

The damage of Newstart.

Why do we need to do this?

To build extraordinary pressure on... the Nats and rural Liberals - because they are ultimately the chisel to crack this stonewall.

They are the ones with the largest populations of humans experiencing misery because of Newstart. The economies of their local communities are the ones being the most damaged because of incompetent governance. And they are open, because they feel threatened by 3rd party forces

But.. BUT!.. people *in politics* (or rather in parliamentary politics) no longer know or remember how to do actual politics anymore (actual politics is about changing events) - they instead have KPIs unrelated to the livelihoods of our 25 million people.

Their "politics" is no longer your politics. Or our politics. It's *their* politics - a meaningless set of near all consuming KPIs amounting to nothing. And all it would take is for 3 smart people to go *nope* and you could change Newstart