5 May

I love parliament, and I despair of people wishing politicians would be ‘nicer’ to each other. Paul Keating once said politicians fight so that people on the streets don’t have to - that’s real wisdom. (The picture shows that they literally do fight, in the parliament of the Ukraine.). In countries where people fight on the streets, there is no real parliament. If your parliament isn’t fighting, if your pollies are being super nice to each other, it just means the real horse trading is going on somewhere else. We shouldn’t wish for happy loves and hugs from politics, we have politics so that we can happy hugs and loves at home. Society has to fight out its differences somewhere, I vote for doing it in parliament. Or as Charles Péguy once said: “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.” Freedom will always be messy. We’ve lost the stomach for real fighting, and so injustices and inequalities go unchecked. We want happy and peaceful lives, but we also want happy and peaceful politics. You can’t have both. All the differences between us have to be sorted out somewhere, by avoiding doing it ourselves, we just escalate it up to politicians to do for us. Which is fine, but then we shouldn’t be hypocritical and criticise them for fighting.