22 May

One sneaky word that needs to be banished from Australia is the idea of a political ‘base’. US attack politics, noxious rubbish. As if a politician has a special group of people they relate to and look after specially, and then everybody else is more at arm’s length. Even in my earlier life political parties didn’t think like that in Australia, if you ran for parliament, your ‘base’ was the entire Australian community. Not because everybody agreed with everybody else, but the clear assumption was there that what you do impacts the entire community. Not special deals for some subset ‘base’. We need to bring that back.