6 October

Politics! But hopefully not what you're thinking... There are 2 games in town I think, and mixing them up is what's destroying our societies. There are traditional political parties, like Labor and the LNP here in Oz. And then there are the 'culture warriors'. These are zealots who think there's a wider war in society, a fight for ideas and minds. They use terms like 'the Left' and 'the Right' a lot, those are its goodies and baddies. Andrew Breitbart is a leading US culture warrior, in Australia we have people like Andrew Bolt, Ray Hadley, Alan Jones to some extent, the Institute of Public Affairs, most of Sky News, and some others. Sometimes the two worlds intersect, when the culture warriors try to have impact on politics. Nearly always they favour conservative political parties, like the Republicans in the US or the LNP here. But they destroy those parties as much as they destroy any other party - they're actually not all that interested in politics, their war is 'cultural'. Ask the Republicans in the US, a party in ruins because their culture warriors were successful. I get frustrated when people associate these idiot zealots with traditional politics. The likes of Bolt, Hadley, the IPA and even Abbott only pretend to be interested in politics here, in truth they want to smash the joint. They're not Right or Left, they're not Liberal or Labor - they're extremists. They're destroying the whole show. Look at what Abbott did to the NBN, which is now an international laughing stock, or his opposition to rescue action during the GFC. Pure acts of vandalism, even to this day he wants to keep destroying energy policy not because he cares, but because he wants to attack 'the Left'.