This piece on the state of country roads is a window into something much more seriously wrong with how we…
This piece on the state of country roads is a window into something much more seriously wrong with how we understand democracy. Short thread. /1 #auspol
https://t.co/r61wcjtptP
As the article clearly points out, roads funding is beholden to the whim of populist politics. Rather than there being any sensible, wide assessment of need, funding is usually allocated in the novelty cheque way, targeted at electoral advantage. Talk to any local government…/2
…authority and they’ll tell you what their backlog of road maintenance and building is. And it will usually be a figure in the many millions. The same populist problem recurs there, with local councillors redirecting vital funding to trophy projects they think will win votes. /3
This is why many regional towns now have extraordinarily extravagant aquatic centres, for example, ruinously expensive to build and run. But it wins votes. This all happens because populism has led us to believe that political representatives actually ‘run the country’. /4
They don’t, they were never supposed to. The *running* of the country is done by officials, that’s how our democracy is designed. If you’ve worked in government you’ll have seen the reality of this every day. And the country ‘runs’ just fine in the caretaker period before…/5
…elections, which nobody comments much on. That’s because it’s always run without politicians needing to provide much input. Politicians simply don’t have the knowledge to run almost anything in a modern society, and nor should they need to. Their job is to ‘represent’…/6
…us in this running of the country. We have a representative democracy, that’s their job. Not to run the country, but to be our voice in the discussions with officials about what needs doing. Populism by definition cuts the officials out of the conversation, or installs…/7
…its own biddable experts. The accumulated expertise of generations of running the country is therefore sidelined. We’re living the chaos of that right now, with Covid, climate change, road funding, energy policy - the list could run for pages. /end