I want to suggest that elected politicians be given input to decisions only after a LONG list of basic…

I want to suggest that elected politicians be given input to decisions only after a LONG list of basic operational realities of society are dealt with. Popularity-based politics is the greatest obstacle to fixing societies that are falling apart. /1 https://t.co/4D4yOwXVz1

Party-based popularity politics leads people to believe that decisions about what has to be done by societies need to go through the detour of the different ideological filters of competing parties and candidates, before anything should happen. That we can’t fix anything…/2

…until we know what the most popular things are. That without popularity, nothing can be done. It’s self-serving BS. About 95% of government is basic operational things that happen whether there’s an elected person there or not. It’s what government departments do. /3

Ask anybody who works in government how much the work of elected people is to take advice from their departments, because the elected person hasn’t a clue how anything works, and nor could they. For years this worked, because politicians would mostly follow the…/4

…recommendations of their departments. Their role was to build public support for these recommendations. Now with populism we’ve flipped that on its head, and politicians wade into all basic operational areas of government, declaring that they make all of the decisions. /5

At the same time they strip-mine the funding for these basic operational things, and re-purpose it in dedicated vote-buying grants, targeted at marginal electorates. So while Australia’s roads fall to pieces, for example, a federal government promises…/6 https://t.co/4D4yOwXVz1

…over $100 billion in tax cuts to people who don’t need them. They shouldn’t even have the discretion to do that, but populism makes the elected ninny the emperor of all they survey. There’s no real ideological difference on these basic operational things, a department for…/7

…example can allocate the work to both private and public entities, depending on what might work best in a given situation. And it will be able to completely ignore whether the work is in a marginal electorate. We should have a list of these operational things that need…/8

…urgent attention, and those should all be left to government departments to coordinate and fix, before ANY politician gets a say on any of it, at all. That’s probably 50 years of work, right there, before we’d ever need to call on a politician again. Get rid of the annual…/9

…budget ritual, where the ideological student politics warriors of the day shell out dosh to their preferred culture war causes. Leave politicians one job, the job they’re actually there to do. To be the touchpoint for the public, in government. To ‘bring the public along’…/10

…in what needs doing. Not to make many decisions at all as to WHAT needs doing. They don’t have a clue. We have a to-do list of urgent repairs and operational fixes that could keep us busy for many decades. Almost none of it dependent on any of the ideologies elected…/11

…Napoleons cherish over all else. They’ll watch society collapse and burn if it means winning a debating point over their rivals on a given day. We need reality-based politics. Focused on basic operational things. /ends