Greg Smart

@Smart_Max67

Coffee snob, former opinion columnist for Dubbo Photo News.

Dubbo NSW

Joined June 2013

778 Following

157 Followers

1.1K Posts

Smart_Max67 retweeted

Evan

@EvanWritesOnX

3 months ago

I am surprised how my tweet below entered the political spheres of Australians. It means that many Australians actually care about their country. But if you want to do something about it, the first thing to understand is that the answer is not the other party. The two parties run the visible layer. The operators underneath is the same regardless of who is in office. Same mining multinationals. Same four banks. Same supermarket duopoly. Same media owners. Same property speculation engine. Same gas exporters paying almost no resource rent. The faces rotate. The arrangement does not. So voting harder for Labor when the Liberals disappoint you, or harder for the Liberals when Labor disappoints you, is not resistance. It is the trap. It is the pressure-release valve doing exactly what it was built to do. The way to move the operators in Australia, is how you move any operator in any country. Stop voting tribally. Strengthen the cross bench. Vote for community independents and minor parties willing to put structural questions on the table that the majors have agreed never to discuss. A senate full of crossbenchers extracting concessions is worth more than another majority for either side. Learn who owns what. Find out who owns your bank, your supermarket, your toll road, your energy retailer, your superannuation, your media. Most Australians have no idea how much of the country routes back to a small handful of foreign asset managers and resource multinationals. Once you see it, the arguments between the parties stop looking like a contest and start looking like theatre. Build parallel structures. Move your money to a credit union or mutual bank. Buy from local cooperatives where you can. Read independent media. Put solar and battery on your own roof so you stop buying back your own gas at a markup from the people who exported it. Demand specific reforms, not vague good intentions. Ask every candidate, federal and state, whether they will support a real Petroleum Resource Rent Tax. Whether they will support a Norway-style sovereign wealth fund built on actual resource royalties. Whether they will support ending negative gearing and the capital gains discount. Whether they will support breaking up the media monopolies. Whether they will support foreign investment screening with teeth. Whether they will support rebuilding domestic refining capacity and downstream processing of the minerals that's shipped out raw. Vote on the answers. Politicians respond to specificity. They absorb and neutralise vagueness. Tell the truth in your daily conversations. The deepest defense of the system is the conditioning that tells Australians their own sovereignty over their own resources, their own currency, their own land and their own future is the unrealistic option. Norway did it. South Korea did it. Singapore did it. Australia chose, repeatedly, through both parties, not to. That is a choice. Choices can be made differently. Saying so out loud, in private and in public, in conversations with family and friends and colleagues, slowly breaks the spell. Australia is managed. That is the bad news and that is also the good news. Anything that can be managed can be unmanaged. But not by waiting for the next election to deliver a saviour from inside the same recruiting pipeline that produced the current arrangement. The change starts when enough citizens stop voting for the marketing departments and start asking who actually owns the building.

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@Smart_Max67

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