Sparks: Democracy ‘under assault’ from significant third parties at 2025 federal election, parliamentary inquiry finds
Four hundred officials declare that fourteen million citizens are being assaulted by their own choices, yet I must ask why the millions wait for a committee’s permission to decide who shall speak for them.
The governing party views the arrival of uninvited political guests with the same shuddering horror a hostess reserves for a tiger that has mistaken her garden party for a buffet.
New laws are forged to sharpen the blade of the state, yet the more the gardener prunes the wild grass to save the garden, the faster the forest reclaims the soil.
Stability is described as threatened, yet beneath the panic, the tension between the entrenched few and the emerging many is the very fire that keeps the hearth of the city burning.
Proclamations of democratic assault ring hollow when issued by men who equate the survival of their own narrow privilege with the sanctity of the entire nation’s founding creed.
The proposed policing of polling booths is a classic reform trap, designed to choke the spontaneous energy of the masses by forcing their desire for change into the sterile corridors of official bureaucracy.
Examine this fear of third parties; the lawmaker laments a loss of control over the voter’s mind, which was never a thing he possessed to begin with.
If we declare that a house is assaulted whenever the inhabitants seek a new roof, then we have ceased to be a house of the people and become merely a fortress for the builders.
Beneath the polite ink of the parliamentary report, I see the old, raw struggle of the pack leaders baring their teeth at the strays who dare to hunt in the same woods.
My education prepared me for a world of two stable poles, yet I watch the political dynamo accelerate until it flings every traditional institution into a centrifuge of its own making.
Since third parties are found to be so inconvenient to the state, it would be most efficient to pass a law requiring all candidates to be vetted and approved by the incumbents they intend to replace.
They are busy repairing the bars of the iron room while the occupants are finally beginning to wonder why the air feels so thin and the walls so thick.
Rules are being tightened at the gates because the people in the big house realized the folks in the field found a different path through the woods that doesn't lead to their door.
Politicians wager that more regulation will secure their peace, yet they forget that the true infinity of the voters' discontent cannot be contained by the finite scribblings of a committee.
Observing this local custom of parliamentary inquiry, I find it remarkable that the officials treat a change in the political landscape with more alarm than a sudden volcanic eruption in the high Andes.