Gez said:
Is she not a deceitful person? She lied about something before the last election and now every Australian now has to suffer for it. It's not something people are meant to 'get over it' the government needs to be held accountable.
I think feigning outrage or disbelief at the nature of politics is something that should be saved for the irresponsible. Times change, political makeup changes and plans are revisited. This has happened across ideologies for as long as this system has been in place.
Should you have to put up with it? That's debatable. Personally attacking or blaming any one person is childish, we can be better than that. Am I surprised the press feign surprise or severely overreact in order to manipulate the public? No. I'd just hope that we're smart enough to be able to see through it.
For the record, I'm not particularly thrilled with any of the major political parties, but to pretend that the alternative at any given time will materially fix any real problems with any of the current systems is absurd. In the end you're going to be effed over in some way in the name of appeasing another group of statistically relevant voters, you're just voting for where, exactly, you'd like to be prodded.
If people get off on arguing about a couple of extra cents added to their weekly bill as opposed to a couple of cents being added to a slightly different bill anyway, that's fine, I guess, but surely we don't need to resort to hyperbole and spreading confusing, fear and poorly researched and unreasonable half-truths to achieve that goal. Both 'sides' are guilty of this, don't get me wrong.
The long and short of it is that I'm completely fascinated by how easy it is to manipulate people, turn them against each other and generally make them bitter, jaded and unhappy over extremely fine shades of grey in political policy. I shouldn't be, at this point, I've seen enough of it, but I guess I'll always be a little bit disappointed.
