Governments are out of control
With the bail outs and quantitative easing governments are successfully keeping up the illusion of prosperity at the cost of impoverishing future generations. This will effect all of us in one way or another (that includes Australia). I have written on this at length in a previous article entitle unfolding economic shift. Whilst spending vast amounts of money many governments are also eroding personal liberties, conducting illegal activities, vote rigging and working in increasing secrecy whilst intruding more and more onto our own privacy.
The recent evidence brought out by Edward Snowden highlighting the widespread government secret surveillance to people around the world shows how this is becoming routine in some countries. Privacy International recently published the a study that showed how endemic this is becoming (see below).
Below is an excerpt from a Democracy Now broadcast interview Glen Greenwald discussing 60 million phone conversations that were recorded in spain.
At the same time as all this scruitiny on us the US government is hiding more and more of what they do with record numbers of documents being “classified” in the US.
So governments are increasingly hiding their activities whilst prying more and more into our private lives?
Shouldn’t it be the other way around??
There are a number of intiatives out there aiming at icreasing the scruitiny of our public institutions. Last year I had an idea for a an iphone app that you could use in parallel with actual voting to identify vote rigging (it was one of many projects that year that got shelved). Since then I have seen a number of new ideas to make politicians more accountable , below are some of the more powerful projects I found.
OPTION 1 Call their bluff
On this website you can review all voting history of any UK politician. The site also profiles their voting behaviours and provides an easy way for you to monitor the politicians attendance and ask questions and view their responses.
A similar site for Australia – in beta test at the moment
OPTION 2 Vote for robots
Recently a new political party in Australia has setup which uses smartphone apps and the internet allow a constituency to direct the voting actions of their senator by an iphone or android phone app. 
How does it work?
1. You vote for a candidate who is part of the “Senator Online” party in the traditional way.
2. If the candidate wins the election and becomes a senator then every vote they make on legislation is determined by what the majority of the the constituency for the senator voted on via thier phone or android app.
This could be the first step in making politicians obsolete the next step would be to remove the politicians and just have direct voting. However things would have to change first as we would need protections against mob rule. This would require the Australian constitution would have to be changed to protect individual rights. I wrote a critique of worldwide constitutions in a previous post that can be found here
OPTION 3 Reduce the impact of government on you
If the first two options could in time become amazing ways of changing the way the country is governed. However they are not without risk so it is wise to plan for the worst. So if you accept that government is to continue in its destructive path then you have to hedge against it.
The way to do this is to reduce the significance of government on your life. This can be achieved by improving personal resilience increasing personal liberty, reducing your reliance on systems of support and suring up your financial situation (hedging appropriately) – becoming a [more] resllient Australian
I hope you liked this article and found it food for thought
AS EVER ….YOUR FEEDBACK IS MUCH APPRECIATED