Shouts from the desert

The unions and other average people tried it on IR and it was routinely dismissed, I'd imagine if others did the same, it would also be done.

Politics is a no-win situation for the people.

Actually, traffic to this web site is actually higher now than it was during the 2004 election.

While it may sometimes be necessary to change our approach to fixing the problems we see, giving up is never the right answer. We have all heard Edmund Burke's quote "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." If those who seek to protect freedom give up, then those who would take it from us will win.

The greatest challenge these days is to get people involved, largely because people feel powerless, especially in the face of ongoing losses in the battle of ideas to opponents who deal in stirring up emotions rather than anything approximating reasoned argument. When you go through the opinion section of the newspapers, you find that the right wing commentators - with only one exception I am aware of - prefer bullying, ridicule and appeals to emotion over logically supporting their case. The right does not have the exclusive franchise on the use of these baseless techniques, with some of the left wing commentators adopting similar tactics, but the right does seem to use this approach almost exclusively - a tactic that in my view implicitly admits that their positions cannot realistically be supported by reason.

Jeremy Goff, founder of the Bennelong Institute, has recently been complaining that people do not seem to care what happens. I disagree - I think people do care, they just believe they have no way of changing the outcome, and if they see no prospect of success, then they see participation as futile and hence a waste of their time. This is not helped by Mark Latham's claim in his diaries that participation is futile.

I have a personal motto that goes like this: "The surest way to fail is not to try." When I get discouraged, I return to the motto because I find a basic truth in it, and I am not the only person to come up with it. Even though the odds may be against success, as long as you are making the attempt you have a much better chance of getting results than if you make no attempt at all.

Mark Latham says not to join political parties, however political parties have resources - money and volunteers - that can overwhelm isolated individuals. The biggest battle an independent candidate faces is getting word to the voters. It is better for good people to join dominant parties. If all the true liberals who were not already members of a party were to join the Liberal Party, then the influence of the extreme right - those who want to impose their authoritarian social agenda on the rest of us - would be so diluted that it would be of no consequence whatsoever. Conversely, if true liberals avoid the Liberal Party, then by doing so they help give power to the extreme right, placing the vast resources of the Party in their hands.

There are other things that good people can do, such as participating in non-partisan organisations like the Bennelong Institute and discussing political ideas publicly. But the worst thing of all is to do nothing.