Playing the Silly Bugger
I have always been amazed by the extents that people will go to to win elections. The saying goes that all politics are local, and local politics are often the worst offenders for the great game of silly buggers.
There was a very bad 80’s era movie called ‘Brewsters Millions’, I won’t bore you all with the details, but there was a line in the movie and I paraphrase “Why would anybody want to spend $500,000 for a job that pays $100,000″.
It’s always interested me the motivations behind local council politics. How interesting can it be to exert your political philosophies onto the management of the three r’s. Roads, Rates and Rubbish.
But people do, and they apply their full emotional capacities to attaining that council position. I wonder how they feel once they do actually get there and realise that they now have to deal with a council that isn’t really interested in their philosophies and just wants to be left alone to do their jobs.
After all, why would you want to do it? Is it the perks of calling yourself Councillor Joe or Jane Blogs? Is it the swanky feeling you get to see your name in the local paper that less that 10% of the population actually reads? Or is it something more? Is it the fact that you beat others to the role?
This very long winded introduction, that got away from me a bit, was to actually discuss the shenanigans of the campaign.
Every campaign has to deal with them. The defaced or blocked signs, the phony letterbox drops, accusations, intimidations and outright lies that follows and preceeds every election campaign.
I guess I am fairly sanguine to the whole thing. I expect it, so there really isn’t any need to get upset by it. The campaign for the MBRC at both Division and Mayoralty levels has been no exception this year. If anything, it is getting worse. Signs tampered with, accusations about sexual harrasment, corflutes blocked and defaced, these are all part of the cut and thrust of the traditional election campaign in Australia and local candidates in particular.
I don’t actually see anything wrong with this, it can be distateful, but at least it gets the general voting public interested in local politics. I mean, lets face it, Local Council Chambers is the most reliable cure for insomnia known to man. Anything that gets people intersted in politics, regardless of the reason, just has to be a good thing.
Show me a person who can sit through an entire day of Council Chambers deliberations and I will show you a person badly in need of a life.
So embrace the shenanigans of coucil election. Revel in the mindless debate about road closures, traffic calming and rubbish collections. Grovell in the delicious sewer of personal and political peccidilloes and generally laugh at the poor fools whose eyes are about to be opened by the inanities of local council chambers politics. But whatever else you do, get involved and maybe, just maybe, we might get value for money out of our rates.