Direct Online citizen law-making
Online technology could make citizen-initiated referendums much easier, and change the way we make law and govern ourselves.
While ancient Greek democracy did not permit women or slaves to vote, in one way their democracy was still in advance of ours: their system provided for each voter to be able to vote on each proposed law, which ours does not.
When you think about it, if it were practical for the entire electorate to vote on any given law, what would justify the continued existence of politicians or parliaments? Their whole justification is, or was, that they are needed to ‘represent’ the people in law-making. But Parliament itself is a kind of information-processing system, albeit a very clunky one, and prone to the institutionalised miscarrying of the people’s will. It is a system developed when the only practical way of getting input from people spread out over the countryside, was for one of them to physically get on his horse and go to some central place, and represent the others of his district.
War on Verbs and Nouns
At this time I believe we should be trying to get our beliefs in front of the public in order to prime them in preparation for the federal election. As such I have sent a letter to the editor of ‘The Australian’ on the Haneef matter, concentrating on the rights aspects of the case.
I would encourage all of those who can to follow suit on this sort of activity to do so, and a few press releases by ‘Spokesmen’ for the LDP wouldn’t go astray at this time.
It is probably a good time to brush up our skills on this and your comments and suggestions for improvements in this effort will help.Those with less experience should go for ‘low hanging fruit’ type subjects, – the type of material easily accepted by the public, and if in any doubt about content should contact us with inquiries.
Local papers are a good target as they are widely read within the local community and the letters section is always popular.
This is advice from the editor, “If you haven’t already done so,please include a contact telephone number and home address. Letters sent as an attachment cannot be processed and will need to be sent in the body of the email”.
In the old days the heading ‘Letters to the Editor’ was also required, however I do not know if this is still the case.If anyone wishes to rip this off and use it in another paper they are welcome to do it, but it might be wise to see what our gurus think of it first.
Anyway, here it is, lets see what we can do: -
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