What else the rorting of the public purse via travel expenses has exposed …

… The unrepresentative nature of our party politicians …

If our party politicians were truly representing us they would have been very aware that rorting travel expenses was not within community expectations.

Quite clearly they did not realise what the community’s expectations were. That tells us that they are not listening to and representing the community and therefore they are not competently doing the most basic part of the job we are paying them to do. This is fundamental stuff.

The elected representatives, the overwhelming majority of them members of one political party or another, are telling us that the actions we find so odious are largely legal but not within the public’s expectations.

I would have thought that if your job was to represent the constituents of your electorate, and you were competently performing that task, you would have been well versed in what was within the public’s expectation regarding greedy sods who over-indulged at the trough on publicly funded “entitlements”; and you would have long ago made sure it did not happen.

That we have found this situation going on tells us very, very clearly that the understanding of the collective body of representation that forms our government of the public expectation is woefully inadequate, to the point of being incompetent.

It is been shown to be completely unrepresentative. Had it been representative this problem would not have happened because the rules would have been crystal clear, far less generous, and properly enforced.

Certainly the Liberal Party has absolutely no excuse for not understanding the public attitude, given that it was a central pillar of Joe Hockey’s first Budget, the one that came with the mantra, endlessly repeated, that “the age of entitlement was over”.

Any Liberal politician rorting their expenses should resign their seat, immediately, on the grounds of incompetent performance of their job.

What is revealed is that many of our politicians have not been fulfilling the most basic function of their role, which is to represent their constituents. My understanding of that particular part of a politician’s role is that it means understanding what your constituents’ expectations are regarding spending of public money and communicating them to the Parliament.

To be caught in a shit storm such as this tells us very clearly that the entire structure of both liberal and labor, and to a lesser extent the Greens have not been paying attention to, and therefore are not representing their constituents, who make up the very annoyed general public.

Perhaps it is time to ask ourselves what exactly these party members who claim to be our elected representatives are actually doing, and who they are really representing.

It looks increasingly like they are looking after themselves and their special interest lobby groups and shafting the rest of us at every opportunity.

Once we have spent some time doing that we might like to consider how we might bring an end to this rampage of greed and self-interest.

Lots more independent politicians might be a great way to start …

*Simon Warriner is a 54 year old farmer who has worked on the highest of high tech and as a scrap yard labourer, was taught to read by a founding member of a right wing political party, and detests wasting effort on activity that does not get the root cause of a problem. He strongly believes that the source of our governmental problems and thus many of our societal problems is to be found in the character of those we elect to govern us. All problems are leadership problems, as scholars of the subject as diverse as Sun Tzu and Machiavelli have told us. Fix the leadership and many of the other causes that sap our energy and enjoyment of life will fade away.