opinion

An open letter to Australian politicians: you've lost the plot and we are over it.

 

Dear Politicians,

Stop it. Just stop it.

We elect you to run the country and yet all you seem to care about is back-stabbing and back-biting and destroying the people you hate within your own party with this leadership spill.

You are so breathtakingly out of touch with what people need from you, what people elected you to do, what this country so desperately requires to survive and thrive.

With the news that the immensely unpopular and extremely conservative Peter Dutton may be about to become our 7th Prime Minister in 10 years, we are gob-smacked.

No matter how you vote or which way you lean, we have had a gut full of your self indulgent nonsense on both sides. Nobody voted for a party led by this man. Not one single Australian. And yet here we are.

Don’t know what’s happening in Canberra? Mamamia Out Loud speaks to the woman who broke the #libspill story, Sharri Markson…

As you plot and scheme and count numbers and look at polls, Australia is burning.

As you scramble to destroy your colleagues and elect a man many in Australia had never even heard of to be the leader of our country, the people who elected you to represent us are suffering.

Here are some of the things you should be addressing instead of playing musical chairs like a pack of toddlers:

  • One woman a week is killed by a current or former partner.
  • A 12-year-old girl who sought asylum in Australia and is now on Nauru has tried to set herself alight. Another girl, aged 17, is on a hunger strike and in critical condition. A 12-year-old boy on Nauru has refused to eat for 20 days.
  • 100 per cent of NSW is currently in drought, and scientists have directly linked it to global warming.
  • More than 100,000 Australians are now homeless, up 14 per cent in the last five years.
  • The life expectancy of Indigenous Australians is an average of 10 years shorter than non-Indigenous Australians.
  • Half of the Great Barrier Reef has died since 2016.
  • Australia is ranked the third least affordable country for housing.
  •  Overcrowding in rural hospitals has reached crisis point.
  • The National Broadband Network entirely misjudged the market and the reality of fast-moving technology.

We have lost confidence in your ability to govern our country since you cannot even seem to govern yourselves. We are horrified by your incompetence, your narcissism and your utter contempt for the people who elected you.

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We are disgusted by your obsession with polls and how you cannot seem to commit yourselves to a single course of action that will advance our country and support the men, women and children who are the real victims of your petty egotistical faction fights.

You are wrecking our country with your instability, your lack of consideration for what’s best for Australia and your petty, vengeful incompetence. Every time you change leaders, the country goes back a year.

Nothing gets done.

It’s musical chairs as you all jockey for position and new cabinet positions, new portfolios, new factional alliances, new ways to advance your political careers… it’s a mess and the Australian people are the victims.

lib spill
While these men laugh, people are suffering. Image: AAP.
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There are Australians who have never known a Prime Minister who has served out a full term because none has since John Howard was voted out of office.

Not Kevin Rudd. Not Julia Gillard. Not Tony Abbot. And now, not Malcolm Turnbull.

This situation is a shambles and a national and international embarrassment. This is not about Labor or Liberal. This is not an issue for a political party but for a generation of politicians who are staggeringly out of touch with what you have been elected to do.

We deserve better. We deserve leaders who can make tough decisions and who don't put their own self-interests and spiteful need for revenge and saving their own skins before our own.

We need political parties who can demonstrate the discipline and work ethic required to run our country. And once again, you have let us down. And for what? To start again under a man who appears to be so widely reviled by the electorate as to be seemingly unelectable.

Was it worth it?

How is what's going on in Australian politics making you feel? Tell us in the comments, we're listening.