#8 RSS feeds

Kind of jumped into this already, and put up the ATO, News.com and Learning 2.0 RSS feeds earlier.

3 very different stories
ATO Feed has a couple per day, and generally works pretty well, if unspeakably boring.
News.com rushes by without any hope of comprehensive coverage. It's a glimpse feeder, and if you happen to spot an item of interest, click quick!
Learning 2.0 seems to have stopped. Last post was 13th Jan 2007.

I was intending to put the DEWR feed on today, since the Media Releases out of the Department of Employment & Workplace Relations seem to me to take civil service impartiality to a whole new level! Headlines like "Labor on AWAs Nothing More Than a Political Stunt" and "Hypocrisy of Union Bosses Exposed" are obviously the new neutrality of the public service, and certainly not a publicly funded outlet for Joe Hockey's political statements.

However, DEWR doesn't have any RSS feeds, so let's just hope there is some money put aside in the billion dollar advertising campaign that the government has planned to let us, the tax paying and voting population, know what issues are of concern to us. Is there an adult in this country that is NOT aware of WorkChoices?

Oddly, I've been reading of Athenian democracy in classical Greece. Democracy here was a far more participative affair, where the citizens voted directly on the issues, and attendance of voting citizens was compulsory, (mind you voting citizens was a minority of the population, about 5-10,000 of a city of 40-50,000). Coming from a background of local government, citizen participation in democratic institutions interests me (call me strange).

Even in classical times, voting blocks would form, but there was never any reference to the need to inform the citizenry of the issues. Indeed the issues frequently developed right there in the forum, in sometimes lethal ways. Politicians had to convince a majority of each issue, not every 3-4 years. After many years in local government I have become disenchanted by party politics, and politicians. Liberal, Labor or independant, there are remarkably few who wouldn't sell their mother for a superannuation package, and even fewer that remain trustworthy.

I've digressed, but my point being, do we really need to spend money on informing citizens of the issues they should be voting on (and lets remember none of us voted for WorkChoices, it came out only after the last election), or should we be looking at ways to more directly vote on issues and participate in government. If technology allowed up to vote directly on bills in parliament, I suspect politicians would do a much better job of keeping us informed on why we should vote for or against it, rather than the need for a spending spree at the end to attempt to influence the electorate. What possible justification is there for a democratic government telling the demos what to think and vote on, surely it should be the other way.