The budget and 'democracy'
Every year, at 7.30 pm on the second Tuesday of May, the federal treasurer gives a half-hour speech in which he (there has never been a woman treasurer) "hands down" the national budget.
In the following hours and days, the mass media goes into a frenzy of commentary and analysis of the budget papers to inform the Australian people what the federal government's revenue-raising measures and expenditure plans will mean for their lives.
This annual ritual is a key part of the Australia's "democratic" parliamentary system of government. It provides a graphic demonstration of just how little real democracy — popular sovereignty — there is in the parliamentary system.
The budget is drawn up in secret by a few treasury bureaucrats, after secret haggling between the top officials of the various government departments and their political bosses in the cabinet. It is then made public by the treasurer.
The overwhelming majority of those to whom the government is supposed to be accountable — the voting public — is excluded from any in-put.
Of course, as the scandal over the $100 million purchase of magnetic resonance imaging machines has revealed, in preparing the budget, government ministers and department officials do consult with some members of the "public" — the representatives of big business and the wealthy.
The only members of the voting public who are not consulted in preparing the budget are the great majority — the working people whose combined labour provides the revenue for the government's budget. Under the parliamentary system of "democracy" all voters are equal, but some, by virtue of the fact that their income is also derived from the labour of others, are deemed to be vastly "more equal" than others.
The parliamentary system, of course, does not entirely exclude working people from having a say in the business of government. Every three years or so, they are consulted as to which gang of corporate-sponsored and -funded political bosses will conduct the secret discussions with the top government bureaucrats and the owners of the corporations to prepare the national budget.
Every three years or so, and for five seconds, working people are allowed to "exercise" their "popular sovereignty" by isolating themselves in a voting booth and placing numbers next to a list of candidates' names. Having dropped their ballot paper in a ballot box, for the next two years and 364 days they are excluded from any say in anything the government does.
As with the national budget, all decisions taken by the government about workers' lives are made in secret and "handed down" to them.
This is only to be expected from a system of government based on a society whose foundation is the business of extracting private fortunes for the few out of the labour of the majority. When the business of government is ensuring the smooth functioning of the capitalist private-profit system, the working majority must be excluded from any say in its decisions.
And when the majority of people have no say in the decisions made by governments, it should not surprise that these decisions do not meet the needs and wishes of the majority of people. The parliamentary system of "democratic" government simply was not created to fulfil this function. Instead, it was set up to make the business of government governing for business.