Short Leash

I am pretty much in agreement with Mark Latham about the joke that's journalism.

It seems to me that most of us will be pushing up daisies if we were to wait for our various governments to take action to clean up our dysfunctional media.

In the UK Leveson looks to be dead in the water, in AU Finklestein has already been buried and in the US they won't even bother with an enquiry.

Because government has long since lost any desire to act in the interests of their citizens.  These days politicians - even so-called progressive ones - are all about encouraging monopoly, shafting people and sucking up to warmongers.

And that's when they are working to a plan - most of the time they just meander about in a policy daze - trying to second guess an equally thick opposition.

And the truly scary thing is that most of us haven't even noticed yet.  We will soon enough.

We need to rebuild our democracy and introduce some strong, interactive and two-way engagement between the people and their politicians.

Citizen initiated referenda and recall elections are good places to start.  Just so we can keep them on a very short leash.