There is only one person in Australia i would trust in the position of President of a new Republic of Australia, and that is the cartoonist Michael Leunig.

He has consistently demonstrated his wonderful insights into the condition of modern life in Oz – and how power corrupts in all spheres of life.

Leunig’s sketches do so with unfailing empathy and genuine humour – the two character traits we must insist upon in any aspirant for leadership positions.

His brilliant cartoon on the orange revolution needs to be stored in our visual memory banks to protect us from all those who seek to recruit us into the agendas which hide their own will to power, power, glorious power!

If you have not seen that cartoon – click on this.

Anyone else serving as a President of a new Australian Republic, especially a popularist riding on a newly mobilised  wave of people power, would need to be subject to very careful controls to ensure power – and decision-making power at that – is well and truly based in our local communities (and guaranteed by constitutional reform).

[For more on Michael Leunig,  see  http://www.leunig.com.au ]

PART ONE?

On Monday 11 January I attended a lecture at the University of Wollongong. I expected it to be about community empowerment. This lecture was open to the public as part of the free summer school course UoW Course Pol340 “Politics, the Community, and the Common Good”.

The lecture was “Community building and empowerment” Monica Baroni & Phil Pearce , General Managers/CEO’s of Sydney Council and Greater Shepparton Council respectively.

While what I write makes more sense if you heard their talks, I don’t intend to provide a summary of what they said.

Generally, Monica talked about the need for new thinking in increasing the common good/social capital by way of Council engaging with ‘the community’ through such things as forums. Phil gave an account of how Shepparton Council became aware of differences in various communities and what is required to assist them to overcome social disadvantage.

Hopefully both speakers were video-taped and these could be made available to all via the web through the extensive IT services available at the University of Wollongong and/or the two Councils concerned (in the name of increasing the common good and social capital).

For info on those Councils see links at end of this post.

What interested me was less what they spoke about and more what they did not speak about. You can make fast sense out of a complex system by looking at what it systematically excludes than you can by concentrating solely on what it includes.

Read on for my take on it all.

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