Just this morning I saw the under-siege Peter Garrett on the front pages of the abc and smh websites, and had mixed feelings I thought would be worth exploring. The nutshell version is that at first I felt sorry for him, but after thinking about it I don’t.
I think my sympathy came from the personal connection I feel with him. It was his voice, out the front of Midnight Oil, that exposed me to many of the social justice values that I now have. And I was gutted when he entered politics he decided to join the ALP and not a party which actually had the values he seemed to embody for so long. But he chose his sleeping companions, and the grilling he’s getting from the Opposition is the kind of scrutiny and politician should expect.
The following video was the Oils performance that really hammered it home for me. I couldn’t listen to the band for ages once Garrett joined the ALP and started back-flipping on his principles. Now I see them as two different people.
Writing/maintaining a blog is one of those things where a simple rule applies. The longer you haven’t done something, the harder it is to start doing it. I’m thinking that rule also applies to politics: plenty of people get into it with the right intentions, but after years of toeing party lines and compromising values, do they come out broken beyond repair?
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