Our constitution, the system and democracy The structure of any constitution must provide the foundational basis for the economic and social order which is to prevail in a given society.
Australia’s current constitution presupposes that individual liberty must be higher in the hierarchy of rights than the collective wellbeing of the members of that society. It lays the foundation, by its adherence and administration of an economic order based on ownership of private property, for an economic structure in which a tiny class of super rich elite maintain control over the vast majority of the economic system.
The nature of our constitution produces a weak, representative democracy which masks the wholly undemocratic distribution of society’s resources. Does voting lead to decision making which is in the interests of the overwhelming majority? By this test, representative democracy as it is known in the west has failed miserably.
There is another interpretation of the concept of democracy, which looks beyond the vote and directly to the material conditions of society. In this perspective, perfection is achieved through true equality between citizens. It is more than a vote but a path, its test being the equality between the physical conditions in which members of society live.
When this new measure of democracy is used we see an undemocratic society. The wretched disparity between those that earn many millions of dollars a year, fly in private jets and own hundreds of houses, and those that scrape together a living through hard work and thrift and great sacrifice, is proof that representative democracy as we know it is has failed.
It has failed to develop the minds and untapped potential of its citizens that by far, slave in the torment of long hours at menial tasks. It has failed to provide equality and by this failure justice, which is so often spoke of as the objective of law. There is no justice with a constitution which upholds the rights of some over the rights of others and creates a legal framework by which to legitimise this disparity.
The rights given by the Australian constitution instils a system of private ownership and control over vast tracts of economic and natural resources. To find an example, the decision to clear cut an old growth forest is in actual practice made by the corporation which benefits from the destruction.
Our system is one of perverse incentive which is destroying the waters, the soil, the forests and the climate.This destruction is global in nature, driven by the economic engines which were built on the constitutional right to private property, hence private capital and produces a system which individual corporate bodies must veraciously consume in violent competition or perish.
The system produces a mutilated caricature of natural selection, whereby instead of the fittest surviving, our economic landscape produces only the most rotten, sociopathic, exploitative and corrupt corporate entities.
Those that destroy the environment, rob our children, rob our soils and give the least back are those which create the most profit.They displace any remanets of sentimental benevolence which even the most corrupt king could express and the corporate entity is beholden by this structure to divulge and embrace evil by necessity. In a word, survival of the sociopathic.
The foundations of our society have produced every problem we have today, every economic meltdown, every war, every environmental disaster, including climate change, every resource crisis due to vested interests which prevent a reasonable response and long term solution. It is the foundation, our constitution and our belief in this document that brings forth every law built upon it.
For this reason I propose that the only rational means forward is the revolutionary re-constitution of our society, in order to create the social and economic framework in law by which we may build a truly equitable and sustainable society.
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