Do the Russians love their children too?

In the aftermath of a 'surprise' result in the Australian federal elections, and in the wake of long-form comparisons being made between it and the Trump/Brexit debacles in the rest of the Anglophone world, it may be relevant to examine the fault-lines between the 'local' interest and the 'common' interest, and whether one can still support the idea that people can be persuaded, emotionally or otherwise, to vote against their 'own' interests.
In this convoluted mass-media landscape, where partisan-interest-driven scare campaigns prey on the susceptible, and folks are living to a ripe old age even while witnessing and living through cataclysmic changes in local weather patterns and extreme weather events, is the message that most of us seem to invest in de rigueur; about imminent societal collapse and species extinction, actually a lived experience for the wider electorate? When jobs are scarce and 're-training', especially for wizened self-appointed subject matter experts in our rural and regional areas, the only option, can we really not extrapolate the results of what seems to be a self-evident choice, to most of us, of local and federal leadership to the existential concerns of a wide swathe of our fellow citizens?
People get used to a certain way of life; those ways of life involve religion, food, self-defence, sustenance, and kinds of work; those kinds of work have not been subject to a great variation on the use of the basic ready-made cognitive and dexterous tools that most of us are born with and have learned to use functionally for a plethora of tasks at hand, over millennia; only the processes by which we use them have changed over the course of time. Can we really begrudge the person taught from a young age that; they have to be self-reliant; are meant to take advantage of the plentiful, bountiful earth around them; will never fail if they have faith; is duty-bound to resist the encroacher and be suspicious of the foreigner; who has only ever had a liminal understanding of the intersection between infrastructure and policy-making and special interest lobbies and technological disruption, their support of the cautious, limited, unimaginative sceptre of a cowardly political representation that can only reaffirm that uneasiness in the pit of their stomach?
If we are to really be progressive, we have to embrace the conceptual realities of the idea of progress in the case of that seminal and elemental Joe/Jane of the bush. They are alienated from pop-culture discourse. They are only bound to the science of change in so far as they can see it, or smell it, or 'feel' it, whatsoever that may mean to them. This notion of uninformed resistance on the part of neo-luddites, burying their heads in the sand, and tied to the local iterations of their guns and their gods, must end lest we dance with the prospect of mass insurrection and civil strife for generations to come. We cannot let fear dictate our policy, we cannot let misinformation lead us astray from our responsibilities, we cannot let ignorance subsume our hope for a better life in a better world. The sooner we include everyone in a 'common' vision, the faster we will be able to fulfil it. After all, we and Sting do now know that, back in the eighties, the Russians did love their children too.

#Auspol

I cannot vote in this election, though I most probably will in the next one. This puts me in the unique position, advantageously or disadvantageously, of a concerned political stakeholder incapable of participation. What this uniqueness gives me is an 'out' - a way to distance myself from the complicity of my fellow man/woman in the choosing of the quality of governance in this country over the next three years, and the option to affect a studious silence when presented with the opportunity to respond to the inevitable manifestations of the shortcomings of the next government with either a jaded, "I told ya so..", or a shame-faced, "If you reckoned the other side would have done better, you're dreaming...". That will be the sum total of the result of all these myriad gladiatorial contests and psycho-social dramas being played out in the media about the choice for our next national political leadership, at least for me.
I cannot deny that I feel a huge dread conjured up from the depths of my modern human soul these days when elections and political representation are being discussed wherever they happen over the world. Whether on hearing about extensions of 'lifetime' chairmanships, such as what happened in China recently, or the discrediting of validly conducted elections, such as what is happening in Turkey right now, I am less and less convinced that the fundamental democratic processes for representation that some states have put in place appeal at all to the vast majority of human beings across the world, exactly at a time when the stakes for a valid representation of the public interest have never been higher in the history of human civilisation. We are faced with existential threats of climate disaster, tribal internecine conflict stoked by the insidious appeal of white and religiously chauvinistic nationalism, the never-ending flow of millions of refugees, and the erosion of trust in institutions that have traditionally safeguarded the inevitability of progress in the world such as education, medicine, and journalism. What would a citizen anywhere in the world gain by dipping their toe into these troubled waters simply for the chance to claim some 'skin in the game'? Isn't it better to find some way into the globalised system of capital financing or multi-national corporatism to ensure our continued relevance in this world in which the very ground beneath our collective feet seems to shake every time we move an inch towards developing any sense of conviction?
There is no doubt that some people, and we all know a few in our families or amongst our past acquaintances and friends, have been way ahead of the curve in preparing themselves and their immediate circles for this cruel world the rest of us seem to have suddenly found ourselves in. The question is whether those people have really succeeded in insulating themselves from the coming weather-related, market-collapsing, and politics-negating catastrophes that all that cumulative subjectivity and 'sensible pragmatism' has been preparing for and ushering in over the last thirty years.
The abiding problem with cynicism, I have always found, is that it eventually leaves one without a map with which to navigate one's way out from under its weight. So, yes, I will have formed an opinion over the next fortnight on what I believe would be the best possible future that my daughter could have, and which political persuasion, whether in the form of a political party's stated policy position or in the utterances of a particularly well-informed independent, would best herald in that future. We are, after all, a very thinly populated country situated in a very far corner of the world. If we cannot even govern ourselves appropriately given all our natural and civic advantages, what hope can there be for a multi-cultural, multi-linguistic, multi-dimensional world out there?