Save western Sydney’s former ADI Site. Website of the ADI Residents Action Group
The Politics

Do we really live in a democracy?  

Are political and policy decisions made whereby the foremost consideration is the public interest and the greater good? 

Contact the Politicians

To understand why political parties make certain policy decisions one must understand the ideologies behind modern politics.

Governments in most modern societies have embraced globalisation and neoliberalism. 

Two types of urban governance have dominated in Australia in the last two decades. The 1980s saw Social Democratic Managerialism, characterised by state governments that managed their affairs similarly to the private sector, dominate. Neoliberalism or economic rationalism was adopted as the dominant ideology by state and federal governments after 1990. This saw the rise of corporate liberalism a form of governance where governments view themselves as corporations. (Gleeson and Low, 2000: 92) 

‘Contemporary neoliberalism in its various institutional and political guises, has set out to reduce democracy in the domain of planning…neoliberalism is not in the public interest but in the interest of the corporate public’. Gleeson and Low (2000: 190)

Democracy, traditionally has meant, rule of the citizens. Dahl, a pluralist theorist, believes that democracy is impossible in populations over 50,000. Dahl argued that modern industrial countries like Australia were ‘not democracies so much as polyarchies - shifting coalitions of powerful interest groups’. (in Marshall, 1998: 147)

Australian democracy is defined by ‘free, fair elections, through which citizens must periodically participate in government’. (Bridgman and Davis, 1998: 76) But others such as Jack Mundey, onetime leader of the Builders Labourers Federation, claim that the participating in an election every 3-4 years does not give citizens enough say in issues affecting their community. Mundey (in Gleeson and Low, 2000: 164) states that:

It is not good enough in a modern society to say that the only right an individual has is to vote once in every three years in an election. I believe in everyday democracy. If a decision is incorrect, any individual or organization has the right to do all that’s necessary to change that decision. Other wise how can decisions be altered?

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