PS on PG

[hmpf]

I have to say post-Midnight Oil Peter Garrett mystifies me. I cannot for a minute believe that he didn't believe passionately in the things he sang about for 25 years. If fame, wealth or groupies ;-) were what he was really after, there'd have been easier, less controversial ways to achieve all of that - even in the 80s, angry left-wing environmentalist rock was not a particularly likely ticket to success in the music business; you don't do that kind of thing (especially not for a staggering two and a half decades) if you don't believe in it. So what the heck happened to him, between then and now? What does he think he is achieving, now? Can he really not see that no tiny incremental gain he may make in what I can only assume are complicated political backroom trade-offs, really means a damn? And that we - that's the Big We, aka, All Life on Planet Earth - simply cannot afford compromise and political change at a snail's pace anymore (if we ever could)? Frankly, if it is political constraints and not honest conviction that's guiding his decisions, then one furious and very public resignation speech exposing those constraints for what they are would do the world more good than another I don't know how many years on the leash in office. I assume he doesn't want to harm his government, on the basis of the assumption that it's the lesser evil compared to a return of the conservatives. But, really, sometimes the lesser evil is evil enough. And if the instituted political process really is that broken, then we need our radicals outside of the political establishment, agitating, not inside biting their tongues. (Political agitation has a bad reputation, but it's really a necessary element of processes of political change.)

Granted, I don't know enough about Australian politics to really be able to judge how much hope there is for 'changing the system from within.' I guess I'm just generally skeptical of that concept.