Successive governments have sold out their constituents' interests

Bob Katter is seen as a maverick. He is.

He is seen as an eccentric. He is.

But Bob Katter is a maverick in a party-political system that has lost touch with mainstream Australia. He is certainly "outside the circle" of the corporate, Treasury and union major players who have commandeered the political agenda over the past 20 years.

His decision to cut ties with the National Party should go down as a watershed in Australians politics. It is the first substantial brick out of a crumbling National Party wall, and it could well bring the wall down.

Like me, Bob Katter now realises there is more that can be done outside the party-political circle than inside it if we are to have government for all the people in this country.

It is significant that Katter has now publicly confirmed what I have been saying for the five and a half years I have been in Parliament: the National Party is the little red caboose on the end of a Liberal Party train that has taken the former Country Party in economic and social directions that have seriously hurt its once core constituency.

The Labor Party stands guilty of the same betrayal, while in many of its policies the Liberal Party has trodden all over liberal principles.

Let me explain.

All the forces of economic rationalism, a disease that first struck Australia in the early 80s, have battered the town of Lithgow. Lithgow’s coal mines, electricity industry, defence factory, Berlei undergarment factory, and state rail works have been variously corporatised, privatised, outsourced, rationalised, globalised and in the case of Berlei, moved offshore by tariff cuts. This has cost the community several thousand jobs and more importantly, apprenticeships and inter-generational career paths.

Most of these people had traditionally voted Labor, yet have watched their natural political party sacrifice them on the altar of global competition and something called "world’s best practice".

Down the road around Orange, orchardists have seen their industry wilting before their eyes. Imports of apple juice concentrate from China have gradually increased under world trading agreements, to the point where local suppliers can’t compete. Yet export markets won in Thailand for local apples have been gazumped by massive plantings of the same varieties grown in China with virtually no labour and environmental standards. On the Australian domestic market, major supermarkets have taken a stranglehold on demand, with growers often receiving barely the cost of production for their crops.

Now our quarantine barriers seem about to be lowered to allow in apples from Fire Blight-infested New Zealand, all in the name of free trade and reducing "non tariff barriers".

Most of these orchardists had traditionally voted National Party, yet now see their plight as not dissimilar to those former Labor voters in Lithgow. In many respects they, and thousands of farmers and workers around the country, are soul brothers in the search for a new political representation.

Most Australians have grown up with an expectation that a hard day’s work will reap its rewards. They believe in an egalitarian society and recognise that to maintain it the government will have to play a role, by way of services, and where needed, regulation, market protection, subsidies and grants. The majority also want a fair tax system that progressively taxes income, not regressively taxes consumption.

They see these core standards eroded in recent decades, as government-sponsored greed takes over from government-supported need.

They want, by and large, to hold on to hard-built public assets such as their telecommunications network. They also believed it was an eminently fair market place when there was a Commonwealth-controlled bank and a state bank and insurance company.

They certainly want a regulated minimum Australian ownership of key industries. They are suspicious of governments that court all foreign investment as inherently good in its own right, and they deplore the loss of icon trademarks such as Vegemite and Arnotts Biscuits.

They are also suspicious of Governments that claim corporate control is healthier than public ownership when Government-owned Singaporean companies buy into our airlines and Telcos.

They believe we are too small to compete with the critical mass of the United States or most European countries, yet (for the moment) too "developed" to compete with the cheap labour costs of many Asian countries. Apart from those closely engaged or employed in international markets, they don’t readily recognise any benefits of globalisation and free trade.

They fail to see why environmental and labour standards shouldn’t be included in trade deals.

A growing number of ordinary Australians, rural dwellers too, also despair at our environmental degradation, and see no urgency from Government to fix it.

Especially in rural areas, they wonder why they can’t deal directly with people they once knew as "public servants" but who are now most often nameless and faceless voices who hang off the end of a phone at a distant call centre.

These disconnected and disillusioned are told by Labor or Coalition Governments that interest rates are low, inflation is low, unemployment rates are low so everything is OK. But very many, perhaps a majority, don’t feel OK. They believe powerful interests beyond their control are screwing them.

They also know their elected representatives, for the most part, support different sets of rules for their own entitlements and behaviour than they legislate for the rest of the community.

They see double standards everywhere. They can’t access their pensions early if they happen to qualify for one. They know they or their kids only have to work an hour a week to be excluded from unemployment lists. They feel the effects of underemployment, but rarely does their government or the media mention it.

They know their contribution to gross domestic product and household spending is built on the back of uncertain employment and a credit card.

They just don’t believe their governments. They become cynical of a government that causes so much pain with cutbacks supposedly for the good of all in its first few budgets, then cynically restores part of those cutbacks (or hands out bonuses) to key voting groups when the political imperative demands.

They wonder whether the apparently so precious "surplus" is created only for the Stock Market’s gratification, for the money traders and stock jocks playing a glorified casino that has nothing to do with raising capital to build things and provide jobs for the kids of ordinary punters.

So is it any wonder Australians are increasingly disillusioned with government? Is it any wonder that more than 40 Independents have defied the party-bias of preferential voting in recent years to enter Australian parliaments?

Between 20% and 30% of the electorate is now placing its primary vote with other than the three major parties. Because our lower houses aren’t proportionally representative that vote is not yet represented in a similar proportion of seats.

However, voters will more and more seek out those representatives who have no other agenda but to represent their interests honestly and fairly, believing the sum total of Parliament and government should be made up of its component parts, the ordinary people, and not the dominant and powerful interest groups.