A female reader of this column, who has voted in the last 23 elections, wrote last week to say that she thought politicians in recent times increasingly cared less about the needs of the people they are meant to represent than at any other time in her memory.
The column measured that comment with the equally excellent letter to The Daily Advertiser editor last Friday by a first-time voter, Gabriel Fox, in which - amongst many inspirational thoughts - she issued this blunt message to politicians: "I want you to know that because this is the first time I vote in a federal election, that it doesn't matter now what you have to say because I don't know you. You have not shown me whether I can trust you; show me that you are listening and that you care about, not only me, but all your constituents with the same love".
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Trust is the key word in Gabriel's letter just as it was a week before when Tony Windsor, as fine an example of the worth of an Independent candidate as you could wish to vote for, inferred in his newspaper column: "Trust is at an all-time low. The Prime Minister is a master of lying, dog-whistling and division. On top of this is a media dominated by a few owners, with outlets that are little more than propaganda machines under the guise of independent thought".
Right at the top of this crass lot is Murdoch's News Limited, closely followed by commercial television and radio.
Hopefully, media laws and the ownership of media will be at the top of a new government's legislative overhaul.
Also, in this week's mail, from one of FOMM's field scouts: "We have inertia because we have arrived at the era of personal greed and the major parties feel obliged to pander to that greed. The test of this election isn't whether Labor or the Liberals can outscore each other; it is a test of each and every Australian as to whether they care about the future of our democracy and political institutions, whether they care about the world our old people die in and our young people will live in, or if they care only about themselves and rorts and indulgences politicians promise them".
As another of my field scout asks: "Are Aussies going to be selfish or generous, concerned for the future or only for the present?"
Most of FOMM's contacts throughout the states are agreed on one issue about the May 21 election - it is not solely about who governs for the next term; it is essentially about where this country is headed in the future. As this column and its supporters have argued for recent years, what the nation needs more than anything is constitutional, parliamentary and electorate change - all are crucial to voter trust because under the control of all governments - federal, state and the odd local council - but particularly a majority of coalition-led governments, trust has increasingly not meant care, hope, belief or honesty; not within a bull's roar of those elements.
Hopefully, media laws and the ownership of media will be at the top of a new government's legislative overhaul.
Then in last Saturday's DA letters, with three weeks to polling day, came one of Mary Kidson's typically measured and equitable comments: "We need a lot more honest behaviour and sensible and logical debate, something that is missing from this election campaign".
Indeed so. Honesty is the key factor here, with political and international editor Peter Hartcher of The SMH driving a massive wedge into the great Liberal lie that it "has unique competence" in operating financial and international affairs.
It simply does not have either, certainly not under Morrison, as Hartcher efficiently exposed. At this moment, as Hartcher explained, when Morrison and his Treasurer claimed that "Labor can't manage money", our gross national debt is 42.5 per cent of GDP. At the peak of Gough Whitlam's disastrous second term, it was 24; at the peak of the Rudd-Gillard governments, it was 20. This Liberal government's own last budget papers, according to Hartcher, said the debt will reach 44.9 per cent in two years, twice as bad as the worst performance by a Labor government in the last half-century.
Two matters rarely mentioned in this election but which journalist Crispin Hull reminds voters; in the past nine years, the Coalition has grossly mismanaged health and education at huge cost to the public purse while our fuel supply is hardly mentioned.
In fact, Hull writes: "Our imported fuel bill is higher than the money we get from coal exports - poor economic management leading to greater security risks".
The time is nigh to elect more candidates of political independence.
