Tough Choice!

[mikz]

All the political movement sites are sending out their 'priorities for 2008' surveys at the moment. The toughest is getup.org.au's People's Agenda for Parliament, because in addition to the available rankings of 'not important' to 'very important' was the rank 'top 3 priorities'. Sheesh, how do you pick the three most important out of this lot?

• Protecting our human rights and civil liberties (e.g. Bill of Rights, anti-terror laws, same-sex rights)
• Making high-quality, prevention-focused health care accessible to all
• Improving community infrastructure and planning (e.g. public transport)
• Supporting and empowering the elderly, the mentally ill, people with disabilities, and their carers
• Ensuring Australians' access to diverse information and media (e.g. affordable broadband, ABC/SBS)
• Becoming a good global citizen (e.g. overseas aid, UN, global poverty)
• Respecting the rights and improving the living standards of Indigenous Australians
• Becoming environmentally sustainable (e.g. climate change, water, forests, marine habitats)
• Protecting workers' rights (e.g. WorkChoices)
• Strengthening our democracy (e.g. government accountability, democratic participation)
• Remaining nuclear-free and stopping uranium exports
• Making high-quality primary, secondary, and tertiary public education accessible to all Australians
• Withdrawing troops from Iraq and urging the USA to change its approach to the ‘war on terror’
• Combating entrenched poverty and narrowing the divide between the rich and the poor
• Reforming refugee policy (e.g., ending mandatory detention)

Some of these were extremely difficult not to put in the top three, especially healthcare and disability services#&8212;those are incredibly important for some people I care deeply about. I also had to give up my pet topic of public transport/infrastructure, and I felt bad for not making indigenous issues a top 3-will indigenous people ever get the attention they need?

But I believe I chose the right three, because they're necessary for our society to function so we can continue to work on the rest:

Human rights and civil liberties is the first one of these: the ability to speak freely is absolutely essential for the rest, and fixing Australia's appalling human rights record is necessary to give us the credibility we need to tackle issues overseas and be good 'global citizens'. I'm pleased that same-sex rights also get taken along for the ride.

Environmental sustainability is the second one I chose-how could society continue to function if we continue to plunder our resources as we have for a century? We can't have healtcare or end poverty if there aren't resources to sustain the population!

The last one I picked is education, perhaps the biggest victim of the Howard Government. It's the most important tool to give young people to help them keep our society moving forward. Rudd has promised an 'education revolution', but he won't deliver unless we keep the pressure on.

I ranked pretty much everything else as 'very important', except for 'withdrawing troops from Iraq', an issue that, while important, gets so much attention that it overshadows all these other, more important issues.

There are options missing from this list, and I'm disappointed that getup.org.au hasn't noticed:

• Winding back the censorship laws that the Howard Government introduced in its second and third term to appease a couple of wowser party senators. This is an extremely important issue, especially since Rudd and his mob seem to want to jump on the same bandwagon with their ridiculous yet dangerous Internet censorship legislation. We need to speak out on this, loudly.
• Drug law reform. This stalled when the Howard Government came in, and since the Greens plus Labor don't quite have a majority in the Senate, it's unlikely that we'll make much progress in this term. But we must continue to press the issue, to prevent Australia getting caught up in the drug scare hoopla that's gripped the United States for decades, and to pave the way for progress after the 2011 election. (Talk about 'progressive'!)
• Making Australia a Republic. This may not be an urgent issue, but it's an idea that most progressives are tired of waiting for progress on, so moveon.org.au should give it due attention.