PROLOGUE
" Justice Delayed is Justice Denied "
Knavish behaviour exists everywhere, particularly in the post-GFC environment, where contingency replaced normal honesty as key drivers to interpersonal relationships. Contingency has even slipped into the political discourse, deflating what should otherwise be exemplars of leadership.
The prologue leader refers to the circumstance in Australia which deals with the trial for Peter Slipper....formerly Speaker for the House of Representatives, now facing criminal charges for mis-use of his Parliamentary cab charge allowance dockets.
According to newspaper reports this is his first appearance in court since the charges were laid earlier in the calendar year. The significance is of course not the charges, nor the potential defence. No; the significance lay more worryingly in the fact that the case will now take place after the Federal election in September, and means that there is no possibility of being found guilty of a criminal offence, which would otherwise cause an immediate by-election in a Parliament which is knife-edge balanced in terms of the majority numbers of seat-holders.
The "justice denied" refers to the Australian population. The Slipper argument that the amount involved is minor, and should have been handled via administrative arrangements to allow repayment, ignores that this is really about whether a by-election would cause the current minority government to fall short by a couple of weeks of lasting until the election, and the advantages ( if any ) that flow from being in government rather than opposition during the run-up to an election. Doubly surprising in the situation that it could be contended that the same gentleman has been reported as saying rather unflatteringly comments about female body parts, which would otherwise see him as being regarded as moderately sexist. Such behaviour would typically have led to peons of criticism from the current Prime Minister, or her coterie of followers. The Will to Power in politics is always more important than fairness or honesty, despite those concepts being supposedly key drivers in the Social Contract.
Re-thinking the Social Contract is designed to examine a range of breaches in the public trust which have emerged over the last few years: where arbitrariness has replaced the normative properties that legitimate, just and obligating arrangements apply to the whole population, the whole of the time. The most egregious have occurred within the financial services industry, but that is only because the cause of money seems to generate more base responses, and therefore seemingly to justify more contingent behaviours.
The public has a right to expect that the Social Contract will be upheld. Some times, however, the public doesn't know how the contract can be subverted.
