Good or Evil?

I’m not a political animal, yet I’ve become involved in trying to protect the local area from developers who would like to see the coast overburdened with tourist facilities.

This fight has been going on for more than ten years and I’ve been happy to let others do the hard yards.

Not anymore. When the local community consultative group asked for some input, I considered it carefully.

For me, I have the qualifications and experience to help the local group; and that experience goes from high-brow, well-researched debate, to down-in-the-mud dirty tricks. I learned from the best: the Canberra political scene, and the local council revels in such methods. And the lies that have been told…

The problem, from what I’ve seen and researched, is that the local consultative group expect to deal with reasonable people. And, sad to say, they are wrong. They are dealing with people who are protecting their own agendas, interests and power bases – it is, after all, politics.

I don’t want this area to be over-run by towering, half-empty apartments, or the associated social problems that comes with rapid development that will ruin such a beautiful place. Nor do I want the local village to die off because of a lack of development.

So, the trick is to undermine the rhetoric with hard facts, policies and legislation; getting hidden information into the hands of the public.

Do I use my skills for good or evil? Ah, that’s a question every writer must ask themselves.

As writers, we are, by nature, solitary beings; we have to be. Constant interruptions raise the blood pressure, distract from the story, demolish our thought processes and generally piss us off. Well, it does to me.

How long, though, can we ignore the outside world? In short, we can’t. The outside world provides our inspiration; without interaction, there is no integrity in our work, no matter what genre you work in.

Local politics is an excellent way to study diverse personalities and interactions on a personal and group level; to understand motivations, agendas, goals, behaviour and body language. Who is lying and who is telling the truth, better yet, who is telling the truth, as they know it, at a particular time? And how do they react when the lie is exposed?

There is also – I say with a smirk – a certain satisfaction in returning to the public arena to kick the people who had me fired as an editor for a so-called independent newspaper.

I’ll stay in the background though; someone else can be the public persona. I'll let you know how it goes...