Re: MTD Yardman Transaxle Rebuild
GOOD man Ron, Controversial is one thing , Political is a NO NO, although at times, this thread has lightly, VERY lightly, swooshed by with it, so far ,so good !!
People who work with their hands tend to be more pragmatic than those work in their own heads.
people who live on or work on farms generally are well rooted in reality rather than an idology.
people involved in primary production ( rather than subsidy farming ) usually come to realize that no matter what colour is in power they get screwed.
People with a sound scientific / engineering background can usually find a real causality path and understand that things happening tomorrow can actually be the end result of things that happened 50 + years ago and not necessarily because of what happened yesterday although they can still be connected but that might not necessarily be causal.
I for one have no strong political or religious beliefs. Which is fairly typical of most Ozzies.
My parents were all ardent Labour supporters ( left wing ) but I have never voted along party lines in my life.
He who put foreward the best platform gets my vote ( which is compulsory down here ).
One thing where we do it a lot better than the USA is the English inheritance of a perminent public service so that tempers massive transmissions from left to right when a government changes and lessens the corruption that your system seems to be designed to encourage.
Compulsory voting means that we all have to vote so the parties do not need to get everyone worked up to a fever pitch to get them off their backsides & into a polling booth.
Thus we do not get the passionate political fanatics who think they should shoot the opposition or violently clash with any one who votes for the other side.
It also means that no party needs to buy their way into office so smaller parties can run & even get elected which keeps raving loonies like Pauline Hanson or religious bigots like Rev Fred Nile out of the governing party where they could do major damage.
And of course the government does not end up being so deep in the pockets of vested interest that the financiers end up dictating policy ( sort of like Mr Trumph's tax cuts )
Down side is the population tends to get very appathetic about elections & the donkey vote plays a big part about determining who ends up in power.
The major parties tend to get very lazy because they know it is only a matter of time before their snouts are in the trough.
And we also get a lot of candidates that would be hard put to run a bush toilet running for one of the major parties.
Witness the current debarcle where 1/5 of the elected representatives were not legal candidates by virtue of their citzenship.
So politics is not a hot bed passionate subject to be avoided at all costs down here.
And religion is quickly following suit
In the last census 3.5 % of the population ticked the "other religion" box & wrote in Jedi, 28% ticked the nun box and another 8.3% called themselves "non-denominational"