Kharon, agreed, we have no voting power, but what we have is money. That money can be used to buy votes.
To reiterate, what I am suggesting is that we can influence the politicians by running campaigns in marginal seats, and the cheapest form of campaign is a negative campaign.
To put that another way, we don't have to spell out in excruciating detail exactly why CASR 4784 is a load of crap because we will have to send our Thronomisters to Mongolia for recalibrating at great expense every year, and therefore you, Mr. General Public, should vote for the Liberal candidate. That is not the message we want to send.
The message we want to send is DON"T VOTE FOR Mr. XYZ! All we need to do is run a legal negative campaign or provide some funding for those who are already doing so. We don't have to talk about aviation at all! We can talk about dirty coal mining real estate deals, pederasty, anything you like as long as it is legal and resonates negatively with the electorate.
This is the genius of the U.S. lobbying system: we don't have to prove our case in the court of public opinion. We don't have to have closely reasoned technical arguments - the General Public wouldn't understand them and as others have correctly pointed out, they don't care anyway.
All we have to do is implant a reason, any reason, for the electorate not to vote for our "candidate" and that reason is highly unlikely to be an aviation related reason unless an Airbus suddenly drops out of the sky, the reason is far more likely to be questionable commercial dealing, fiddling of government expense accounts or racist statements about some group or other.
It also matters not if the opposition candidate is a green tree hugger who hates aviation. When our candidate points this out to us we simply say: " be that as it may Mr. Candidate, YOU won't be in Parliament". And if we are successful and our candidate gets binned, we then have Four more years to work on the tree hugger and carefully remind him where some of his electoral support came from and ask if he wants the same again or "the treatment"?
As an aside, I have never really given politics this much thought, but the alleged behaviour of CASA, if true, has had a galvanising effect on this old fart.
Last edited by Sunfish; 10th Mar 2013 at 21:36.