Every election should be about healthcare. Or education.

It shouldn’t be about something so fundamental as finance. Of course it’s important – it pays for everything we want to do with our lives and with our country. On it rests every other decision, every other matter (almost).

But didn’t we have 90 or so years to get that part of our country figured out?

Shouldn’t we now have the ‘luxury’ to debate how we want to live our lives, and not whether we can or not?

We’re stuck back trying to figure out the basics. Talk about regressing.

But we have regressed. And so this is where we are.

I suppose, we can let that get us down. Let the frustration and the anger ensnare us and defeat us. Become so preoccupied with where we are and how we got here that we forget where we want to go; even, how to get there.

Or we can instead forget all of that. Not completely: our history is our history and we take it with us as much as we can. But, as we all know in our personal lives, sometimes we take too much.

Sometimes it’s good to put past stories behind if it means we can move on and create new ones. Better ones. More hopeful. New opportunities. New realities.

Politics isn’t everything. But it is in everything. It is as fundamental to a society as economics; more so in fact. It got us where we are today, which we means it can also get us out. It has to.

Because politics is about choices.

And now we have to choose what we want to do. I mean really choose, make actual decisions. Because if we don’t then the decision is made for us: the end. But if we do, then we choose to make a new beginning. To stand up and say this is who we are, it’s a brave new world.

Elections are about choices. Every election should be about healthcare. Or education. Or how we treat our children. Or how we treat the environment, or criminals, or minorities, or the middle class.

I look forward to the day when elections will be about who and what we want to be as a society; what model of state, what priorities to the fore; what philosophy underpinning it all and how does that deliver for all of us.

I’m looking forward to it because I think we’re going to get there. I think we’re going to move in that direction.

After all we are a young nation. And, as in everything else, we must fail until we succeed. We have stumbled but we haven’t fallen. And when we regain our stride we will be better for it, more confident, more able.

I’m sure of it.

A new way beckons.