Politics & Power Quote by Peter Garrett

Garrett lands the punch with a word that’s almost certainly a tell: “county.” Whether it’s a slip for “country” or an intentional localizing, it shrinks the whole drama of democratic failure down to something municipal and familiar - the sense that disappointment isn’t an abstract crisis, it’s what you live with, street by street, election by election. Coming from Peter Garrett, a frontman-turned-politician who built a public identity on moral urgency, the line reads less like a pundit’s diagnosis than an insider’s exasperation: this is what it looks like when the ideals you sang about hit the machinery you tried to reform.

The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost dad-level blunt, and that’s the point. He’s rejecting the seductive complexity politicians often hide behind. “Don’t tell the truth” names the original sin; “don’t keep their promises” names the predictable sequel. The structure implies causality: dishonesty isn’t just unethical, it’s operational - it becomes the method by which promises get made in the first place. “Serve us well” frames politics as a job with a customer, not a calling with a halo, and the “our” pulls the audience into a shared ownership of the problem. It’s an accusation, but also a resignation: we’ve seen this movie enough times to summarize it in one breath.

Context matters because Garrett isn’t talking from the cheap seats. His credibility and his vulnerability are baked in: he knows how people perform sincerity for crowds, and he knows how institutions grind sincerity down once you’re inside them.