The evil here is compulsory voting.

Obviously the major parties rely on it to be elected over and again by those who have no minimal knowledge of the issues, nor even opinions, who instead judge by the candidate's face and the noise they make.

Without compulsory voting, only those who at least to some degree bother to understand the issues, would vote - and having some opinions of their own, they would vote very differently.

Slogans get you nothing but self serving and indifferent folks too incompetent to create new and workable ideas?

Gone are the days and the original Westminster system and progressive unpaid volunteers giving freely of their time, to make a difference; hold heads of state to account!

Simply put, only around 30% of us understand economics, with another 30% understanding politics?

Even so, it's the remaining 40%, who understand neither, who invariably decide elections or indeed buy the BS sloganeering!
Alan B.

Bessie, check voter turnout over the last 50 years throughout the democratic world where voluntary voting is the norm. A 77% turnout would actually be a good figure.
Not sure what your argument is apart from abolishing compulsory voting so as to stop the election result being diluted by the don’t knows and the don’t cares.
You certainly can’t, and shouldn’t, stop politics being a part of frivolous gossip.

"the consequence is that many of us are turning towards social media sites or public contribution forums in order to make decisions. But these are not reliable sources of information- "

How do you know when a politician is lying?

When they open their mouth!

There is plenty of evidence that the media, print, radio, TV also present extremely biased views.

Perhaps its for this reason.

We the might elect the pilot but we sure as christ do not set the flight plan and Labour and liberal are just the two wings of the same bird of prey.

The Trans Pacific Partnership is now the official and visible government above government. No Australian Govt will ever pass a law without first getting permission of the TPP because if they dont and a big corporation thinks that law interferes with their operations, they can take the Australain govt to their own private courts claiming restraint on trade, and who in all likelehood, will order the Australian Govt to cease and desist or, it may fine them whatever they think is a good thing.

Why is likely to be true? well, Former United States Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Reagan Paul Craig Roberts, said every member of the US congress who voted for the legislation had a $136 million donation paid into their re-election campaign fund.

Cant imagine Australian politicians who voted to sign this document would have got that much but PCR suspects that politicians in other countries would have been paid, in relative terms, a similar amount.

We can play all the musical chairs in Canberra we like people but the TPP is the real gov, anything else is just an administrative gov.

Let's get something straight - compulsory voting is a joke.

In the event that you fail to vote, you will be sent a letter asking for the "true reason" that you failed to vote. (I just love that "true reason").

If you reply that you failed to vote because it is against your religion, the act says that that answer must be taken as conclusive, and no further action will be taken.

So anyone paying a fine for not voting is an idiot.

That is not to say that a sizeable proportion of voters and politicians are idiots.

Compulsory voting is maintained by both major parties because it relieves them of the onerous task of having to persuade people to turn up at the polling booth.