The need for electoral change is indeed an urgent one.
Which of the two major parties will do it though?
How do we break from an adversarial system which, aided by the moronic media, invokes and frames every issue in terms of the extremes?
As for lookalike parties...the Liberals have now embraced corporate welfare, unlimited currency manipulation (wilful boom-bust amplification) and opaque accounting, while Labour has also embraced corporate welfare, lower real wages, and now wants to censor the internet despite overwhelming advice to the contrary.
Despite strong evidence, we follow the US into policy that we *know* doesn't work (health, banking, schooling, transport, R&D) and ignore the alternatives that we know *do* work. This points very stronly as corruption and vested interests at work.
Religious groups appear to have mastered the art of subversion too. Under Howard Christian cults such as the "Exclusive Brethren" were allowed to do their own thing and influence policy. At least the US had the courts ban the teaching of religious dogma as science. Here it slipped in without anyone caring! Rudd appears to be following this tradition without any issues. As for Conroy...
It seems the "system" has effectively filtered out anyone resembling a statesman and has left the opinionated, ignorant scum to rise to the top.
We have no genuine "Liberal" nor real labour parties any more as both have approached a ridiculous fascist/socialist blend, which simply makes no sense! We are so far from a real democracy it is tragic.

Spot on Klaas, I doubt anything will change on this front though for the reason you suggested at the end of the article - the old parties have too much to loose. Even as a kid I thought to myself how does someone who gets less than 50% of the vote represent those that didn't vote for them? Answer, they don't and it shows. I have a growing dislike for the status quo of the "two-party preferred" system non-sense. This is one reason I am running for a Lower House Seat at the next election. Will I win? Based on this article, I have buckley's, but I will give it my all, as I do in everything I try.

"Be the change you want to see"
Adam Butler

There is a field of study called "Social Choice Theory" devoted to investigating the mechanics and properties of voting systems.

It turns out that creating a voting system that every one agrees is "fair" is not an easy task. Indeed, once you have 3 or more candidates/political parties there is a the mathematical proof that it is actually impossible to create a "fair" voting system that maintains the (obvious/natural) criteria that the vast majority of people consider a voting system should have.
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem : for more details.

thinkabit: True, but you can rank the systems by an agreed measure of fairness. Combining this with cost and robustness can lead to a ranking of voting systems that is not completely arbitrary.
Needless to say, the current system is not particularly good in fairness, cost or robustness.

I have thought for years that we should have proportional representation in all houses of parliament in Australia.Queensland with it's unicameral system (courtesy of Labor in the 20s)needs to reinstate the Legislative Council.

Will this happen? Not likely unless there is a concerted campaign by enough citizens.Given the extent of political ignorance and laziness in the electorate,not likely,either.

Our federal system,with it's division of powers is a good starting point.Some misguided people want to abolish the states on the grounds of efficiency.Proportional representation would enhance the checks and balances inherant in the federal system.

Indeed Klaas- dropping the Westminster system in favor of the (actually democratic) Swiss system of voting and representation, (not to mention direct-democracy if I may say) would radically improve the woeful setup we have now.

Of course, every member of Liberal and Labor know that the day such a system gets in- party time's over!

Fantastic article! Needs to be read by as many Australians as possible.

Fantastic article Klaas. Australia has one of the worst democratic systems of government in the world starting with a dysfunctional, outdated constitution that carries productivity losses of around $50 billion a year in needless duplication of laws, licences and onerous taxes.

Public forums such as Q and A and Insight reveal that the general public are growing increasingly frustrated at the pitiful policy offerings of the major parties to the serious challenges facing Australia.

I'd be happy to consider changing Australia's electoral system provided that we also introduced the citizens' initiated referenda system that operates in that country. We'd then be able to see politicians squirm as they were forced to introduce voluntary euthanasia, capital punishment, a genuinely tough policy on queue-jumping refugees and a host of other community-supported initiatives that are currently placed in the too-hard basket by most politicians from most political parties.

This is a good article as far as it goes.

I strongly disagree with Klaas's implicit objection to the preferential voting system, when he writes:

"In single-member districts candidates are often elected on the basis of around 40 per cent of first preference votes. The result of this is that their first preference candidate does not represent a majority of electors ..."

If a majority of electors are not prepared to give their primary vote to one major party candidate, but, nevertheless, prepared to give that candidate their second or subsequent preferences, in preference to the other major party candidate, then why shouldn't the former be elected?

The only alternative to preferential voting is first-past-the-post which very oftenresults in candidates opposed by the majority winning elections.

The obvious example is the US Presidential elections of 2000 where (even disregarding the rorting of the Florida ballots) a decisive majority voted for Al Gore and Ralph Nader.

If those voting for Nader had been allowed to allocate preferences, nearly all of those preferences would have gone to Gore and the US, and the whole world would have been spared the horrors of the Bush administration.

It should be considered a scandal that so much of the supposedly democratic world - the US, Canada, and the UK retains the ridiculous first-past-the-post system.

Changing from single member constituencies to multiple member constituencies would greatly improve democracy, but it still may only fix part of the problem.

As Bernie Masters pointed out, what is needed is direct democracy, otherwise known as Binding Citzens Initiated Referenda.

If we look at Australian 'democracy' over the last 3 decades in terms of outcomes and not just who happened to get elected, it is obvious that the outcomes are little better than what would have occurred if we had been governed all along by corrupt Third World despots. I gave just some examples in my article, "Why Queenslanders must demand new and fair state elections" of 12 Jan 10 at http://candobetter.org/node/1718 :

(tobecontinued)

Over the last 3 decades at least, "elite as opposed to popular views" have been imposed in regard to many other important policy decisions. Examples of such unconsultative policies implemented include the removal of tariff barriers to prevent the export of Australian jobs to slave wage economies; the removal of barriers which prevented foreign companies from buying our mineral wealth; the removal of barriers to foreign investors being able to buy up Australian real estate; the deregulation of our finance sector; the privatisation of our retirement income on a model similar to the one enacted by the Chilean military junta in the 1970's, the privatisation of government-owned businesses including Telstra, QANTAS and the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories; and the corporatisation or privatisation of vital resources: water and power utilities, and of infrastructure normally owned and paid for by taxpayers, such as roads and public transport.

There have also been numerous disposals of public parkland, such as 20 hectare Royal Park in Melbourne, and the massive rezoning to urban of "Green Wedges" (environmentally beneficial low-impact rural and publicly accessible bush and recreational land).

We have also lost publicly owned state banks, insurance companies, and local, state and national services, including road-making, land-development, public housing construction, the prison system and monopolies on marketing agricultural product - such as in the privatisation of the wheat board. The public is the poorer.

We have also seen the imposition of the National Competition Policy on all levels of Government, the forcible amalgamation of local governments, the removal of the rights of local governments (and therefore of residents and citizens) to oppose local housing and other developments,6 the imposition of costly environmentally destructive projects against the wishes of the local communities, the destruction of farmland and bushland to allow the construction of mines, the threatened imposition of a Chinese-style Internet firewall, etc., etc. (from http://candobetter.org/node/1718#EliteImposition)