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 Australia has one of the worst democratic systems of government in the world starting with a dysfunctional, outdated constitution that carries productivity losses of around $50 billion a year in needless duplication of laws, licences and onerous taxes.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