Reforms

1- CIR and Direct Democracy; as it is clear that politicians are more concerned with enhancing their own careers- simply because they can get away with it

2- electoral reform separating ministry (each preferably direct-elected, independently from the other) from parliament.

3- Remove the 'winner-takes-all' system- as some might notice that the european countries that get things done have much broader number of parties leading the country

4- abolish compulsory voting; it is clear that it only raises the apathy of the vote politicians need to aim for, and it is mostly likely the reason they can continue getting away with doing nothing.

How many of the prople of Australia KNOW or UNDERSTAND the TRUE MEANING of DEMOCRACY and what it stands for?
My understanding of DEMOCRACY is that the PEOPLE RULE. The people are Sovereign.
The levels of Sovereignty are;
1/ GOD or THEOCRACY where GOD rules
2/ MAN or DEMOCRACY where People rule
3/ PARLIAMENT or BUREAUCRACY where Officials rule
4/ CORPORATIONS where these entities rule nothing.
100 years ago teenagers were managing farms, inventing new machines, starting families, building businesses, learning trades.
Average people today are trapped in a desperate cycle of performing jobs, that zap their energy, they watch tv shows that dull their minds and they buy stuff they don't need with money they don't have.
The thing is it's not our fault, look at schooling for example. Most prpbaly spent 9 years upwards of their life being isolated from the real world, cloisted together with other immature children and forced to read and recite facts and figures, in schools with their long term, cell block style forced confinement of both teachers and students.
Our society is producing people who are afraid to step out of line and live life on their own empowered terms as is guaranteed in our the peoples Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia Acts, 1900, It has been hidden from most of the people, so many are not aware of its existance. Does this happen by accident? I dout it.
The politicians, the Parliaments and the Governments of Austrlia don't want the people to know as it would remove their power and the rorts and benifits they claim for themselves. They do not want the people to know or understand TRUE DEMOCRACY.

We the PEOPLE RULE, and we elect the members of Parliament and the Government to serve us, this means that we the people are the boss and we pay their wages, so they must do what the people want. In any proposals they want to introduce which will undoubtably impact on the lives and living standards, customs and freedoms of the people they MUST put it to the peope in a REFERENDUM of the people who will either endorse the proposal or reject the proposal. That is how a DEMOCRATIC society functions. Do do otherwise is oppressing the people and replacing a DEMOCRACY with Tiranny enslavery of the people.

Singapore and Norway are democracies and progress quite well so its not democracy thats the problem.
Atman,
you got that right, these countries actually practice democracy, here it's just being talked about.

Yep, agree with that. I'd like to add that the EPA is also one of the major causes to accelerate inertia.
The EPA has misinterpreted its sole function of protecting the environment in favour of protecting itself. Every village idiot will tell that the environment needs respect. What no greenie academic will tell is the fact that the environment can actually be enhanced by man's ingenuity. Not every move of soil or redirection of flow of water is bad for the environment. Nature itself does that quite frequently. We need to educate the educated about common sense for a start. The effect will snowball no doubt. This in turn will help us turn the inertia.
We can stop this inertia but not if we keep listening to experts rather than people who know.

Gypsy,
The whole point of the education system is to keep people in a state of immaturity so that they are incapable of taking responsibility for themselves, their families and their nation until they are well into middle age.
My generation, the 40 somethings are next to useless and the politicians know it,the elite know that they can do whatever they want because the "Gen Xers" won't lift a finger to stop them.
We're literally a failed generation, taught not to think or ask questions, just to obey. For example it's frightening to think that we have a good chunk of that generation who were convinced to delay or reject reproduction, that's unprecedented in human history.
Men my age are, in the main totally disinterested in politics simply because they know next to nothing about how the system works, or how they can influence it at an individual and community level.
I heard a speech from a senator the other day (I forget who) and he said that the Country Liberal organisation to which he belonged in the 1950's and 60's had 62,000 members in South Australia alone.
The State education system in the 70's and 80's taught us not to think and not to become engaged, that politics was for the WW2 generation to worry about, all we had to do was find jobs and do as our bosses told us.