Tanner makes some interesting comments; and seems a lot more thoughtful as a private citizen; than a very good on his feet politician. I never took a shine to him and saw in him, an extremely arrogant autocratic elitist?
However, one can agree; the system needs to be changed and or seriously updated!
There's enough diversity of often strongly held views; in any of the party rooms; for an opposition to be permanently shelved; if we but introduced a secret ballot, which would serve as well or better; and, we'd save many billions, which would be better spent elsewhere.
We ought to remove the politics from our parliaments; and, replace it with pragmatism and powerful thinkers; and speakers eloquent enough, to persuade others to their thinking. And no need to change a good leader mid term?
At the end of their terms politicians would be even more accountable to the people; given, they would no longer be able to blame Dr no, or a recalcitrant opposition, merely seeking to spoil the political apple cart and acquire the keys to the lodge?
We also need to seriously reform the election system with proportional representation replacing a quite massively manipulated preference system! Thereby removing the power brokers and their back room deals and or, dirty deals done in the dead of night?
The power to decide such things needs to be returned to the people, who should decide pre-selection, candidates and representatives! It is supposed to be an actual democracy!

remove the politics from our parliaments; and, replace it with pragmatism and powerful thinkers
Rhosty,
been saying since day 1, Nr 1 move is to keep ex lawyers away from the political arena closely followed by the highly educated who are mainly only food in idealism but have nothing else to offer. Introduce a non military 2-year national Service & you'll gradually get a more responsible voting public. There's no single issue to change, it's a whole new chain we need. To start we need a smarter & more responsible voter. The pollies will have no alternative but to follow suit.

Individual, I concur and agree there is a case for compulsory service; military and non military! I believe that would probably produce a better more self reliant citizen; but not necessarily; a more erudite voter, completely au fait with all the relevant issues?
Remove the educated from parliament? Well only if the goal is to completely dumb it down? Some might even conclude, we'd already achieved that?
Certainly, I agree we can have too great a representation of one particular profession; sometimes because they weren't much chop at the day job?
However, there is a case for eliminating the career politician? And that's easily achieved; by all of us simply putting the incumbent last on the ballot paper; and his preference partners immediately above, every election?
Several one term parliaments; should remove most of the current crop?

If Tanner is right and I see no reason to dispute his insights after so many years in the business, then there are other questions that should be asked, including "what is informing the media's views", "why is analysis generally so facile and shallow?" as well as a discussion of the role of the advocacy journalist, who doesn't so much report on an issue as try to create a particular viewpoint in the reader.

I suspect a strong influence is the increased feminisation and consequent exposure to victim-politics within universities. It encourages a lazy approach to analysis that ignores many of the driving forces in favour of a simplistic victim-centric viewpoint. As well, some 80% of journalism students are female, overwhelmingly from middle-class backgrounds, who are the very people the ALP's policies have been designed to appeal to and many of those journalists have, over the years, become members and sometimes representatives of the ALP.

Tanner's concern may be genuine, but he was a key part of the ALP leadership at the very time that the party was making specific policy decisions to enhance its attractiveness to middle-class women.

The interesting thing is that the policies haven't worked especially well in appealling to such women more generally, since the Greens have played the "social justice advocacy" game much better from their position of complete lack of responsibility for outcomes and hence freedom to make extremist but superficially appealling statements. Brown is the past master of such "look at me, I'm standing up for victims" politics.

The ALP will also have to consider how close it wants to be to actively lobbying advocacy groups like Emily's List and to the female-dominated white-collar unions. The country is finding it very hard to afford the spending that such groups have demanded as a quid pro quo for their support for Labor. Advocacy journalism is a part of their arsenal in negotiating such deals.

Here's an example of the problem from today's press

http://www.news.com.au/top-stories/women-overdiagnosed-with-breast-cancer/story-e6frfkp9-1226245029828

"Their analysis found that improvements in cancer treatments rather than early detection through screening was likely to have caused the 21 to 28 per cent reduction in breast cancer deaths since the program began in 1991.

A 2010 study found that for every 2000 women invited for screening throughout 10 years, one would have her life prolonged but 10 healthy women would be diagnosed as breast cancer patients and treated unnecessarily."

We have an enormous and disproportionate anount of money being spent on breast cacer awareness, treatment, screening and research, yet the benefit is to only 1 in 2000 of the participants and 10 times that number are being scared and mislead into being treated unnecessarily.

Breast cancer and women's health more generally have been major targets for feminists and there has been little examination of benefits amid the emotive victim-centric arguments that have been put forward.

I'm glad that some people have benefitted, but there are obviously more serious problems that receive a great deal less attention.