"We can dump the Westminster system and elect the executive directly".

Wouldn't this give us a celebrity-style system like the US? which is more dysfunctional than ours.

All systems of electing a parliament are flawed. the question then becomes: which is the least flawed system where the result fairly represents the spread of opinion in the electorate, achieves stable government, and safeguards the several imporetant functions of opposition, including holding the government accountable. (Those who rely on the press are simply living in fantasy land).
The only system which fairly meets all of those objectives is a form of proportional representation. Personally I favour one similar to either New Zealand or Germany where a 5% minimum threshold keeps out the lunatic fringe and/or a multiplicuty of parties that can paralyse government. There are a number of those examples around. Unfortunately the current two major parties win office sufficiently often to receive the Pavlovian intermittent reinforcement that persuades them to stick with the current, highly dysfunctional, system.
The plus side of the annihilation of Labor in NSW and QLD in the past twelve months is that they might be forced to reconsider the electoral system rather than navel gazing about their own inadequacies. the down side is that history teaches us that they are almost certainly likely not to do anything at all other than stagger on as before, to the detriment of us all, and not least our democracy.

Dear Sillysally,

Yes, it would give Australia a system like the US. Abraham Lincoln, Frankin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Grover Cleveland along with a number of others have been president under that system. No system will result in all good chief executives, but I think the US has done pretty well.

Surely the simplest and most effective guarantee of responsible governance is to have an upper house whose members are elected on a state-wide basis for a term twice the length of the lower house term, and with half of upper house members coming up for re-election mid-way through each lower house term?

Stability and accountability built in.

Eyejaw, interesting. I’ve raised the issue of preferential versus compulsory voting on OLO a few times. There hasn’t been a lot of interest and it has been clear that most people don’t really understand the connotations.

Optional preferential voting gives the voter the choice of marking just one candidate or declaring preferences as far as they wish to do so. They can mark just one square on the ballot paper or all squares or anywhere in between.

This gives an accurate presentation of a voter’s wishes, which sits in total contrast to the compulsory preferential system where every box must be sequentially numbered or else the vote is void. Even if the voter’s intentions are perfectly clear, if they leave one square unmarked, their vote is annulled.

In many instances if they wish to not vote for either of the two big parties and mark them last and second last, there vote will end up counting for the one they mark second last, after preferences have filtered down. This is just entirely disgusting. I can’t understand how this absolute rort of a system has remained in place.

So as far as democracy and the principle of voting goes, the optional preferential system is definitely the best one.

<< Let us assume for arguments sake that I want to vote Green. The candidate loses. Are you really telling me that you cannot see any difference at all between ALP and Katter ON ENVIRONMENTAL grounds? >>

If a person votes green and reckons that the ALP is better than Katter on environmental grounds, then they’ll mark the ALP with a 2 or at least with some number higher than Katter or they’ll leave Katter blank. If they don’t declare preferences, then it is pretty good indication that they don’t care whether ALP or Katter’s mob get in and don’t consider one to be better than the other.

So, what sort of system do you wish for eyejaw? I can’t quite imagine what alternative there is to OPV that would cater for your concerns.

James the one thing we want in an electoral system is one that gives us good government. The last thing we need is something like Tasmania or New Zealand, with their dysfunctional governments. I can only suppose you hate progress with your ideas.

The fairest is first past the post, & all BS stopped. Preferential is bad enough, but the moment you start this proportional rubbish, the rubbish get control, with balance of power rorts.

When it comes to Labor, they can never be pleased.

First they got the famed gerrymander, where country electorates carried more weight. Suited them when there were 6 farm labourers to every farmer.

They got rid of the upper house to free their arm for skulduggery.

When the farmer could not afford labour, they bitched about the inequity of their established gerrymander, until it was abolished.

They introduced "just vote one" with optional preferential voting when compulsory preferential voting started favouring the coalition.

While they had a tight hold they loved the system.

Now they have cr4pped in their nest too often, they want another change to tip the playing field. Well no thanks mate, we'll keep something reasonably sensible.