Unfortunately ethical people are not always competent and competent people are not always ethical. Ethical people are unlikely to follow a political career precisely because it requires them to compromise their ethics. Competent people are unlikely to follow a political career because they can usually do much better elsewhere. What do we have left? Victims of the Dunning-Kruger syndrome, mostly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

If we want competent politicians we will a) have to reward them a damn sight better and b) overlook their moral failings.

I don’t understand why politics is such an unethical arena. With two parties willing to jump on the tiniest perceived fault in each other, you would think that all pollies would be very well-behaved, wouldn’t you?

It should be a strongly self-enforcing setup – one party cannot help itself but to criticise any member of the other party who does the slightest thing deemed to be inappropriate and therefore should be extremely careful about keeping its own nose squeaky clean, in order to uphold the standard it sets for the other party and to avoid embarrassing criticisms from them.

Even if a lot of pollies do have Dunning-Kruger syndrome and are not the best people for the job – because the best people are sensible enough to stay right away from politics – this self-enforcement should still work.

Why doesn’t it work??

"…this self-enforcement should still work. Why doesn't it work??"

I just had a frightening thought.

What if it is working and the current politicians are as well-behaved as they are capable of?

Oow! I think you might have hit the nail on the head there, WmTrevor!

( :>|

private philosophy works its way out in public performance. The deceit, lying and cess pool of denying is no more obvious than our current Government. Private philosophy and lives have manifest itself in public policy. Adultery, blasphemy, stealing and loose living. NO character references for these guys unless from each other. One hopes the Libs might be slightly better. They certainly could not be worse.

I have a couple of questions.

Why haven't you written articles on the questionable ethics and morals of Beattie, Bligh, Rudd and Gillard

Why have you only written one article critical of John Howard's Liberal National Coalition and one article of Newman's two month old LNP government. Where are your articles critical of the decades of Labor State governments, the Rudd Labor government and the Gillard Labor Government?

You claim both sides are morally and ethically questionable but the bulk of Governments in this country over the past 20 years have been Labor, especially since 2006. Have they been so much bettor than Howard and Newman so as not to require articles to be written, by you, specifically critical of them?

Are you showing the usual academic leftie bias?

Ethics in politics? Moral people attracted to politics? Increase the rewards, say some?
Patently, increasing the financial rewards, will simply attract more of the type that patently put their own pecuniary rewards ahead of party politics; and party politics ahead of bipartisan support for the national interest.
In times of hardship as is evidenced in the retail, services and manufacturing sides of the economy, genuinely ethical people would take a very substantial pay-cut to led by example. Moreover, they'd likely grandfather some of the quite grossly exorbitant rewards currently handed out to past politicians.
Politicians ought to be limited to no more than two full terms in the senate, four in the house of Reps and three in state legislatures. This is the only way we can eventually get rid of the party hacks, that are simply adorning our parliaments. We need to get back to a time when ordinary folks, with lots of real world and business experience populated our parliaments.
Perhaps some form of mandatory pre pre-selection integrity testing, would not go amiss?
We have several space age lie detection methodologies available to us, thermal imaging, voice stress detectors, computer assisted facial recognition; and, ought to oblige intending candidates to front up to an in depth, virtually undetectable, non invasive, space age polygraph assisted inquiry, that ought to inform us beyond reasonable doubt, as to their current morality and ethical standards.
We will no longer need to keep the bar stewards honest, if we simply eliminate them as contenders, before they ever get into politics?
However, we don't need to know about their sexual preferences and or peccadilloes, or invade their personal space/privacy?
Some of our very best Leaders have had their all too human flaws and shortcomings? Rhrosty.

Jez Rhrosty, are you sane?

Under your proposed regime Labor wouldn't be able to field any candidates in any election.

Paying them more & more over the years has only resulted in the incompetence we have witnessed. Moe pay is only justified if the electorate feels they're better off. Politicians' pay should be set via referendum.

"Moe pay is only justified if the electorate feels they're better off. Politicians' pay should be set via referendum."

I wonder if some other process could be used that reflected how the community was travelling. There has been a bunch of work done over the years on measures of community well being which might be useful to form the basis of performance bonuses. Set the base pay lower and at the end of a term use a wide range of measures to determine the size of the pool for bonuses for pollies who've served during that term.

An individual pollies share of the bonus pool could be adjusted based on what happened to their proportion of the primary vote over that period.

Some of the measures would be outside the pollies control as are many of the measures used by other employers. If there is a GFC and things are tight then pollies might join many others in having less in their pockets.

Measures might include some soft figures around sense of well being but would also include hard figures, rates of bankruptcy, rates of employment, length of hospital waiting lists, national debt maybe offset against an independent valuation of the nations assets (spending on infrastructure is not necessarily be bad if we get value for money but waste should not be rewarded).

It should not be all that difficult for those who specialise in that sort of thing to come up with meaningful measures, what would be difficult is getting pollies to ever vote to have their pay tied to performance.

R0bert

Here's a novel idea, People that embezzle money should not be allowed to remain as MPs.

http://resources3.news.com.au/images/2012/05/22/1226363/858475-120523-nicholson-cartoon.jpg

Labor trying to set up an ethics committee for parliamentarians while Thomson remains is like having the mafia control the police.