Unfortunately for us, there is no longer any incentive for anyone with original ideas and the talent to put them into practice to become a politician. The money is lousy, and the privilege and prestige formerly attached to the job has been eroded away. Add in ridiculous working conditions and the media's puerile fascination with everything you say and do, and it's pretty obvious that anyone with any self-respect will look elsewhere.

The best solution would be to have one-tenth as many pollies and pay them each ten times as much. Failing that, it may be necessary to allow perks of office, and even add a few more, just to try and attract people with some ability into the job. But coming down hard on politicians will just drive the overall standard down below the depths it has already plumbed.

Dear James,

<<In return that citizen expects certain things of those that govern: that if he/she gets sick there will be a functioning hospital system; they will get a living wage pension on retirement, their kids will go to school and be educated, not sexually abused and so on.>>

There are two faults in this argument:

1) Different people have different expectations of life. This may be your list, but others may include a box of cherries.

Why hospitals yes and cherries no? It just happens to be your personal preference!

2) Even when people want certain services and securities, this does not imply which group they want to receive it from; which group they want to contract with. It is arrogance to assume that everyone just freely chose or consented to receive their desired services and outcomes from that particular and arbitrary group of "all who live in this continent and a few islands around it", most of which we don't know and will never meet because they live 1000's of kilometres away.

Many of use would have preferred to have a social-contract, but instead of with such a huge body of foreign faces, with some smaller group of closer and more like-minded people. But did we ever get to choose?

As it stands, there is no social contract - only coercion.

James, I have shown why relations between sovereign and subject, or citizen and state, have none of the elements of contract. Contract requires offer, acceptance, consideration and intention.

In fact and in law, tax is a coercive, non-contractual payment. The High Court has made it clear that tax is not a payment for services. Payment of tax, of itself, gives rise to no right to any service whatsoever. Paying tax is not the price we pay for hospitals etc. It’s the price we pay for not being locked in a cage and shot if we resist.

To confuse consensual with coerced relations is the most fundamental moral and intellectual blunder. You might as well say that relations between a bank and robber are a “contract”: the bank staff undertake to give him money, and he undertakes not to shoot them.

Also, as Yuyutsu has shown, another problem with the theory is that it’s anyone’s guess what the terms of the alleged contract are. Contract refers to an agreement, not an open-ended ground for demanding anything.

So far as you need the theory of social contract to be true in order to provide a legitimisation of government, that doesn’t magically make what is untrue, true. It just means that so far you lack a theory to legitimise government.

The law of nationality provides a more accurate basis for understanding than the law of contract. Nationality law is based on a supposed mutual obligation between sovereign and subject. The sovereign has a supposed obligation of protection; the subject has a real actual obligation of obedience.

In other words, it’s a protection racket.

It’s a relation in which the strongest and most aggressive party unilaterally decides to take as much of the weaker’s property and services as they want, on terms that they can unilaterally require anything, and exempt themselves in their official capacity from any law they impose on everyone else; and the weaker party has only the freedom to obey.

This theory also has the advantage that it’s historically accurate in describing where states come from, unlike social contract theory.

The money is so 'lousy' that Australian politicians are amongst the highest paid in the world. Apart from receiving generous salaries they are able to parlay their accommodation allowances into real estate investments; we give them cars even if they don't want to use them - they can be handed off to any old designated driver; they get multiple mobile phones; they can accumulate huge libraries of books which are then theirs to keep; they can get most of their holiday travel paid for either by arranging a quick meeting or two right near their preferred destination or claiming they are on 'study leave'; they get staff to do all the heavy lifting for them. Poor things, makes your heart bleed. No wonder we have so much trouble getting people to offer themselves as candidates.

James,
The Nuremberg trials didn't set a benchmark so much as a dangerous precedent in that they legitimised the authority of the Atlantic alliance who you now rightly accuse of warmongering and perpetuating a double standard.
There's a direct link between the lies NATO told about Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and the lies the Allies told about National Socialist Germany. Nuremberg entrenched the Kangaroo court as the supreme instrument of allied "Justice", the cells in Buchenwald where 20,000 German prisoners were tortured and murdered in 1946-47 are linked through space and time to the cells at Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu-ghraib.
Saddam was "Just like Hitler",so was Milosovec the Jihadis are "Islamofascists", Assad is a "dictator" who "kills his own people" and is also according to John Kerry also "just like Hitler".

Jon J
"Add in ridiculous working conditions..."

What are the ridiculous working conditions btw?

I was under the impression they aren't under much or any pressure as members of Parliament, as opposed to as party members. There was a guy in NSW recently, a member of the upper house as I recall, who pretty much stopped turning up to work early on in the piece, and years later they were still trying to chase him down. He kept saying his wife was sick.

But I mean, if you were a member of the upper house, and just didn't turn up, how would the system strike back? For example, it's not obligatory to sit in the house during debate - that's why Whips are needed in the parties that have them.

I got the impression work was pretty much optional for members of parliament in their capacity as members of parliament.