“The Democrats hit the iceberg some time ago, they need to stop taking water before they bother plotting a new course.”

I would agree with this, but add that it is not just the Democrats that need to do some re-thinking. The Democrats were originally created to “keep the bastards honest”, which was a honourable enough exercise which unfortunately has failed. The idea was to introduce a third political party to try and keep the two existing political parties from becoming corrupt, but it didn’t work for that long.

So we are now back to a 2 party system, that is not necessarily democratic, nor is it a system that gives more power to the people, (and not the state).

A party could have a Pro-Life policy, and a Pro-Nuke policy at the same time. The other party could have a Pro-Choice policy, and an Anti-Nuke policy at the same time. Now if someone liked the Pro-Life part, and didn’t like the Pro-Nuke part, then which party should they vote for. That is the dilemma.

It is my guess that there would actually be very few people in society who are fully paid-up members and supporters of the Liberals, or the Nationals, or the Labor party. Therefore these organisations (or political parties) are really minority groups who have the rest of us hamstrung, because we have to vote for them.

Either or all parties can indulge in lies, propaganda, indoctrination, misinformation, dirty politics, corruption etc. These parties can also play “personality” politics, whereby the leader of the party is portrayed as being just fantastic, so every candidate of that party should be elected at election time.

It’s a very sordid state of affairs, and I would think that it is time to reduce political parties from government as much as possible, and put more government back into the hands of the people as much as possible.

How? Well call me names, but these are my ideas:-

- Take political parties out of the Senate and have independents only in the Senate
- Introduce secrete ballot in both the Senate and the House of Representatives
- Have more public referendums, and more public enquiries.
- Government to actually carry out the results of the referendums, or the recommendations enquiries.
- Put “none of the above” on the bottom of each ballot paper, and if the majority of people tick “none of the above” then the election has to be held again.

Those are some suggestions for the Democrats to consider, because I don’t think they will be able to resurrect themselves. If they or their supporters want more honesty in government, then they must try and keep political parties out of government to start with, and keep the power with the people.

The who ???????....................

The Who? You know, anyone of voting age.

Those big enough and educated enough to be able to decide the country’s destiny, and not become so dependant on a small number of professional politicians, who like to indulge in the normal things professional politicians indulge in. We've had these professional politicians now for over 100 yrs.

We’ve had “Lies”.
We’ve had “Keeping the Bastards Honest”.
We’ve had “The Biff”.

But none have worked all that well, so maybe time for a different set of methods and principles to be used within government.

Quite frankly, who cares! The Democrats have been in terminal decline for years; view Andrew Murrary's timeline chart available by accessing his article.

It seems the only ones really worried are the Democrats elected members. Self interest anyone?

The Demcrats have lost their place in the political landscape because their media space was cleverly cannabilsed by The Greens.

Unable to counter that threat, the Democrats were on the fast-track to irrelevance.

Roberto

Timkins
my 'the who' bit was just a slap at the Democrats.. I mean they just don't count any more so I was underscoring that by asking if they still exist.. so to speak.
I wasn't commenting on what u said.

Boaz,
I too think the Democrats are a bit of a spent force at present, and I get the feeling that a job was done on them, as they were becoming too uncomfortable for some. I think that if they do re-build, then probably another job will be done to knock them over again.

So if they sincerely want to keep government honest, they have to do some lateral thinking, and look at what creates dishonesty in government to start with. Not enough people power, and too much power held by a few professional politicians, (who then hold the rest of us to ransom), obviously creates dishonesty in government.

To have some democracy, best to keep political parties out of government as much as possible.