Philo... I'm in the ONLY State (there are others ? :) VIC....

Graham..

humble apologies, must have seemed like we were using your article purely for the promotion of pet ideas.

I looked further into what you said, the thrust of which seems to be that we should find ways of involving the community in the political process.
The ePortal sounds ok, a bit like this forum already. (is this your training wheels ? :)

I do like the idea of transfering pre-selection from party machines to a broader community interest/involvement/primaries type of approach. One suspects that the reason our political parties seem to much 'us/them' is because it is a mentality handed down by the political hyper fundamentalist machine people.

For me personally, the opportunity to interact with various 'opposing voices' is most refreshing, it provides ample fuel for reflection and also an outlet for the results of such reflection. It also causes us all to research our positions more thoroughly (except for Kenny :)

So, on the suggestions you raised. Go4it.

P.S. the fact that we take things off topic at times, is also a litmus of the fact that we enjoy the social interaction on matters important to us, and clearly we say things in our posts which trigger 'hot spot's of concern in others.

I am a member of a Christian values Party in NSW and we have all our online members constantly answering opinion polls on issues, to gauge our supporters views. We also have members with similar interests interfacing online to develop ideas into policy to be put to our politicians.

I would think that it would be much better to have proportional representations of sections within our community rather than current Party structures.
For example: All persons involved in the food indusrty by proportion be given a quota of representatives. All persons involved in the mining, manufacturing and timber industry be given a quota of representatives. All persons involved in commercial, tourism and service industries given a quota of representatives. etc etc etc
This way we have the industries etc presenting their best spokesperson to form policy to develop, protect and service Australia.

This idea needs some thrashing out, otherwise we continue with unknown Party hacks to vote for.

Graham, Thanks for this insighful piece. I'm giving it some deep thought before I respond /engage. (as I suspect others will too).

My off the cuff response is that E-democracy has yet to fully realise its capacity and a prototype model where concise discussion is facilitated and resolutions enabled is long over due.

This is a topic that has interested me for some time. Graham raises some interesting and desirable possibilities. However, I think that the responses above from a couple of TNF's 'usual suspects' exemplify why such a cyber-democratic utopia is unlikely to eventuate for a while yet.

If democracy has anything to do with the ability of individuals to influence the body politic, then it's pretty obvious that at this stage the Internet is a long way from delivering the kinds of representative functions that Graham envisions. It's too easy for a small group of extreme windbags to target particular forums, even within those that are restricted to members of politically-oriented groups.

And as for Internet polls - who hasn't been urged by email to vote in this or that poll on MSN or wherever, in order to skew the results?

Then there is the question of who runs such a portal and sets the rules by which it is conducted. For example (and IMHO), this site is compromised to a large extent by perceived partisanship on the part of its administrators - which results in its attraction of disproportionate comments that express extreme right-wing ideologies. Relatively speaking, this site attracts very little attention from the progressive side of cyber-politics in Australia, who are very active elsewhere on the Internet.

Having said that, I like the idea of eDemocracy, and will be interested to see how it develops. However, I suspect that it will be quite some time yet before the general public has sufficient confidence in the Internet for it to have much direct political impact.

e-democracy will only ever be a theory until we find a way to identify - properly - everyone who partakes in it. It is not for nothing that the act of voting involves the laborious process of presenting yourself, in person, at a designated location in order to be counted in. The Internet, by its nature, has characteristics that will never allow it to perform a similar function. Not until, that is, we are all allocated our own URL, which is firmly embedded in our DNA at birth and destroyed when we die.

Technology is not an answer to anything. It can only spotlight or magnify existing capabilities. To try to use it as a sounding board for ideas, one has to be very specific about the ground-rules. If OLO, for example, were to decide that all posts should identify their writer by name, address and postcode, we would have a very different style of discussion. If they then made sure that the information provided was accurate - by sending the police around to check, perhaps - there would be a substantially different, and possibly much smaller, complement of posters.

All in all, I would have as little faith in the feedback from a "political brokerage" function as I would in the result of a fully on-line federal election. There simply aren't the safeguards available that will allow you to be sure that the information you receive has not been managed and manipulated.

Having spent far too many resources in promoting proper governance - running resident's associations, lodging submissions, attending meetings, court hearings, standing for election, overturning corruptly elected councillors, trying to get the electoral commissioner to take enrolment fraud seriously, and having missed election 3 times by less than 30 votes (out of 17000) the thoughts presented above berating any sort of electronic (or public) involvement ring true.

The number of voters who say "glad you're around to keep them honest" or who sincerely let you know that "we voted (major party) but put you second..." clearly indicates that advocacy outside the main parties, whilst publicly acknowledged as a necessary good, is not viable so long as the majority of unthinking/uneductaed voters are compulsory enrolments caught up in advertising campaigns, rather than on voting records or candidate CV's.