Oh, come on all you guys and gals who are slamming Nick and Scott for suggesting an appropriate watchdog which might just provide the ultimate cure to Queensland's malaise in governance, presently provided by Teflon Pete and his ill accomplished team.

Let's quarantine the debate until we have all had the opportunity of reading the numerous responses to the December 2005 LCARC discussion paper: Access to administrative Justice in Queensland, which are due to be tabled in State Parliament circa June

Then perhaps the serious debaters of this isue might be spared some of the esoteric chaff which has been posted so far.

I think the Queenslanders are ahead of New South Wales in many areas. Queenslanders have lower state taxes and charges, they don't have our ludicrous RTA "pink slips" which are a joke. I don't think we are in a position to sneer at the Queensland health system either as there are holes in ours. Try the western New South Wales experience!.I have not seen much creative or complimentary legislation come out of the New South Wales upper house and from where I stand it is only a reward system for the party faithful who fail to be elected or represting a group the appointing party wants on side.

Oh come on Kevin. You’re as bad as you’re alleging Nick to be. You keep bringing up this canard of the “balance of power of unrepresentative minorities” but refuse to address arguments it.

In the federal sphere, the Bob Browns and Dee Margetts are unrepresentative but that’s because smaller states get equal number of senators to larger states. In a state based proportional representational system all party blocs in upper houses would be truly representative of their popularity with the voters. Even if an individual wins a seat with 43 primary votes and the rest in preferences due to a smart deal he or she made, then as much as you hate to admit it, he has still won office due to the preference of the voters. If a voter didn’t bother to check up to see where his vote was finally going then that is his problem. You can’t arrange an electoral system to accommodate slack voters, ESPECIALLY when it is at the expense of those minorities who would otherwise be denied political representation.
As for small parties or individual members having the pivotal say on the passage of major party legislation, does is ever occur to you that if the major party needs support then it must be a minority in the first place, and as such what validity is there that its legislation must get through?
There is no shame in two parties getting together and passing two pieces of legislation where overall, representatives of a majority of the people preferred the law as it will become to as it was.
Where there is shame is in the (not unique) circumstances of the federal lower house election of 1998. Then, under single member voting, not only did the majority of voters not get their preferred PM (Beazley actually got more preference votes than Howard) but the majority of voters also didn’t get their first choice as their representative in the House of Representatives. What an electoral system! The majority didn’t want that P.M. and the average voter ends up with someone else as his MP.

Dream on, indeed. It's very Australian to criticise, and particularly to criticise new ideas, but the fact is that we need some improvement to parliamentary democracy. People are losing confidence in it, and we need to start considering alternatives rather than just cynically attacking ideas.

An upper house for Queensland could provide much-needed review of the parliamentary executive. I've heard it said that the best Qld legislation of the 1990s was when Liz Cunningham had the balance of power. Legislation was checked and negotiated much more carefully than when one party has a clear majority. It is arguable that a minority party having a balance of power in the Senate has similarly checked excesses of both Labor and Liberal Governments, a check that is now absent.

We want and need an executive branch that can act decisively, rather than have Israeli, Italian or Indian(?) style Parliaments where the executive doesn't have a clear majority.

And yet an upper house could help the Legislature as a whole become more independent. This would validate the authority of the parliamentary executive acting through the Legislature, because the Legislature would not simply be its rubber stamp.

Hold on to dreams. We need them right now.

Very necessary Fitzgerald Inquiry induced reforms have slipped. Politicians remain politicians, and can never have too much scrutiny, especially when in government and wield so much power. Yet they are more than prepared to foist extreme levels of scrutiny and social engineering on the people of Queensland, by way of legislation. Once in power both sides of politics, either Labor with its socialist foundations; or the Nationals, who have dominated Queensland conservative politics, with their apparently agrarian socialist tendencies, use that power without much regard to Queenslanders rights.

At last Friday's conference that debated reintroducing an Upper House in Qld, mostly attended by academics and lawyers, and too few ordinary people, the audience heard the not unexpected news from Qld Labor Minister Reynolds, that Labor believed everything was okay, democracy was working, and that the ALP would not support an Upper House or Legislative Council being reintroduced. Even more disappointing, but also not entirely unexpected, Mark McArdle MP representing the Coalition, also advised that the Opposition does not support it either - they simply prefer to tinker with processes and appointments, like the Information Commissioner.

We know that at the last election, the ALP secured around 47% of the vote but won over 70% or 63 of the seats of the 89 seats. The Liberals achieved 18.5% (or one third of Labor's total) of the vote but only won 5 seats; the Nationals got less than the Liberals vote, just under 17% but won 15 seats.

Here's some info from the conference. The few Parliamentary Committees are dominated by the ALP. The chairs and majority of the members on the Committees are ALP MP's. We already know that the Information Commissioner was entirely an ALP political appointment. The Scrutiny of Legislation Committee is supposed to scrutinise new legislation to assure legislation conforms with law, that natural justice provisions apply and that human rights are observed. Experience shows that they don't do their job effectively. Apparently a third of requests for facts by the Committee to government departments go unanswered, even though ALP dominated.

This isn't good enough.

Regards, Derek Sheppard

The Fitzgerald Inquiry was probably a political mistake - the maxim that you don't hold inquiries unless you know the outcomes, was overlooked, hopefully purposely. Fitzgerald's disaffection with the Nationals and the ALP shows that neither side appreciated the importance and quality of his work. I suspect even he possibly underestimated party poltical machines working to erode true parliamentary democratic reforms to ensure power is retained at any cost.

You would expect the Opposition to recognise the depleted state of parliamentary democracy and have policies that seek to remedy the situation. Where are these policies?

But do they want to be accountable, transparent and subject to parliamentary scrutiny? Triennial elections are a long way from enough to assure democracy.

Politicians do themselves and parliamentary representative democracy a disservice by not ensuring that there is real separation of powers, by ensuring the executive is separate from and overseen by representative, proportionately elected members of Parliament, and in the absence of the political will for a Legislative Council, there must be at least a Parliamentary Committee system that has real powers to effectively scrutinise both legislation and the exceutive's administration. Anything less makes a complete mockery of parliamentary democracy, will erode the people's confidence in it, and worse, lessen the quality of and respect for legislation, and its administration. Who accepts decisions affecting our lives by all knowing, yet flawed leaders are more important than due process?

Government in Queensland borders on totalitarian. It's currently run from Premier Beattie's office. He governs with less than half the votes cast in the 2004 election (even less after 3 by-elections), and yet can do whatever he and the ALP parliamentary arm wants, implement variants of ALP policy (even though over half the voters didn't want it, and hardly a mandate), pass any legislation or regulations (in fast time, with no or little effective scrutiny or analysis), irregardless of the rights and interests of the people, because every other check and balance has been effectvely nobbled.

What does the Opposition intend to do - anything at all, just a little or nothing?

Regards, Derek Sheppard