Alchemist, I have a feeling we may have been separated at birth.

"...have all political candidates document their promises and agenda's, anything outside of that, would go to referendum. Also make them carry out their promises or get sacked with no pension or benefits."

This says it all.

There is a fundamental crying need for an overhaul of the tired, corrupt and morally bankrupt version of democracy that we have created.

In theory, a representative democracy will smooth out the peaks and troughs of governance that are created by our natural tendency to short-termism and selfishness. In practice, it passes our individual power to a group of people who blatantly and demonstrably are in business only for themselves.

"More and more, politics is becoming the concern of a small caste. The distance between the political professionals and the normal people never ceases to widen." [attributed to a French sociologist; if he's reading this, my apologies for not finding out who he is, I'd like to shake his hand.]

A direct democracy has its faults too, of course, except in the pure Athenian model that allowed for the execution of public officers who abused their position. Now that was smart thinking.

So we should push hard for an Australian version of the Swiss system, where they have had roughly two referenda a year since federation without too many deleterious side-effects. As Alchemist points out, we should be able to i) hold our elected government to the promises they made in order to get there, under pain of - if not death, then certainly penury, and ii) allow the gaps to be filled by citizen-led, binding referenda.