Jud200609
Mr. Leigh, you seriously believe that politicians are here to stay for ever?

How gloomy a prospect it would be for humanity if it were to be so!

Keep them and the ground will go from under our feet. Disobey all of their rules and the planet will last a little longer.

All politicians want is to control and play with others’ lives, all they do is make Laws that enter into the very life of each human and wreck it to insignificance.

They sense their own superfluity and dread the contamination of their tyrannical order by free spirits.

In the scale of Man’s time, they have not been around long, though long enough to take this planet’s life to the brink of annihilation.

“Control” is all they are about. Not one of them has not some traits of Mussolini’s, or Stalin’s or Hitler’s characters.

I have lived long enough to see them as romantic saviors before and brutes after election.

Aesop, two and half millennia ago saw that: “We appoint big thieves to protect us from petty ones” he said.

And as idiots we continue to give them our vote and pay them, de facto unconditionally, for accepting it.

This must have been what Adam Smith saw at the “free Market”.

What a paradox

Is not politicians our people? Did not we vote them?
Is not enouph that they humiliate their self?
OK they take more money comparing with their services, but why we do not blame our self for this kind of politicians? We elected them we are responsible for them!
Generaly our behave to politicians weaken our democracy and damage our interests.
Antonios Symeonakis
Adelaide

Fair point, Grim.

>>Pericles, I think the original post was advocating that politicians should work for nothing; obviously only the likes of Rudd and Turnbull could afford to do this.<<

I had in mind the eighteenth-century landowner, dedicating his time to representing the welfare of his constituents. And I agree, it would not work today.

But there is still a major discrepancy between the financial conditions under which politicians work, and those that apply to the rest of us.

All my working life I have been judged on my in-job performance. In the early days, this was accomplished by sitting down with my manager, agreeing goals for the coming year, and at the end of that period assessing how well I had performed against those tasks. We both knew that i) my survival in the job and ii) my salary level hung on the outcome.

Since staring my own businesses, the feedback mechanism is much more direct. If I don't succeed, I lose my entire investment, and put some good people out of work.

Surely, it is not beyond the wit of man to devise a sensible measurement mechanism for politicians?

Simply meeting the commitments they make before the election would be a start. The penalty for not doing so would be consistent with the private sector - fire them, and disallow them from standing again for a period of time.

The prospect of losing one's job - especially one that is surrounded with so many perks and benefits - should have the effect of sharpening up their attention to both the promises they make, and the efforts they put in to meet them.

Pericles: "Surely, it is not beyond the wit of man to devise a sensible measurement mechanism for politicians?"

More to the point, is it beyond the wit of Pericles?

I take the answer is it "yes". But I don't blame Pericles for this. I blame the guy who posed the question.

He apparently doesn't appreciate that we have a workable way of measuring politicians now. Their job is to represent their constituents (customers). Every few years we get their customers to rate their performance by asking them if there is someone who could potentially do a better job.

It ain't perfect system by any means. But we have tried a few ways of selecting and measuring our leaders over the past few millennium and this is the best we have come up with. Asking someone to come up with something better is asking too much.

"Asking someone to come up with something better is asking too much."
So there's no more room for refinement, even though the system "ain't perfect"?
While I concede your point about essential democracy, Rstuart, I think Pericles also has a point.
Most businesses these days offer a clearly defined (albeit often rose tinted) mission statement. It is curious no political party offers such clear goals in their election promises; ie "in our first 3 year term we intend to do this, with the clear understanding that we will achieve this result, before the next election". Currently, as much as they love making promises, they never seem to mention a time frame.
If governments had to go to a fully independent bank to finance these open ended schemes (without the wonderful backup of almost infinitely variable tax dollars), I wonder how they'd fare?

If this was meant as reproof, or even an insult, it was far too subtle for me, rstuart.

>>More to the point, is it beyond the wit of Pericles?<<

My proposals were actually serious. More to the point, they are actually workable, and I make no apology for comparing the mechanism to that of an ordinary company.

A company works at a couple of levels, as Grim points out. At the top level, they have mission statements, goals and objectives, against which they are broadly measured by the public and by their shareholders.

In my scenario, this would be analogous to the Party's general manifesto - we're pro- or anti- unions, for example, or we are pro- or anti-ETS.

A company also works at the basic levels of Sales and Marketing, Service and Support etc. where the mission, goals and objectives are turned into daily work patterns.

This is analogous in my proposal to the individual's approach to their electorate.

The "if elected, I shall..." commitment.

This would encompass the more tangible stuff, like whether the candidate is pro- or anti- a desalination plant or a nuclear power station in the electorate, or whether they would support or oppose legislation banning the morning-after pill.

It should not be too difficult, given the wealth of technology available to us, to document these agreements that were voluntarily made in return for our vote, and to hold the elected member accountable for them.

We as the citizenry would actually have a personal reason for monitoring the cations and activities of our representative. In turn, they would be aware of this, and be far more assiduous in the discharge of their obligations to us.

On the whole, a system that is a heap more responsive, I would suggest, than simply trooping along to the polls every four years to elect some faceless twerp who cares for little except the fact that he or she has finally made it onto the gravy train.

>>But we have tried a few ways of selecting and measuring... this is the best we have come up with<<

So far.