Sorry, Herbert, but the example Senators you use hardly inspire the conclusion that the system works. Fielding and Milne are wastes of space who, let's not forget, hardly got any votes. Fielding only got in through a series of shadowy preference deals and Milne also through preference deals plus the distortion that lets any Tasmanian Senator get elected with far, far fewer votes than they'd need on the mainland. The Senate is the problem. The Senators' only constituency is the selection panel of their party. They are completely unanswerable to us in any meaningful sense. In theory they represent the states, but in practice they are party machine people. Next time you have a quiz night in your local community, ask them to name all the senators for their own state. I bet they don't get past three. Down here in Tassie, the standard answers are Brown and Harradine (who hasn't been a senator for years)and a few have heard of Milne and, more recently, for all the wrong reasons, Abetz. What the hell do the other senators do to fill their day?

On SBS recently they had a show about whistle blowers, whilst Australia doesn't execute or imprison people, people can have their lives destroyed in other ways, an example was about the whistle blower over the airports, and the Liberal Howard response, Labor is no better.

Basically like the mafia, someone else does the dirty work. It would appear at present that making political donations, means favourable treatment by the party in power.

Sadly such a situation of political donations and favourable treatment is perhaps much stronger in the US than here at the moment.

We have corporatocracy.Corporates donate to Govts and Govts do their bidding.We all exist in a de-mockracy.

A fantastic article Greg Lees that should be viewed by every person who has at least the interest to look at news sites or sites such as this.
Australia's Westminster system is complete rubbish- how a system in which a tiny cartel of people who answer solely to a few thousand people in specific areas, and cater to a few thousand 'swinging voters' to back up their other members who do NOTHING- while they rule over the rest of us while we get ZERO say and their own members get barely a say for the next 3-4 years passes for a 'democracy' blows me away.
Even the 'conscience vote' is a sham- what right do a few dozen people have to dictate their (dubious) consciences on the rest of us?

We NEED BCIR (thanks for sending the letter Daggett and co), and we also need a system where:
-The Parliament is scrapped, and the entire lower-house is split up into independent ministries, voted in by separate ballots so that not all corners of our country are dictated by the whim of the top politician's party.
-Each separate ministry MUST have a coalition if nobody gets over 60% of the vote
-The Lower House candidates each answer to the WHOLE nation- not respective electorates- Senators instead can come from the electorates (or larger local regions) instead of some misproportionate state-by-state.
-NO deals (donors, lobbyists and party preferencing) may be committed either without voter consent or ALTOGETHER.

Thanks for your encouragement, King Hazza.

However, I disagree with your proposal to scrap the lower house.

I think the Parliamentary system could work quite well with BCIR's, although, (I would still favour the introduction of a Hare Clark system with multi-member constituencies for the lower house).

If Legislators understood that they cannot ignore the wishes of the voters as they do now, then I believe that it is likely that they will begin to pass good laws in anticipation of what the voters want and not enact laws that they know voters will subsequently vote down in a referenda.

It may not even prove necessary to go the to trouble of forcing a referendum on every wish by voters.

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Don't forget that the system of representative democracy that we have in this country, even without direct democracy, has functioned reasonably well in many countries for much of the time.

That is, why the greedy elites were unable to get what they wanted out of them, for example in many Latin American countries before 1973, when Pinochet's junta seized power in Chile in order to do their bidding. All this is described in Naomi Klein's towering work "The Shock Doctrine" of 2007.

Of course in 2009 Australia's supposed representative democracy has been almost thoroughly corrupted and does largely give our own greedy elites what they want at the expense of everyone else, but I still think, as bad as the situation is, it can still be largely fixed with BCIR's and need not be completely discarded.

I dunno Daggett- although BCIR would mostly fix the problem of accountability (and make no mistake- our country is NOT a democracy as long as we lack BCIR, nor can any other country claim to be such without it either), we would still be left with a huge expensive bureaucratic waste of excess members randomly assigned their roles (or non-roles) of government- which is why, in my opinion, the Lower House needs to be made up of independent ministries each directly elected- instead of a large parliament composed of locally-elected representatives whose actual function is assigned afterwards.
In other words, I'm still endorsing a representative democracy- I'm just proposing changing the representatives.

BCIR is most definitely the main answer to fixing our system, but other changes to improve accountability (and also the use and expertise of serving members) need to be implemented as well.