US election 2024 - democracy voting itself out

Assume for the sake of argument that Steve Bannon and his ilk didn't successfully steal the election as they were fairly openly planning to do, and there is no proof that they did, but also no one seems to be really looking into that. Right up until election day there were adamant claims the election would be stolen, and pretty much every thing Trump accuses his opponents of is projection, but let's put that to one side.

Also assume that the oligarchs backing Trump were at least somewhat counterbalanced by the oligarchs backing Harris. Musk et al did mean most of the big money was on Trump's side and blatantly buying the election, and while this was significantly worse than usual even for US politics it certainly wasn't new, and bipartisan, if not equally so.

That means that a majority of US citizens knowingly voted for not just a known truly heinous and corrupt individual but one openly expressing authoritarian intentions such as mass deportations, attacks on "the enemy within" and maintaining the purity of the "national blood", who thinks that the existential threat of climate change is a hoax. This seems like proof that representative democracy is doomed to fail, happily voting itself out of existence.

While Dutton isn't as bad as Trump, but that is a very high bar, he does seem to be doing his best to emulate him, and it is looking increasingly likely that we will get a local franchise of Trumpism next year. Our hollowed out democracies seem destined to fail, at best just continuing entirely as a facade.

At present it seems the only thing that will likely interrupt this decline back into feudalism and the rule of oligarchs is the actual end of civilisation due to actively accelerated climate change. So faith in democracy is pretty hard to sustain just now, perhaps only outdone by the effort to sustain any sense of hope in the future. I am grimly clinging to the distinction between representative democracy and actual democracy. The future however looks bleak.

How to break up a duopoly?

It is unclear how the policy to force Coles and Woolworths to divest would work in practice. At present they have economies of scale and an effective duopoly that is not just national but at the local level.

For instance if Coles was forced to divest some of its stores would the now separate stores introduce any actual local competition? Is it assumed that Coles would then open new stores in the same area to compete with their former stores? How many separate stores could most areas actually sustain?

The buildings aren't really the most important part of the business despite often limited suitable locations, but rather the access to the supply and logistical network, which is inherently centralised and where the economies of scale come in.

So are we not talking about divesting stores but some other aspects of the business that would somehow introduce competition, and if so what?

Perhaps if stores are divested from Coles or Woolworths in each local market to create a new public alternative or confederation of co-operatives, though it would still have to develop a new supply and logistical network to be able to effectively compete.

In terms of competition policy I have often wondered that if instead of trying to reinject competition back into markets if it wouldn't make more sense to acknowledge that a company or companies have effectively won the competition, that market is now mature, so game over you're nationalised.

If after that the so-called free market wants to claim that private enterprise is inherently more innovative (without any real evidence) then they would be welcome to try and compete with the supposedly inefficient public sector.

Regulation of the people, by the people

Empowering the community to enforce the law would contribute to the development of a culture where the law actually functioned. Before there were police departments law enforcement was much more of a community matter and that approach, somewhat evolved for the modern world, is really the only viable way for the law to be enforced effectively.

As democracy is not just about elections, laws are not just legislation being passed, as laws only have effect to the degree that they are enforced. The problem with most laws is not what is written but the corresponding lack of action, not the talk but the walk.

While there are of course bad laws, more often the issue is the deliberate tactic by governments to undermine enforcement of laws against the powerful who coincidentally often funded their campaigns and will employ them when they leave `public service'.

Governments frequently do not want to be seen to change the laws to be watering down protections of citizens, are or actually are not able to change laws do so. They can however much less obviously and easily with executive power restrict and underfund the enforcement of laws that would protect people and the environment to the point they are rendered ineffective.

Laws that generally impact poor people tend to be enforced with vastly overfunded police departments resourced to overpolice, an expensive judicial system and mass incarceration. It is of course a system of one law for us, and no law for them.

Laws that generally would have an impact on the wealthy or limit corporations tend to have lax enforcement with hamstrung underfunded enforcement bodies a mechanisms to allow the wealthy and powerful to negotiate their way out. There are few cops on beats like financial regulation, tax audits, protecting workers' rights, or, environmental regulation.

Of course regulators alone or even primarily do not enforce laws. Rather a culture has to be developed where at the very least there is a widespread expectation of there being likely consequences to breaching the law that are a sufficient deterrent.

Laws have to be a bit fuzzy reflecting firstly the complexity of modern life and that no law can articulate every permutation. They also have to be able to reflect evolving community sentiment. Finally they have to operate so that the advantage is clearly in acting in good faith and avoiding transgression rather than a race to the bottom seeking loopholes or evading enforcement.

Any disadvantage should accrue to bad actors rather than good. If any significant proportion of the regulated can successfully avoid compliance it means either a privileged minority acting above the law entrenching their privilege or to compete everyone has an incentive to ignore the law. That is what we currently see with the regulation or corporations generally.

Of course to really function a law needs to operate so that it is accepted culturally, so people actively act to avoid transgression. Ideally of course the laws should reflect the values of the people governed by them so that they should want to comply, and indeed participate in ensuring compliance.

Government alone will never be able to enforce laws and regulations adequately as it simply cannot resource such an undertaking and such a concentration of power inevitably leads to abuses. Community support is required to create a culture where laws are complied with and a majority of transgressors face significant consequences, legal and otherwise.

Perhaps an important early step towards breaking down the status quo would be recognising that for many the most pressing under enforced areas of law there are already organisations and people interested in seeing laws enforced. Think unions and the issue of wage theft, or environmental NGOs and pollution or illegal tree clearing, or, consumer advocates detecting fraud by banks or other corporations.

If these groups and people could be recognised to have legal standing, rights and powers to allow them to participate in enforcing laws they would significantly increase the enforcement infrastructure for the relevant laws. Moreso if they were also able to fund themselves by collecting bounties for detecting violations of the law that are successfully prosecuted funded by financial penalties on transgressors this would make the system more sustainable.

Such a system where law enforcement is not monopolised by the political class would go a long way to creating a culture where laws that effect the powerful are actually enforced.

Trial by Constituency - Holding parliamentarians to account

Representative democracy can't be made to work if there is no way to enforce that elected representatives actually represent their constituencies. Our current political class overwhelmingly act in the interests of vested interests who they leave parliament to be rewarded by rather than the people who elected them.

One of the fundamental problems with representative democracy is that once elected representatives are effectively impossible for voters to hold them to account. The only remedy available to voters is that should the parliamentarian stand at a subsequent election to vote against them.

Unfortunately this action provides essentially no real accountability as it undermined by the partisan system meaning voting against a candidate means voting against their party as well as being forced to vote for another candidate likely with less ideologically in common with the voter.

Also of course the politician might not stand for election again, and for most of them at that point start cashing in with the vested interests they actually represented in parliament.

However interestingly it has recently been reported that former Sports minister Bridget McKenzie could be personally liable for grants made during the sports rorts corruption. Such liability is far from established and has certainly never actually been enforced but it theoretically exists, and could be clearly articulated in law.

While the current mechanism probably only applies to the executive it could be extended to all parliamentarians to the extent they could be construed to be liable for facilitating the misconduct or corruption. Most often this would mean that partisan colleagues would be construed to have had some complicity if they did not reasonably act to address the matter.

Also interesting was when in 2019 in the UK Boris Johnson was sued for misconduct in public office, a criminal offence in common law with potentially a life sentence, relating to his lies about how much the UK paid the EU during the Brexit plebiscite.

This particular case was ultimately dismissed, but there is again theoretically at least a framework for taking action against parliamentarians for their misconduct that could be built upon. Again it at present relates to office holders, but there is no reason it couldn't be broadened to include all parliamentarians.

I would argue that parliamentarians should as a matter of course at the conclusion of their terms be subject to a trial by a jury of those they purportedly represented, a Trial by Constituency. This trial would determine if the parliamentarian has reasonably sought to implement the platform they were elected on and that they have not engaged in any misconduct or corruption.

If the parliamentarian were found to have not represented their constituents, to have misrepresented themselves to get elected, or engaged in misconduct or corruption they would be subject to penalties including most obviously being ineligible to sit in parliament.

A mechanism for instituting such proceedings before the conclusion of a term should also be available, possibly similar to a recall election, and be possible immediately after election to allow address for election by fraud. It should also be possible to bring action against a former parliamentarian who has subsequently demonstrated that they are being improperly rewarded by vested interests for actions taken while in office.

As with regular jury trials a super majority of some kind would be necessary to convict but it would be possible to hold individual parliamentarians accountable. Liability would also extend to any political party that endorsed the parliamentarian in the election and had not expelled them in a reasonable timeframe upon misconduct.

Our current system does nothing to address corruption or misconduct, does nothing to address the rewards that currently accrue to those who campaign based on solely on lies and fear campaigns to get through elections. There are not effective checks or balances. The represented need ways to take action against representatives who betray them for the system to really work.

If nothing is done the credibility of democracy will continue to be eroded away to nothing from the little credibility it still retains.

Consent of the Undead versus Living Democracy

The basis of how we are governed is expressed in laws in the form of legislation and constitutions (for the purposes of this discussion common law and the relationship it has with democracy is not being considered).

Constitutions are generally entrenched, meaning that they are hard to change, having a threshold for change higher than a simple majority, possibly having multiple thresholds that need to be met to achieve change.

This has generally been construed to reflect that the laws expressed in constitutions are fundamentally more important, more basic, than other laws, and thus need to be protected from the hurly-burly of day-to-day politics and considered somewhat sacrosanct.

In practice this has proven innately extremely conservative and required workarounds like the concepts of a living constitution where the interpretation of the document can be stretched and changed and read into due to the inability to actually change the text. Often anything construed as requiring constitutional change is abandoned as being inherently too difficult.

In a sense all laws are entrenched to an extent as generally the status quo is difficult to change even if theoretically only a majority is required to vote for change, because various hurdles will exist to mitigate against moving to a vote, if nothing else just the innate inertia of the status quo, the time it takes to change one law in the context of the number of laws.

Then of course there is the inherent defense of the status quo where laws are often protected by concentrated vested interests versus a more disperse group who would stand to gain from any change. Laws are further protected by the lack of representation in representative democracy. So laws passed at a particular point in the past are to some extent or another hard to change, that is are entrenched.

On reflection however it should become clear that entrenchment is innately in conflict with the democratic principle of consent of the governed in that it is means laws, constitutions especially, are reflective of a point in time, often a point significantly in the past, and therefore often don't represent the current constituency, but possibly a generation long since passed on.

Ideally to satisfy the principle of consent of the governed laws should be required to constantly prove they have the support of the current constituency. In practical terms this has not historically been possible though it is possible though generally not done to require periodic renewal of laws.

Times have changed and Liquid democracy has now been developed as a way to spread the practice of democracy to all with a mix of direct and representative democracy, but as generally construed it is still constrained by entrenchment. However liquid democracy is ideal to incorporate the concept of living democracy where decisions only remain in force for so long as they retain majority support.

The direct democracy and transferable proxies of Liquid democracy mean that support for decisions can be tracked on an ongoing basis. We are perhaps not ready to use such a system at the level of the state but we could introduce it in our civil society associations.

New members can take position on previous decisions directly or by proxy, former member's positions are removed, current members as always can change position. Therefore all decisions could be constantly subject to a de facto motion of confidence, an ongoing mechanism testing consent of the governed.

The foundations of our democracies cannot themselves be fundamentally undemocratic. We should not be bound by those who have gone before, or conversely bind those yet to come, and we now have a way to make rules prove that they have our continuous consent.

Advantages of Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP) over an upper house

Advantages of Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP) over other more well-known options like Hare-Clarke as in Tasmania or the ACT, or a Single Transferable Vote Upper house like the most Australian states or the Australian Senate:-

1. The big one is of course Proportionality. With MMP the number of seats each party gets in parliament very closely reflects the percent of the vote they got from the electorate, depending on the number of seats it could be basically a seat per percent of vote. In Tasmania the threshold for a party to get a seat is 16.5%, the ACT either 14.2% or 16.5% depending on the seat, and in the Senate 14.2%.
2. The second main advantage of MMP is that is addresses issues in the house that forms government, in contrast to adding an upper house that leaves the more powerful lower house untouched. A unicameral system allows for progressive changes to be passed, whereas introduction of an upper house only potentially allows for regressive changes to be blocked.
3. MMP addresses government being formed with less than majority support of the electorate, instead of 100% of the power going to the party with about a third of the support of the electorate. An upper house doesn’t effect the formation of government.
4. MMP almost certainly requires coalitions of more than one party to form government. This is more representative, but also makes parliament more relevant as decisions not made within one party. With an upper house this level of co-operation is not required and not on equal terms as the generally one party government always controls the lower house so continues to set the agenda.
5. MMP retains local electorate parliamentarians which many people think is important to the functioning of a representative democracy.
6. MMP addresses the neglect of safe seats, with elections focused on the lower house currently only about swinging voters in swinging seats, because every vote counts towards determining how many seats a party gets in parliament. The high thresholds in upper houses still translate to relatively safe seats and the election will remain focused on the lower house. There is just one election rather than two with everyone only focusing on the first one and ignoring the upper house.
7. MMP leading to minority government forces political parties to try to work together issue by issue rather than being in a constant adversarial political theatre. Parliament at present is largely a complete waste of time being a rubber stamp for the one party government. With an upper house the focus is still on the lower house where government is formed, and again the one party government sets the agenda and a majority in the upper house can’t pass anything without government support.
8. In MMP there is a greater incentive for parties to engage with those currently disengaged from politics to increase turnout to get the largest proportion of votes possible. Every vote counts towards how many seats the party ends up with, including those not currently voting, or voting informal.
9. MMP ensures that there will be a viable Opposition, unlike in Queensland after the 2012 election.
10. MMP with its lower bar for entry for political parties, means greater representativeness, and allowing for entry of new parties into parliament allowing rejuvenation of politics.
11. Due to its greater proportionality MMP is largely immune to disproportionate changes in results form small changes in votes that upper houses are. A small decrease in vote saw the ALP’s representation halved in the Senate in Queensland last election.
12. In MMP there is an advantage to parties being able to have an actual presence on the ground to campaign across the state, so works against public relations fronts like Clive Palmer’s party United Australia, but also even the ALP and LNP would have an incentive to really engage with their memberships and thus improve internal democracy in political parties. Upper houses tend to mean parties still neglect large areas of the electorate because the next threshold is out of reach.
13. MMP facilitates the break up of old parties kept together despite internal differences due to the demands of the electoral system. This is important to address institutional problems inherent in long established parties, and for the rejuvenation of politics.
14. MMP can be introduced without any increase in the number of parliamentarians which is an issue for many people (though it shouldn’t be as we have too few representatives per voter). While an upper house could be introduced without any increase in parliamentarians that would likely mean very high thresholds for entry making it less proportional and possibly dominated by the ALP or LNP.
15. In MMP the voting system from the perspective of the voter could in theory stay the same with the one vote variation, that is the ballot and how voters vote could be identical, so the transition would be very smooth. Even with the more common two vote system the change would be relatively straight forward in contrast to an upper house vote which requires `tablecloth’ ballot papers as we see with the Senate.
16. It is easier to introduce other affirmative action targets for parliament via the list MPs.
17. MMP doesn’t duplicate parliamentary processes as an upper house would.
18. In a one vote variation of MMP where the list is automatically generated the power of behind the scenes party hacks can be limited and parliamentarians given an incentive to better represent their electorates.

Mixed Member Proportional Representation: A very brief history and news

The basic concept of levelling seats that underpins Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) representation, that is seats added to a parliament to make it representative of the party votes received in elections, was introduced in Denmark in 1915 and is still used throughout Scandinavia.

Germany introduced MMP in particular after WWII when they were clearly desperately in need of a new, more democratic electoral system, and they have retained MMP since then and their system is generally considered among the most democratic, stable and effective in the world.

New Zealand voted to introduce MMP in a referendum in 1993, and first used it in 1996, and of course they now have the government led by Labour’s Jacinda Ardern in coalition with the NZ Greens and NZ First.

In the United Kingdom MMP is known as Alternative Vote Plus. It is already used for the Scottish parliament and Welsh and London assemblies, and there is a strong campaign to introduce it at the national level gaining ground in the context of the Brexit chaos.

Thailand introduced MMP for the 2019 elections.

South Korea is moving towards introducing MMP with support from governing party and minor parties, though opposition from the main conservative party.

Canada has had a number of referendums in provinces on introducing MMP narrowly defeated, sometimes due to high thresholds. There will be a referendum in Quebec in 2022. It is one of the more popular alternatives being explored at the national level though reform was undermined by Justin Trudeau after the last election but the campaign is still active as they head into their current election. Recently the NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said that he would introduce MMP “without a referendum” if elected prime minister.

In Queensland MMP could be introduced without constitutional change as it reforms the existing house of parliament, in contrast to its main competition in terms of electoral reform, reintroducing an upper house. MMP is part of the Queensland Greens Democracy Policy.

MMP would bring us much closer to the democratic ideal that underlies the principle of one vote, one value, as almost every vote would actually count towards determining the composition of parliament. At present while electorates might be roughly the same in size votes in marginal electorates are worth much more, as are the votes of swinging voters.

Sortition is a partial answer to restoring the legitimacy of our democracy

Sortition is random selection by lot from the entire population rather than by elections to appoint positions, for instance for parliament. Democracy is generally traced back to ancient Athens, but the democracy the Athenians practised was very different from modern representative democracy, with the default instead being use of sortition, believed to represent rule by the people, in preference to elections which were seen as tending towards oligarchy.

There are many advantages to sortition. Parliamentarians determined by sortition would be representative of the population demographically, so not overwhelmingly rich, white, middle-aged males disproportionately from the legal profession who see parliament as a pit stop on the way to a lucrative career lobbying or sitting on corporate boards. A parliament determined by sortition is the most demographically representative a parliament can get. Everyone has an equal chance so generally the people selected will reflect the population.

The limitations of partisan preselection processes is inherently not an issue in sortition. The outcomes in most elections are not particularly competitive, being reduced to choosing between two, or occasionally three, people preselected by parties, and in a safe seat the effective choice is eliminated altogether. For most voters elections are a largely empty ritual as they are not swing voters in marginal seats so there is little incentive to engage as their vote won’t matter. The determination of who the parliamentarians will be is largely predetermined by the internal party preselection processes. The preselection system produces parliamentarians who are mostly seen as a political class who have worked a corrupt, factional party system to get their position, separate and removed from the average voter.

The corruption of money in politics is much less of an issue when using sortition. Firstly because of bypassing of the partisan preselection process and partisan election, the latter especially coming with significant costs to compete in that are not a factor in sortition. A parliamentarian selected by sortition owes no factional loyalty or favours to donors, and has no need to try to accumulate any for the next election. While of course the possibility of brown paper bags under the table can never be eliminated (though of course a national ICAC would help) the structure of sortition isn’t susceptible to the systemic corruption of money in politics that we currently suffer under.

The use of sortition would reinvigorate parliament. There is research that suggests a proportion of parliament being randomly selected would be beneficial to the functioning of parliament. It would almost certainly mean the institution was not generally dominated by the executive. If a proportion of the lower house this would essentially guarantee a hung parliament with a significant crossbench of sortition parliamentarians meaning the chamber wouldn't be controlled by any one party and functioning as a rubber stamp for the executive.

If people when considering their vote have to keep in mind that perhaps they personally may be called upon to address the issues as a parliamentarian they are more likely to engage with the issues. Even if they assume they won't be called they will know that those selected by sortition will likely be like them rather than from the political class. The distance between the governed and the governing would be bridged. Parliamentarians will become more relatable, in that a significant proportion of them would be ordinary people like other voters, and overall would be more actually representative of the electorate being significantly more diverse, drawing people from all walks of life beyond the narrowed horizons of most professional politicians.

One possible way to seek to address the disturbing levels of disengagement and rage evident in our democracy would be allocating some parliamentary representatives via sortition, the random allocation of positions from among the eligible so all have an equal chance of holding a seat. The disengaged could be represented proportionally in parliament by representatives chosen at random from the population, like jury duty, probably for shorter terms than for other parliamentarians, possibly annually.

Opting for sortition could also be offered to voters on the ballot, at the top of the ticket so also somewhat addressing donkey voting, as an essentially none-of-the-above (below) option. This would provide a mechanism for the enraged to express their frustration that didn’t result in the election of faux anti-Establishment populist parliamentarians, but still definitely had an effect.

Under this model it would also importantly provide an incentive for political parties to try to engage the disengaged, something that they mostly don't have at the moment as demonstrated by the almost total lack of effort to do so. This sortition process would give political parties as incredibly powerful, virtually unregulated institutions in our democracy, some competition. Political parties would have an incentive to engage all potential voters so as to reduce the proportion of parliamentary seats determined by sortition and therefore not under the control of the party whips.

Restoring the legitimacy of our democracy requires that something be done to engage, or at the very least take into account, the huge and growing proportion of citizens completely disengaged from the democratic process and completely unrepresented in parliament. A random selection of representatives are likely to reflect the general will of the electorate at least as well as the representatives from political parties dominated by an elite and beholden to wealthy donors.

Some expression of the protest, active or passive, that this disengagement demonstrates, should be reflected in the election results. Expecting the disengaged themselves to fix the system clearly won't work, so an incentive has to be created for the political class to engage them, or at least take them into account, and a sortition process like this could be such an incentive.

Sortition while not a panacea would be a significant step in the direction of addressing the growing alienation of the electorate from the political process. It is radical approach seeking to limit the power of political parties as institutions largely seen to be out of touch, and to demonstrably seek to include ordinary people in the political process and a willingness to give them power.

A democracy without legitimacy is not really a democracy at all.

The myth of a competitive free market

It is often asserted that capitalism is defined by competition, a competitive free market. But how many markets are actually defined by real competition? For most things the price that the at most several large suppliers or buyers have converged on must just be accepted. Most businesses operate in established markets with established suppliers and customer bases and are not engaged in daily struggle of cut-throat competition with survival of the fittest.

How many markets have many sellers and many buyers? The stockmarket comes closest to this ideal in a sense, as there are many company's shares being sold and many investing in shares (the institutions actually mediating the transactions is another matter). Though even here large institutional investors have increasingly excluded smaller players in a meaningful sense from having much influence.

However other than the stockmarket which is in a sense artificial, other examples of actually competitive markets are few and far between. Perhaps the housing market, especially as it is increasingly and unfortunately less constrained by geography with interstate and international buyers. What else? Restaurants, are an example of an ongoing competitive market at least in cities, with many entrants supplying, and of course lots of people eating, and established players still having to compete to survive.

Entertainment provides some competitive markets, actors and productions especially, and, productions and platforms currently, though this recent phenomenon of many platforms will likely consolidate and most of the significant new players are leveraging their dominance in other markets. Facebook TV is coming. Musicians and platforms arguably, though there are still predominant labels. Authors and publishers/platforms somewhat more recently, though historically large publishers dominate and Amazon arguably supplanting all of them. Standup comedians are actually very competitive and less constrained by a mediating oligopoly like other entertainers. 

Generally competition is suggested by a lot of people entering the market and failing, or getting by on slim margins, and a few doing well but continuing to have to work for it. But other competitive markets beyond those above...? Not too many. Often there are many outlets, but with essentially a local monopoly, and/or also subject to some monopoly or oligopoly one step up the chain. Professionals traditionally had some competition though limited by access to the profession and geography, and increasingly they are subsumed in large firms.

A look back at many of the competitive markets shows they are dominated by individual talent which will inevitably decline and die making room for new competitors. Where markets are based on corporations, virtually everywhere now, corporations that are in a sense immortal, there is less competition. Where markets are based on patents and control of intellectual property, that is government granted monopolies, held by corporations rather than creators there is inevitably less competition.

Competition is not open ended, over time someone (or a small group) will inevitably win, which would be the case if all competitors started on an even footing, and even more so in the economy where they don't. This process is somewhat obscured and ameliorated by new markets forming but that doesn't effect the dominance of the pre-existing market even if reducing its size and importance. Microsoft still dominates in the desktop operating system market despite the emergence of other bigger IT companies in other markets.

In most markets the competition, if there ever was any, has long since devolved into an oligopoly or monopoly, or in other parts of the supply chain a monopsony or oligopsony. Even for above exceptions we see large institutional investors coming to dominate the stockmarket, housing stock getting concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and McDonalds and other large fast food restaurants.

Economic competition is more like punctuated equilibrium in evolution. Disruptive innovation happens, but then the market settles down again into a new balance without any real competition. Competition is the exception not the norm. What competition there is largely restricted to emerging markets, or those based on individual talent, or those that are essentially gambling, speculation largely divorced from any underlying productive asset.

Our system is also set up to let large companies stifle competition by buying up innovators, or using market power and or corrupt influence with government against them. `Consolidation', `rationalisation' obviously means less competition. This was in the past somewhat recognised by the creation of anti-trust measures, though in practice these have been infrequently utilised, and should be revitalised. However firstly it is important to acknowledge the fact that a competitive free market is basically a myth.

The whole can not be more democratic than the parts

A lot of effort is devoted to the idea of democratic reform of parliament, and rightly so, as it is very far from representative and that undermines the integrity of our democracy. However even if we did manage to achieve Mixed Member Proportional representation, with elements of sortition, the glaring lack of democracy in political parties as institutions that dominate our democracy would still be undermining the functioning of democracy in our country.

Political parties dominate our system of government, despite only being tangentially mentioned in the constitution, and importantly being virtually unregulated by the law or the courts. There is a incentive to register with the relevant electoral commissions and some very limited disclosure of donations, and that is the sum total of regulation of political parties.

Political parties as institutions, functioning largely unhindered by any standards, are also perhaps unsurprisingly overwhelmingly undemocratic. The iron law of oligarchy has long since taken hold of the major parties. Given their dominance of the political system this lack of internal democracy has significant negative flow-on effects for the implementation of democracy in the country.

Hollowing out of the membership of political parties have made them not only less and less representative of the general population, but more and more susceptible to undemocratic practices. The ALP and Liberals are in a very real sense little more than brands rather than political movements. There is no substantive control of either party by the membership, with members reduced to being merely a source of free labour/cheer squad.

Political party membership has correspondingly shrunk, even more so if we discount branch stacking. These are not mass membership parties as they once were, with the total membership of all parties now being a minuscule proportion of the population. Policy is being determined solely by either parliamentarians or leadership staff. The sop to the ALP membership regarding determining the leadership was designed so as the entire membership was able to be vetoed by the caucus.

That caucus, as is those of the conservatives, is made up of former candidates who are regularly determined either centrally and/or by factions and imposed on the membership and then in turn the electorate. In our unrepresentative system, the parliamentary contest is almost always either between the two cartel preselected candidates, or for safe seats basically the preselection of the relevant party determines the parliamentarian. Preselections conducted by corrupt, undemocratic organisations overwhelmingly predetermine who will be in parliament.


Unfortunately in our society the practice of democracy has contracted down to merely this act of voting on choices predetermined by these corrupt organisations every several years, and even that participation is being undermined, for instance with voters supporting longer terms. Voting against democracy, seems to be increasingly common.

Modern democracy emerged from civil society, in the form of clubs, associations, unions, co-operatives, even some churches, and the decline of democracy can be seen in these institutions as well. The practice of democracy on this more intimate level has been undermined by the growth of the organisations involved often reducing members in practice to passive observers, the general tendency towards centralisation, and perhaps the modelling of declining democracy given by the public parliamentary process. People don't really experience much democracy in their day-to-day lives anymore.

Perhaps the most glaring sphere lacking democracy, the one doing most to undermine democracy in other spheres, is the corporate sector, where democracy never took hold in the first place, and which overwhelmingly still operates on something akin to a neo-feudal basis. There are exceptions like co-operatives, but these are in a minority, and in the wider undemocratic context in business have often struggled to maintain their democratic ethos.

The lack of democracy inherent in current business practices, and increasingly in civil society contributes to the undermining democracy at the national level, and vice versa, and likely addressing that decline will require a rejuvenation in these organisations, to then in turn flow to greater expectations in state, national and international contexts.

We probably need to address the issue from all angles, requiring democratic reform of political parties, and seeking to rejuvenate democracy in civil society, and introduce it to the corporate sector. All such reforms would reinforce positive change in the other sectors, much as their decline is reinforcing negative change at present.

The tide is currently against democracy, a principle and practice that has emerged through significant struggle relatively recently in history, that is seemingly underappreciated at present, but it still is maintained by most as an ideal, and it is one worth fighting for. There is hope, in the ability to use new technology, and new innovations in democratic organisations, and combinations of these two developments. Democracy takes work (eternal vigilance), and likely constant innovation to survive and thrive, but it can and must.