Filling the empty seats in parliament - representing the disengaged and enraged

The legitimacy of our democracy is already highly questionable given the obvious issue of the lack of proportionality in the translation of votes to representation in parliament. Of course this issue could be considerably overcome with the introduction of well explored alternatives like a system of Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMP). Then of course there is the issue of the corrupting influence of money in politics.

However beyond the issues of proportionality and money the legitimacy of our democracy is also undermined by another less commonly acknowledged issue, the increasing proportion of people who believe that participating in our democracy doesn't make any difference.

At every election towards the bottom of the results is a generally ignored report on the number of people who voted informally. While certainly some of these are genuine errors of not filling in the ballot correctly many are meant as a protest, impotent though that protest is. If you look more closely you will also find the number of people enrolled in the seat is significantly greater than the number of people who voted, meaning a huge number people didn't think it was worthwhile spending a couple of minutes voting.

Even more disturbingly, but much harder to get figures on, is that beyond the informal and non-voting enrolled that there are estimates of a huge number of people who are eligible to vote but not enrolled.

"The AEC studied the 2010 election and found more than 3 million Australians did not vote. Of those 1.5 million people were not enrolled, 900,000 people were enrolled but did not vote and nearly 750,0000 people cast an informal vote." http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-21/figures-show-25-per-cent-of-young-people-failed-to-enrol-to-vote/4903292

These informal votes, those who didn't vote, and those not enrolled add up to a huge number of people not being represented in our parliaments at all beyond any issues of lack of proportionality. Such a significant proportion of people in our society disengaging from the process and going unrepresented inherently undermines the legitimacy of our democracy, and the levels of disengagement seem to be increasing and likely to continue doing so.

One possible way to seek to address this disturbing level of disengagement would be allocating parliamentary representatives for the disengaged via sortition, the random allocation of positions from among the eligible so all have an equal chance of holding positions. The disengaged could be represented proportionally in parliament by representatives chosen at random from the population, like jury duty, possibly just for annual terms.

In an MMP system these seats could be incorporated into the list system, which by design is meant to allocate seats to the underrepresented. Opting for sortition could even be offered on the ballot, at the top of the ticket so also somewhat addressing donkey voting, as an essentially none-of-the-above option that unlike voting informally doesn't mean the vote goes uncounted, and the protest that this often represents is effectively ignored by the political establishment.

As a fringe benefit sortition would allow a much greater cross section of society to be represented in parliament beyond the usual lawyers, union officials, electorate officers and graziers, who are also disproportionately older, white men. Sortition would get a much more representative sample of representatives in parliament, at least for that proportion of the seats so determined.

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 institutions, incredibly powerful, virtually unregulated institutions in our democracy, some competition. There is also some research that suggests a proportion of parliament being randomly selected would be beneficial to the functioning of parliament.

Political parties would have an incentive to engage all potential voters (also a characteristic of MMP generally that overcomes the issue of neglect of safe seats) so as to reduce the proportion of parliamentary seats determined by sortition and therefore not under the control of the party whips. This lack of control by the whips would also help liberate parliament from the executive, something parliaments are all increasingly subject to, especially in lower houses, especially in Queensland.

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

Union reform

There are reports that the Australian Labor Party are going to propose improvements to union governance.

It is of course doubtful that anything proposed by the ALP will address the core issue of the lack of genuine democracy within unions, without which there cannot be accountability.

Unions have played an important part in making our society more equal and democratic, but are not playing that role to any significant degree any longer.

While there are of course other factors like structural changes in the economy, this diminished role is in large part due to the capture of the union movement by the union bosses, largely indistinguishable from the bosses unions were formed to counter.

This has undermined the ability of unions to evolve in a changing environment as union bosses instead focus on their careers in the ALP and other perks.

While certainly not all unions are as undemocratic as the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association (SDA), controlled for decades by Joe de Bruyn who runs it more like a rightwing Catholic cult than a union, or the Australian Workers Union, or the Health Services Union, all unions tend to be controlled by a small cabal that is essentially immune to democratic control by their members.

Australian unions are an excellent demonstration of the iron law of oligarchy, where organisations, even those ostensibly in favour of democracy, over time tend to become controlled by a small elite able to consolidate power and defend their position from the workings of democracy.

There are some things that could be done to reinvigorate the union movement and put it in the hands of the rank and file rather than union bosses:-

1. A requirement for union positions to be determined in free and fair annual elections conducted by an electoral commission. No donations from non-members to internal campaigns, and limits on donations and expenditure.
2. Other democratic reforms such as recall mechanisms, term limits, requirement for significant decision to be made by referendum, and a template for democratic constitutions.
3. Union official’s compensation to be tied to average wages of the industries they represent.
4. Unions to be subject to financial accountability similar to companies.
5. Political donations by unions to require consent of individual union members on an annual basis.
6. Any party and factional affiliation is on the basis of individual union members opting in on an annual basis and paying an additional fee.
7. Union members to be able to initiate de-amalgamations of their unions, and be able to initiate sections of unions splitting and joining other unions.
8. Union membership be portable to allow members to join the more democratic union, and provide an incentive for less democratic unions to change to avoid losing members.
9. Lowering barriers to new unions. Demarcation to be determined by individual member affiliation.
10. Other possibilities might be the use of Delegative Democracy for internal governance, a possible way of combating the iron law using technology.

Unions as organisations of working people should be making a significant contribution to bettering our society as they have historically, but it seems likely that in order to do so rather than the current rearguard action and functioning as a step in the career path for opportunists, they will need to undergo significant democratic reform.