How do we get more talented people into Australia's Parliaments?

Another structural problem is that our political parties are focussed against their opposition, as opposed to focussed on the national interest. This means that pollies become very narrow in their thinking, and politics quickly gets personal - a trend exacerbated by the lazy media.

So how do we improve parliamentary representation? One obvious thing would be to require politicians to hold professional qualifications. Is it too much, for instance, that a person putting himself or herself forward to represent people in national parliament has a relevant degree? On the other hand, all those lawyers with their highly technical but narrowly focused law degrees show little benefit from a university education.

Certainly we should improve Parliament itself. Its real function – to openly and exhaustively debate the main issues of the day and come to rational decisions – is now almost defunct. Reforming the role of the chamber speakers seems essential, as does returning Question Time to some relevance. Anything that encourages pollies to actually come into the chamber and participate with energy would be a good thing.

Representative democracy is supposed to be the best compromise between direct expression of electoral will and accountability. Currently, it fails on both counts. As things stand, I submit that if we took a random sample of the Australian electorate and sent them to sit in the plush leather seats in Canberra, we would not lower the quality of representation in Federal Parliament (and certainly it would be a more diverse place). As I have quipped on occasion to my (politics) students – who are already highly sceptical about politics - you would not trust your dog with most of the current denizens of parliament house, let alone the country.

On both sides of politics a few smart individuals manage to drag their dull colleagues along with them to keep the process from completely collapsing, but that is not good enough any more. Australia is being sucked into an ever-more-complex and dangerous world. The spread of weapons of mass destruction, the rise of new diseases, global warming, al Qa'ida, and all the promises and threats of an ever accelerating technological society require intelligence, experience and character to deal with them.

People with such attributes are around – how do we get them where they can do the most good?