McPolitics

The solutions are there in our experience of corporate governance. The first thing we can do is to ensure that political parties' constitutions meet basic regulatory standards. Queensland has legislative requirements that set out the form a political party's constitution must take.

But legislated governance structures and reporting requirements only take you so far, as HIH and FAI demonstrate. Ultimately corporate good health is guaranteed by competition. We need to introduce more competition into politics.

This competition won't occur through the advent of new political parties. In our system the single member constituencies in the lower house only occasionally yield up a member from outside our political duopoly, and then it is most likely to be an independent.

If competition is to occur it has to happen at another level. One way is to introduce it internally within parties. Another is to innovate in how citizens interact with government, outside of political parties.

A good first step would be for the ALP to abandon its policy of caucus solidarity. It has corroded politics on both sides directly leading to a monochrome state of debate. Petro Georgiou and his supporters demonstrate what representative democracy should be about.

A second step would be to introduce primary elections, as in the US. They would diminish the power of party bosses and give electors a say in who represents them, even in seats which are safe for one side or the other.

This system is not without its problems. Elections at large are expensive, and with party organisations marginalised, this means that plutocrats are more likely to win than others. That is not likely to be as large a problem in Australia as it is in the US. To start with, electorates here are much smaller, so the cost should be lower. One could also legislate to limit the amount of money that could be spent.

Even if it did lead to more rich people getting elected, would that be a bigger problem than electing talentless hacks?

Another solution is presented by the internet, and is one that The National Forum, and its journal On Line Opinion is dedicated to exploring. While Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) and others have pinpointed the problem of “the democratic deficit” that doesn't mean that citizens are no longer political.

What has happened is that citizens aren't using political parties as the conduits for their political activities anymore. When issues affect them, they want to make their voice heard. That is the reason that broad-based political parties originally came into existence - they provided ordinary citizens with the ability to hook up with others who were concerned about the same issues. They are no longer performing that role, partly because most ordinary citizens are repelled by the self-interested manipulation which forms the basis for most activity in the corporatised political party.

This is where the internet can perform the brokerage role that political parties formerly performed. Many groups, of which New Matilda is one, are using it imaginatively, no doubt with the success of sites like MoveOn.org in the backs of their minds.

But if it is to perform that role adequately it requires something to bolt the efforts of the various lobby sites together.