Reinventing the Democratic Process in Australia

Recently in Australia, the Labor party joined hands with the Liberals to pass a bill on Data Retention, showing the primary distinctions between the two duopolist parties: i.e. no difference at all. With this incident, the political term 'opposition' gets relegated to 'sad joke' status and squarely demonstrates Australia's tepid leadership. While our bureaucratic overlords seem to think this is a great game, I pondered whether the bill would have had any support from the general public; in PROTEST I have designed an overhaul of the entire Australian electoral system, which I present for review. Those of you who are advanced in Political Science can set me straight on which elements are impractical, but please consider every part in total first:

Goals:

• - Take advantage of modern technological advancements (but is not in itself E-Democracy), to generally increase the security, quality and speed of electoral results.
• - Maximize the satisfaction levels of all participants (individuals or collectives), with the view this enables efficiency and empowerment.
• - Reduce waste by limiting size and power of government.
• - Bring more transparency to positions of influence in the voting process.
• - Use free market mechanisms to reward honesty and punish bad political behaviour.
• - Produce the most accurate map of the wishes of the voting public.

Constraints:

• - Zero political-will to change the current system.
• - One hundred years of bloated, bureaucratic legacy.
• - Weak leadership with vested interests.

Sadly, both the goals and constraints are simultaneously the reasons why change will never be put into place - even as I write this article, the current government are proposing new laws to limit the influence of micro-parties. My ideas first got rolling when I was reading about the recent iVoting in the NSW election, where a team of independent researchers found a flaw in the voting website. I considered penning an article on that alone from my tech background (suffice to say security is purely a question of quality), but was more interested in the surrounding discussion where someone highlighted the conundrum: 'with internet-voting it is impossible to design a system which ensures the person voting cannot sell their vote'. So I started a thought experiment 'if selling your vote were allowed, would that help things and what would change?' It led to an interesting design, here are the primary elements of my proposal: