Should Australia consider a version of the American political system?

DB008 said:

This may be a little bit off topic, but the way that the votes are counted and used in the USA is a farce.

Found a SBS article on it.

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The electoral colleges are kind of a relic of federalism. The underlying theory is that the Congress should be popularly elected but the executives are to govern a federation of independent states and so should be chosen by the states. Until Jackson in the mid-19th century most states legislatures elected their own electoral college voters (ie there was no popular vote). So even today, the states still chose the president.

If Australia were to become a republic it would create an interesting question on what power to give the states in electing the president if it was to go down the path of popular election.

Julia said:

Thank you for explaining. That seems crazy. How could Senate voting be improved?

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Fewer senators would reduce the influence of minor parties because they would need a greater share of the vote to hold a seat. Reducing the influence of preferences in the senate would probably also be a good move. Of course you can't remove the influence a single senator will have if they control the balance of power.

Julia said:

Examples?


Could you expand on this for us?

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Hi Julia.

Here is a good example to illustrate two of these points:

http://www.ntnews.com.au/article/2013/03/04/318226_ntnews.html

Lobby groups taking advantage of constitutional and legislative weakness to put down good policy.

Bad result.

OK. I heard some discussion on this on "PM" this evening. Good example. thanks.

The Westminster system has more checks in place than most other governing systems.
Why fix something that isn't broken?

chops_a_must said:

Apart from what we have at the moment, our system has generally worked very well. Much better than the US.

What we need is for more Australians to be involved in community groups, and advocacy, and in politics at all levels.

We aren't getting what we want because we've allowed narrow interest groups to dictate terms.

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