My preferred method is to weight votes according to age: voters below, say, 30 would receive a more heavily weighted vote, voters 30 to 60 would get a less weighted vote, and those over 60 would retain their current single vote. For argument’s sake, you could multiply the vote of under-30s by 1.3 and that of 30- to 60-year-olds by 1.1. People’s ballot papers could be distinguished by colour – under-30s get blue, 30s to 60s green and oldies red – to make counting easier on election night.
How can you have a real democracy when the majority of voters only ever vote for 2 parties?
Fix the system as much as you want, but how do you fix the voters?
Well if you remove the parties and get people voting directly on issues instead, you’re one step closer to a real democracy.
Representative democracy is just a way for the lobbyists and rich to have all the power by buying a few people and spamming them with financial/media support to win and advance their agenda.
Direct democracy is a pretty flawed and exhausting way to do things. It’s very rare that a person has strong knowledge and interest in more than one or two domains and so consultation is necessary. Every individual replicating that work is an idealistic fantasy.
You can look at how rapidly interest in repeat votes falls off in cases like the French revolution. Copying a model of recallable ground up councils seems more sensible to me.
Local people get together and send some number of speaking/voting representatives to the next tier of organising body and so on. Meetings are always open, but only these representatives have the right to speak so you can actually get stuff done. People who aren’t happy with how the people they chose are doing can always recall them and choose again. You aim to have consensus as a process for approval with quorum establishment to break critical lock ups. Power can be devolved to higher councils but recalled by the lower ones, so ultimately the seat of power is the local level where people are much more engaged and social mechanisms help temper abuse of power.
It’s undoubtably slower and less efficient, but stuff like the anarchist councils in the Spanish civil war shows it can work I think. It would require trial and revision.
edit: importantly though we can’t say we live democratically if the majority of social arrangements necessary for live are dictatorial. Housing, work, and community life must be transformed. Voting on some law or trade treaty and then going to your completely disenfranchised job to pay rent for your disenfranchised housing is not democracy in any material sense.
I wouldn’t trust Australians to vote directly on issues, these are the same people who made the ford ranger and toyota hilux the highest selling vehicles for years, even though the majority of Australians live in cities.
There is no doubt that the system is broken, and the majority of politicians, and parties are corrupt, but the people make really bad choices.
ladies, gents, gremlins: political enlightenment
“Australians can’t be trusted to vote, instead they should vote for someone who certainly cannot be trusted”
Politicians are the same people who support Israel, are in bed with LLM data centres, do jack shit on climate issues, focus on corporations over people, etc.
More often than not politicians act against the wishes of Australians.
That is true because the majority of politicians are right wing (including the alp), yet the people still keep voting for them.
it is the same as blaming billionaires and corporations for everything wrong in the world, many of them are definitely bad, but it is the people who fund them by using their products and services. Blaming them changes nothing, they don’t really care about the blame, as long as they still get your money.
If you want a better world, be a better person, boycott dodgy companies, don’t vote for dodgy politicians. There has been a decent choice on every single ballot that I have ever seen, they are surrounded by bad choices, but they are there.
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not applicable to aus anywhere afaik
Did that over a century ago.