What would be required for Australia to change to an electronic democracy?

I'm not the one who trials offtopic into personal attacks. If you dont like reading anti-ALP views, then you cant just bully everyone else off to suit, its not an ALP forum!!

Since your fond of casting false accusations... I'll just add that I try to reply to the topic, so if you go there - so do I. BUT going OT and cutting you off at the knees in a forum is a pithy waste of my time generally speaking - I dont know why you get such a kick out of doing it to others, but dont expect not to get a response from everyone you do it to. So there you go, this seems to be the nature of conversation you prefer.

 

In hindsight, I agree, I apologise. In most part. It has nothing to do with ALP. I am also not fond of false accusations, and challenge that.

 

Its certainly given their citizens more freedom, rights and democracy then currently available in the UK & Australia.

 

If Abbott can spend $12 billion of our tax money to let a few pilots show-off and play "Top Gun" then we can definitely afford to spend a few $million dollars of "our" tax money money to staff electoral offices during referendums.

 

I'm not convinced there is a simple measure of scale for these things and it's a matter of quality rather than quantity anyway. We could have general elections every two years rather than every four to get double the democracy but it wouldn't be better (encouraging more political short-termism and pretty much constant election campaigning).

I'm still not saying these referendums are a bad thing, I'd even cautiously welcome a similar concept here. I just don't think they should be presented as some magical solution to the problems within our political systems and certainly shouldn't be presented as some middle-ground balance to a preferred option of scrapping government entirely in place of some system of direct democracy.

 

How much more obvious does it have to be, that the citizens can no longer trust what politicians tell them, especially before elections. Considering when they obtain government, they then change their minds with the click of a finger.

No one should ever forget that politicians are pathological liars, as we all remember the famous public promise made by Julia Gillard before she won Government - "There will be "NO" carbon tax under a Government I lead". When she won Government, she enacted a carbon emissions trading scheme, which by all definitions, is a tax.

Abbott got sprung lying on TV, and during the interview, he admitted to the people not to believe anything he said unless it was written down on paper - being a legal document.

I constantly shake my head, as to why the people want to always believe these deceitful pathological lying politicians, and why they want to vote these vile people into running our country and our lives. The majority of us would not tolerate or accept our family, friends, or acquaintances deceiving or lying to us in the same degree that politicians lie and deceive us. So why are some people still giving these vile deceitful lying politicians the opportunity to govern our country and make laws and decisions that effect and impact our intimate lives?

Surely the citizens have realised with all the lies, deceit and corruption within Governments, and facilitated by politicians, that its time to change the system, as this type of bad behaviour within a hierarchical government system dates back to ancient Roman times.

History tells us about all the corruption, lies and deceit that transpired within the Roman government that made the Roman citizens poor and miserable, but even after a thousand years, and all the corruption, lies and deceit still happening in our own current government system facilitated by politicians, the lesson is not being learnt. Do we only wake-up when the chains come back on our wrists and ankles?

We need to demand direct democracy by way of referendums, and to take back the power that politicians have automatically given themselves at our expense.

 

That's something of a rhetorical exaggeration isn't it? You could even say it's a lie, supporting the point I'm about to make.

Politics is a lie but it's not just politicians who engage in politics. How many people make "protest votes", voting for one party not because they agree with their policies but to try to keep another one out of power? How many people vote for candidates with absolutely no idea who they are beyond the party label they're standing under? How many people demand better services one day and lower taxes the next, yet never have any realistic ideas of how to square that circle? How many people blindly accept the blatant lies of "their" party yet loudly condemn the slightest slip from any others? Heck, given the politicians are apparently so bad, why do we keep voting for them in the first place? Why don't we do anything other than moan about them on message boards?

We can sit here and debate principles and concepts but we don't have to make them work in the real world, in the face of often irrational (and dishonest) responses from the general public. That isn't to say that there isn't plenty that politicians could and should do better but it's a systematic problem which you and I are just as much a part of than they are. I personally not convinced the general public are ready for honest politicians - there'd be riots in hours.

Politicians still have to implement the results of the referendums (or not as the case may be). Much of the time politicians write them after all, it being used as a tool for politics and as much one of for real change.

The simple fact is that, other than with a dictatorship or true anarchy, politics is always going to exist in that it is how policy is decided. Whichever individuals and mechanisms are involved aren't actually going to change all that much. This is really a question of human nature and that is much more difficult to fix.

 

Surely it's not that difficult.

Require x amount of signatures on a petition to initiate a referendum (Federal and State level, constitutional or legislative), and stick it on the next general or state election ballot.

It would cost practically nothing, they do it in Switzerland and California, works perfectly fine.

No one wants too much "direct democracy", parliament makes thousands and thousands of decisions about all sorts of things that no one really cares about. Let them get on with it.

It's only the "big" things, especially the ones that neither side of politics are willing to address, that the public needs more direct control over.

Any sort of electronic voting is unlikely, just not secure enough. And any form of internet based voting is completely out of the question for the foreseeable future.

 

Any decisions that will impact and effect citizens live, the citizens should be entitled to the democratic right to a referendum on the issue. Switzerland & California are perfect examples were general referendums work, and practically cost nothing to initiate.

 

I'm sorry, but you simple cannot excuse the amount of lies politicians tell the public by deflecting the blame onto the public's voting habits. Maybe if the citizens were told the truth for once, then they would be able to make an honest and informed decision, instead of "protesting voting" the same pathological lying clowns back into power. It also doesn't help the average punter, when the biased media is either sitting in the camps of the ALP or the LNP, and we have no true independent media sources available.