Politics or journalism - let's blame someone

It is common to moan about the current state of politics. This isn't uniquely an Australian position though.

The question though is "who is at fault?" One popular view puts it down to an under-educated electorate.

DragOnista has a different take. Writing for The King's Tribune she thinks the solution is better political reporting, which in turn she thinks would come from teaching political history to journalists.

The idea fails on its own logic. There is no evidence that different/better political reporting would improve the thing commercial media needs, that being readers or viewers to sell to advertisers. What sells is what they already report - politics as horse race or politics as celebrity.

The first part is why in the two years after an election the media obsesses about leadership and possible challenges, and goes overboard on polls. The second part is why any column inches at all are devoted to J. Gillard's marital status.

My own view is that the lack of political engagement is a function of never having it so good. Let's face it, we've had 65 years without a major war. In Australia we've had twenty years of uninterrupted economic growth. Ultimately there is a degree of consensus around managing the economy as "guided capitalism" in the greater "liberal" tradition.

There is also a small amount of market game theory at work too. Just as I don't need every consumer to do endless price comparisons to get the outcome as if consumers do, so I only need enough citizens to monitor politics. Basically the free-riders know that the policy wonks will wake them up if they are needed.

Of course the problem with that is that it can be easy to wake them up the wrong way (great big tax) if we didn't wake them up properly to begin with (we are all going to die).

The message is for those who want to get greater political engagement, don't moan, don't complain about the journalists. Hone a message that explains why you need your fellow citizens engaged on something concrete.

Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est

Elections and Political Parties

NSW saw the absurdity of the modern campaign when married to fixed four year terms when the ALP held its official campaign "launch" yesterday - just six days from the election.

Meanwhile in the SMH we read that;

Today the Parliamentary Budget Office is due to release its audit of the government's election promises, but not those of the Coalition.

The Coalition has refused to submit its costings to the office, choosing instead to hire the former NSW auditor-general Bob Sendt. It is understood they will be released as late as Thursday, allowing as little as two days for scrutiny.

There is NO DOUBT that O'Farrell is running your classic promise nothing substantial campaign. His latest ad "the contract with NSW" ends with "most important of all - we'll be accountable". he doesn't tell us what that means, and really he will be just as accountable as the ALP - in 4 years time we get to vote.



But O'Farrell is pulling the same stunt as Tony Abbott in not getting his promises "costed" by a body with not only the skill, but also the resources to do so.

The issue for me is that we've completely changed our political system with fixed terms, public funding and the publication of party names on ballot papers and party replacement of upper house MPs without doing much more than requiring 500 membership forms to be submitted.

We really need a slew of reforms, covering party form, published platforms, longer campaigns and independent assessment of platforms.

The first is creating a legal entity called "political party" - so they don't have to decide whether to be limited liability companies or associations. They should be granted limited liability status in return for full disclosure of their financial position. The party rules must be entirely democratic - no party can be controlled by an individual (a la Hanson mark 1) or external bodies (the ALP) - in fact only people who take out membership can vote and it is one vote one value except in so far as the party can make its own rules for how the membership is "subdivided" except that geographic boundaries for election to governing bodies must be based on State and/or Federal electorate boundaries.

The register of political parties provides for a platform to be lodged with Elections NSW (Electoral Commission of NSW). This should be mandatory, the party deemed not to be registered for electoral purposes if it does not publish a platform.

The campaign times are currently designed with the idea of quick elections because they used to occur at times of hung Parliaments or Governments that had lost confidence of the Legislative Assembly. The haste of under three weeks from nominations closing to polling day does not suit fixed terms. Six weeks is a more reasonable timescale for nominations to close.

The cut-off for platforms being submitted would then be the five week period before the election. If the party hasn't submitted by that date then the party loses all other rights of being a party for the election (including invalidation of any nominations lodged by the party as a party).

The Parliamentary Budget Office should be replaced by an Electoral Proposal Assessment Commission to be made up of five commissioners elected using proportional representation from the Legislative Council ( which should result in the fifth person at least representing divergent views). One week prior to the election it is required to produce a report evaluating the budgetary implications of each platform and reporting on the relative "completeness" of the platforms lodged. It cannot evaluate anything promised by a party beyond that included in the registered platform, though it can comment on completeness of the platform in the context of the rest of the campaign.

That way we'd force political parties to start taking elections seriously.

Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est