The Problem With Elections

It has rightly been said that the problem with representative democracy is that no matter who you vote for you always end up electing a politician. The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band said this in a slightly different way in a song recorded in 1988, when Margaret Thatcher was the UK Prime Minister - although the record wasn't in fact released until the 1992 Election, by which time Thatcher had been replaced by John Major.

From Joe Public's point of view, the problem is not, as some have drawn attention to, the low level of participation in political parties but the total absence of opportunities to directly influence decision-making between elections.

In some places in the world, there is provision for ballots to be held to determine issues (eg many States of the USA and the Cantons of Switzerland), but these are often restricted to occasions when elections are being held and are, in any case, too cumbersome to deal with urgent and important issues.

There is, however, a burgeoning virtual community around the development of electronic petitions for a whole range of purposes, but electronic petitions do not meet the current requirements for presentation to, never mind being debated in, state or federal Parliaments in Australia.

However, the UK Government has put in place a formal process to co-ordinate petitions to Government/Parliament and to allow those that get sufficient support to be debated in the House of Commons. In the two years since this system was put in place, 7.2 million people have signed one or more petitions on the site and 19 of those petitions have been debated in the UK Parliament, having achieved the required 100,000 signatures.

On the basis of relative population, this is equivalent to 35,000 signatories in Australia or 3,500 in Western Australia.

The UK system could, no doubt, be improved - for example, I'd like to see "could be debated" changed to "will be debated", with a guarantee of at least half a day of parliamentary time and a vote.

Complex issues, especially those that have strong technical and emotional aspects, do not easily lend themselves direct democracy. Electronic petitions and a formal process for dealing with them would, however, at least provide an avenue for having them addressed in a public and transparent way.