But Tony Abbott is not the problem. Hes a symptom. Actually, he is more than that: he is a reckoning. He is what you get when politicians lose touch with the electorate and get lost in the echo chamber of the concerns of the broader political class. He is the logical consequence of a system of government that is weighted in favour of two major parties that no longer command majority support, of a system that no longer reflects the views of voters. He is what is left when the parties can no longer inspire us with a positive view of what they stand for, but can only rev us up with attacks on what they are against. He is the detritus of system that has reached the bottom of the democratic barrel, where a leader is the person the party factions and News Ltd can live with. The simple fact is, the electorate has moved on. We show in our voting patterns and other behaviours (including our media consumption) that we have fragmented in a way that is no longer captured by the two-party system, that no longer drops neatly into the boxes labelled Liberal and Labor. Unfortunately, these changes in the electorate are not reflected in our democratic institutions. The preferential system in the lower house, for instance, delivers our votes to parties we no longer fully trust or respect, and to politicians who show more allegiance to the economic system of market liberalism than they do to voters views on what makes an acceptable society.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 08:32:27 +0000
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