Anna Bligh is launching a study into forcing local councils to adopt a proportional representation voting system (like in the Senate). The Greens support it, as it would increase the power of the smaller parties.

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However, a far more democratic system is voting by delegable proxy. This has all the advantages of direct democracy, without the biggest drawback - that it requires so much effort from the public. Instead of a senate style system where the number of representatives from each party is proportional to their take of the vote, each citizen gets one vote and delegates it to an MP of their choice. Then, instead of each MP having an equal vote, the power each MP holds in the house is proportional to the number of people voting for them. Effectively, each citizen gets a vote on each bill and their MP of choice lodges it in parliament on their behalf.

If this were combined with an electronic system, it could achieve true direct democracy, either by allowing people to change their delegate on a 'bill by bill' basis, or actually voting directly as an alternative option to nominating a delegate. It avoids the major drawback of direct democracy, because it still allows people to delegate to an MP. With an electronic system, it would even allow people to vote less often.

In practice, it would give voters far more choice, because instead of only a small number of parties with a small number of ideologies being represented, each MP would represent a different ideology, or a truly personal choice of policy.

There would still be room for political parties, as they provide additonal checks and balances that may make some people feel more comfortable with certain candidates who are party approved. Also, to actually form a functioning government, a coalition of MPs with majority power would have to form, and parties would aid this process.

The recent move to larger local councils opens up this option for local government, because there will be enough people sitting on each council to make the system work. It is a far better idea than proportional representation, which would require far more sitting councillors to make it work.

Australia has a proud history of improving the democratic process, with proportional representation and preferential voting. It is time to take this one step further to achieve direct democracy.

Obviously there are a lot of details to sort out, but here are some suggestions.

Salary: You could make salary proportional to the number of votes an MP wields. Or, each MP could be on the same salary, regardless of power.

Delegating yourself: All votes would have to end up with an MP, and there are many ways to achieve this. You could have a fixed number of MPs, and you gain entry to parliament by getting more delegations than the lowest one and replacing him. Or you have a fixed percentage of the population (eg 0.5%) required to get into parliament, and the number of MPs varies depending on how the vote is split up. There would have to be a mechanism that allows people to delegate or nominate people outside of parliament. One option is to require a 'petition' having X number of singatures from people who agree to delegate to you upon your entry into parliament. A second option is to allow intermediate delegates (lets call them agents - probably a position not funded from government coffers). You can delegate to them, then they can delegate to an MP on your behalf. To keep it simple, you could limit it to 1 'redelegation'. Then, if an agent comes to represent enough people, can can delegate to himself and enter parliament.

These are fairly technical issues, but I see plenty of solutions to each and I don't see any 'show stoppers'.

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I have been meaning to add an article to the site about this, as the current one doesn't really do it justice. Here is my start. Please add to it if you wish:

http://www.ozpolitic.com/wiki/index.php?title=Voting_by_delegable_proxy

The other article:

http://www.ozpolitic.com/electoral-reform/electoral-reform.html

As you can probably guess, I have spent a lot of time promoting preferential voting (IRV) to Americans etc, but this is something I feel I can promote locally.