this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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Well right now the barometer is running about 85 percent glad of our Westminster-style democracy, 10 percent secondhand embarrassment and alarm about the state of the US, and then of course there's the omnipresent 5 percent who think that everything the US has done l and is currently doing should be slavishly copied here.
That last 5 percent can generally defined as the opinions of the proportion of the population that, kindly speaking, have a few kangaroos loose in the ol' top paddock.
The problem with the Westminster system is it does rather assume that all the parties are equally competent. When you have one party that's utterly useless, it doesn't really work as it just gives a free pass to the other party to do whatever.
UK Labour are currently swinging all over the place and it's impossible to work out where they stand on anything. The issue been the Tories are so completely incapable of holding them to account. They have apparently decided that they are not keen on Trump, so at least they finally work that out.
The US should be a lesson to all of us about what happens when electoral systems are left to wither and die.
We all need electoral reform. UK and Canada need a more democratic upper house with proportional representation and powers more like Australias. Once they are democratic they might as well be allowed to introduce legislation as well as review it.
Then preferential voting for their lower house.
Australia should do something about parties that consistently get far less seats in the lower house than their proportion of votes by introducing extra seats for them. Perhaps mixed member proportional or similar. So the two party system gets a shakeup and new parties can emerge when one is doing poorly.
@shirro @echodot we have an inequity built into the system in that each vote over, I think, 4% attracts around $4 for the party win or loss. This means a nest egg is created for the party. That same party does not have to declare where the big money came from until 12 months after the election whereas the newby must notify in near real time.