Adam Bandt: How Two-Party Politics Has Failed Australian Voters

Great talk, Adam! You're going to do great things. (And you are doing them now, also, of course).

"The Labor party is where progressive voices go to be silenced". Great line!

Thanks Adam. There's much to agree with in your talk.

I would take issue with the Apollo Mission reference. Though you quite rightly noted the Cold War driver of this event, that acknowledgement subverts its use as an exemplar of the desire of humanity towards a grand supra-prosaic cultural project.

Moreover, this was very much a project of the American boss class, meaning that the jurisdictional issues that would necessarily attend a project aimed at moderating and then stabilising emissions of GHGs on a global scale. You will be aware I'm sure that George Bush 1 supervised a project that successfully moderated SO2 by using an emissions trading scheme in the north eastern US. That was pretty simple in jurisdictional terms.

Reconciling the energy conversion and land use behaviour of the bulk of 192 separate and not at all equal or structurally complementary jurisdictions is a qualitatively more complex task, particularly, as we must, attempt to do it on a very short timeline. Although we of the left like to speak of the capitalist classes of the planet in terms of their general interest, this is really just a handy piece of ellipsis. It remains the case that they also have quite localised and specific interests and that even on a national scale they lack the kind of coherence that would make it simple for them to achieve unity on what, if anything, should be done, and when. That, one suspects, is why Copenhagen was so disappointing. The world's ruling classes proved unable to devise a common platform. They couldn't even agree to do nothing. They quarrelled and then left the field, each of them pointing accusatory fingers at others.

I agree with you that we need to move beyond the two party system and I do wish The Greens well, though I don't share your position on everything. In my opinion we need to transcend the party system entirely -- to instantiate governance by a developing a new way of composing it which is genuinely inclusive. While I certainly don't share Ms Gillard's though bubble on the virtue of a Citizen's Assembly to determine the way forwards on climate change, I do think a model based on sortition, deliberative democracy, and direct democracy, profiting from the new and developing IT being rolled out has considerable merit.

Most of us on the left have talked over recent decades in a fairly lofty way about notions of citizenship and public engagement, but in practice, until quite recently, the technologies to facilitate this simply haven't been there. Now they are. It is technologically possible for people to participate in discussion with millions of people in real time. It is possible to vote deliberatively using a web-based platform. And it is possible to do this from your home, a public library, your workplace, your car or pretty much anywhere else.

In a system where candidates were drawn at random, deliberatively evaluated and then culled by weighted random selection and subject to a plan devised by a dialog between these folk and the populace at large, parties would be reduced to politicking by the promotion of policies rather than personalities and trivia. Over time, we would develop an informed and engaged public, and eventually have a model which we could fairly call inclusive governance.

Best Regards ...

Loved this bit:

"Who can be the toughest on boat people"
"Who can ignore climate change the most"
"Who can censor the Internet the best"

Absolutely brilliant speech.

Your going down you bunch of Marxists. Can't wait for your demise, which is coming for you. LOL