Taken from Lara's terrific show on TuneFM, Adam explains why we don’t really have a true democracy in Australia. His research is extensive and spans multiple continents and demonstrates the erosion of democracy in countries that claim to have democratic systems of government and values. The MiVote global movement, founded and chaired by Adam, is on a mission to erase this erosion by using technology to improve democracy across the world.
We talked about how democracy worked in Australia for the vote on marriage equality, but how some politicians (in both Labor and Liberal parties) chose to vote against the will of the people anyway, which goes against the fundamental principles of democracy. Luckily, Adam has a plan to fix it by giving people the opportunity to have an informed vote on issues; not just at election time, but within the parliamentary process in a meaningful way.
Adam then informs us of the 5 critical factors that governments need to govern well:
Adam also blows the argument that we have a two-party system of government and therefore Independent voting is futile out of the water. He uses the example of the Gillard-led minority government as example of how independent politicians can actually make government better and hold them to account to create better policies. We also discuss present issues around political advertising and the media and how the AEC could be improved to make sure politicians aren’t telling lies to win votes in political campaigns.
Interesting Quotes from the Interview
“An election is not a democracy.”
“The system is designed to win and maintain power so that you can prosecute your ideology, whatever that may be.”
“Democracy is about enacting the will of the people and you can’t enact the people’s will if you never actually ask the people what they want.”
“Democracy and politics are mutually exclusive… Politics is about the acquisition and winning of power, democracy is about the release of power to the people… When you are engaging in politics, the behaviours required to win an election fly in the face of what a democracy is.”
“If you choose not to inform yourself, we choose not to listen to you. Because that’s actually the citizen’s responsibility in a democracy. A democracy is a responsibility in two parts. The first part is the responsibility for the citizen to understand the ramifications of their vote. The second part is for the representative to actually represent the majority view. We don’t have either of those two things in our system.”
Further Reading: