So basically I don't like the party political system: instead of representing the will of the people they impose their political ideologies.
As far as I understand at both State and Federal level, we elect representatives to two houses these representatives along with the governor or governor general constitute our government. From the government an executive council is selected by the governor or governor general. The executive councils task is to advise the governor on the will of the government and execute the will of the government.
The government has many department or organisations, and each of these has its own chief executive officer (CEO). all that is required for operations as usually is for funds to be transferred from the treasury to the operational budgets of these departments. The governor could do that without any interference. The point of calling assembly of the representatives is to implement change demanded by the will of the people.
So we have various government agencies responsible for things like: water, sewage, solid wastes, gas, electricity, telecommunications, housing, transportation, land use, the environment, education, and health care, just to list a few.
So health care needs to be provided to the 2/3rds of the population within the Adelaide metropolitan area, and the remaining 1/3rd scattered across the rest of the state. The first and foremost requirement is technical: a matter of resource management, the role of the education department. How many schools do we need, and where? Logistics: the right goods and services, of the right quality, and right quantity, in the right place at the right time, at the right cost. There is likely more than one way to achieve the objectives. For starters we can either put the school buildings with the population or require the population to move to the schools. Thus two options immediately. Each option has a cost, and a collection of benefits and disadvantages. None of the options may be affordable, its the role of the education department to find an option which is affordable. It should have a budget to cover operational costs, and an additional discretionary budget for optional and infrequent tasks (eg. building a new school.). There should be an imposition that recurrent operational costs decrease with time. Just because population increases doesn't mean budget should increase in proportion: the departments task should be to maximise the benefit from the available but otherwise limited resources. Not keep demanding more resources, declaring don't have enough resources. Such declarations indicate the employees of the departments lack the necessary ingenuity to find real solutions to the problems and difficulties encountered.
Political parties are not concerned with solving problems, they are concerned with imposing their ideologies: more typically creating problems rather than solving. Providing health care and education to remote regions is a technical problem it should not be a political problem. As a political problem, if want competition, and want to exercise power and dominion, then we raise a new model army and take parliament and throw the politicians out.
All members of parliament constitute the government, whoever gets elected for your electorate irrespective of the political party they belong to is there to represent you and I: we the people. It is not acceptable for one political party to hijack the government and appoint themselves as the executive council and consider that the executive council, the council alone constitutes the government. There should be no split in parliament: all members constitute the government there is no government and shadow government. The concept of government and shadow government residing in the houses of government is plain stupid and unacceptable. If a shadow government exists then it exists outside the houses: it indicates that those in the government houses the MP's are going to be ousted.
Labor was in, Liberals are apparently set to replace in South Australia. But let's get things straight, both labor and liberal sat in parliament before the election. If things are a mess it is because both Labor (ALP) and Liberal(LIB) sat in government. So election results thus far indicate that LIB(37.4%) and ALP(33.9%), collectively 71.3% , making the rest 28.7%. On the other hand, it also means that those not in LIB, represent 62.6%. Thus LIB cannot hijack the government unless all the MP's sat in parliament allow them to do so. Assuming similar situation previously, then the LIB's are just as responsible for the mess imposed by ALP as ALP itself, because the LIBS were right there in government alongside ALP.
My proposal is that we limit the seats and percent of the vote to 20% overall. So LIB and ALP have too much of the vote. They therefore have to shed some votes. This shouldn't be a problem as we have preferential voting, these parties didn't get those percentages without 2nd and 3rd choice distributions. So without any prior rules in place, we just find those seats where each party got the lowest percentage of the primary vote and drop the party from that electorate and redistribute the preferences. That is those electorates where they got less than 20% of the primary vote, or if none that low, less than 50% of the primary vote.
With the statistics available it's not that easy to identify such electorates. But just as an example consider Heysen. Here LIB got around 40% of primary, but with 2 party preferred, they get 52.1% whilst SAB gets 47.9%. So we take this as an electorate where LIB is dropped. The preferences are then redistributed, if ALP bubbles to the top, then the ALP is dropped because they already have to many votes. Without knowing what the distribution of the preferences, my guess is that SAB will then bubble to the top, and so SAB will then have an overall showing of greater than 13.7%.
The minor parties thus gain more representation in the government. The next part of the my requirement is that the members of the executive council are selected in proportion to the seats held by each party. Since none is permitted more than 20%, none can have greater than a 20% representation in the executive council. So if the executive council comprises of say 10 people, (I don't know how many people there usually are and it seems to change from time to time), then no party can appoint more than 2 people to the executive council. In working out the numbers the numbers are rounded down, so 1.8 members is reduced to 1, and 0.9 is reduced to zero. The only exception is if the number of members is short then those less than 1 are rounded up, so 0.9 becomes 1. So as to get the maximum representation of all parties on the council.
From the council the premier is selected, by the remainder of the parliament: the members of the council don't get to vote on the matter (they are the candidates). The ministers of the council find out from the CEO's of the government agencies what needs to be done. The agencies should have a clear understanding of shortages and failures which need to be rectified. For example the cost of electricity to pump water to irrigate farm properties. Why are they pumping water and how sustainable is such activity?
A farming region has a representative, and that region makes it clear to the representative what their woes are. That representative doesn't merely sit in parliament, that person speaks in parliament on behalf of the people they represent. However irrigation is a technical matter as is pumping, and storing water in the region. So first question is why do they have a water supply which is pumped? Why isn't the water supplied under gravity? Is the cost of electricity an indirect charge to the farmers in the cost of their water supply, or is it a direct charge because they are pumping the water themselves? If they are pumping water themselves, how is it a state problem? First they need to employ the appropriate people to design appropriate technology for the task at hand. Do not need to pay for electricity if do not need to use it. If use lower priced off peak electricity to pump water to elevated tanks, then gravity feed can be used for irrigation and electricity costs can be reduced. So where is the government agency providing appropriate advice on agricultural technology and engineering? So do we have the appropriate government agencies, are there suitable private organisations available to provide the required expertise? Given the problem held by the farmers either suitably qualified private enterprises are not available, or those that are available charge too much, are otherwise less than competent, or the farmers simply didn't make use of the appropriate technical services. So what is the real matter that the government needs to look into? Better educate the farmers maybe, provide farmers with better access to technical services?
Who or which political party the representative belongs to is largely irrelevant. The person is part of the government (they sit and speak in parliament), they are responsible and accountable to your electorate.
Not to put to fine a point on it, but anyone who needs political office to get things done, is likely the last person who should be given political office. If you need political office, then likely don't have the necessary skills, nor appropriate contacts to get the job done.
So a platform of : "if I get in power I will improve education", is generally an indication no capability whatsoever to do so. Education and health care can be improved by persons who do not have political office. The woes of the farmers can be resolved without political office.
As I said, the government agencies should know what the problems each region has. South Australia is the driest state on the driest continent on earth. Supply of water is fundamental to our survival. It cannot be resolved by business: not when the purpose of business is to maximise profit. A non-government private enterprise maybe able to resolve the problems, if its focus is supply rather than monetary profit.
One other thing we need to do is get rid of trade unions. I am not against unions, just against trade unions, they are obsolete. When trade unions initially emerged they were typically community based, because employment was bound to a geographical area: mining town, ship building town etc... Trade unions step outside geographical bounds, and no longer provide benefit to local communities. For want of better description, employees have now emerged as the new age capitalists. The downtrodden workers have become the greed ridden capitalist employees, exploiting communities, and little concern for the existence of society.
We need community cooperatives, where emphasis is placed on our geographical regions. It is important, because whilst humans have legs and are meant to be mobile, we exist in regions where we are held prisoner. We are required to have permanent home addresses, and need permits (visas and passports) to leave the boundaries of our prisons. If we do not have freedom to roam, then we have to protect our geographically constrained homes. We have to achieve a balance and stability with respect to what flows in and flows out.
If shipbuilding flows away from a ship building town then the population of that town is in trouble. Mining will eventually flow away from a mining town as the mine is exhausted. Market gardens eventually disappear under residential neighbourhoods. Whilst farmland is otherwise exhausted of its nutrients and becomes useless. If we are trapped in place, then none of this is acceptable. And our government is bound to geography, it is about place.
If a political party places its ideology above the needs of place then it is of no use to us as a population. We don't want wages increased in one place, and made possible because we shut down business on the other side of the town, state or country, and thus displaced/stole the work.
We need to forget about the political parties, push them out off the government, and implement dynamically adaptive systems which ensure our needs are met both by private enterprise and government agencies. If we occupy a region, then we occupy the region, we don't want towns to become ghost towns. The South Australian government is responsible and accountable to the people of the geographically bound region that is South Australia. Population occupies the whole region: even if it is scattered and the bulk of the population is in Adelaide metropolitan area.
The remote areas are where mining and agriculture take place, and whilst these industries only account for some 5% of employment collectively: they account for a large portion of the states and countries income. Employment wise most people are employed in healthcare, education and retail: there are no geographical constraints on these activities. Education and retail can occur over the internet. All 3 services can be supplied to the world, and the world can either come here or the services can go to the world. Education can be provided globally independent of any national government, and likewise for healthcare. So we don't need a government building and owning hospitals, we just need a government managing the proper supply of health care services. Part of which task would be determining how many hospitals are required, how big each should be and where each is to be located, or whether the service should be mobile.
When everything is boiled down, we just have technical problems to be solved, and some choices to make. The representative government is to make the choice between the available options on behalf of the population of the regions: not for the benefit of a political party.
Part of the choice to be made however, is do we fund education or healthcare the most? As I said each department should have an operational budget. Dynamically adaptive the budget will decrease with improved technology, increase with inflation and population, and on balance remain unchanged. If the agency needs more funding it is probably doing something wrong: like paying too many employees too much for too little. So the number of employees needs to be made dynamically adaptive. For example an agency has a small stable core of employees, who are assisted by part-time employees, casual employees, contract workers, and volunteers.
Volunteers are important for fulfilling intermittent service needs. People providing services as a consequence of their interests and motivations during their spare time outside paid employment. Some jobs we have people paid to be on standby for emergencies, such as firefighters, who otherwise train between their need to actually provide their services. However, such model is not appropriate for all services, and is otherwise expensive and prohibitive. A culture of volunteering is thus important, and voluntary services displaced by paid services doesn't tend to fair well in terms of supply of service. Modern business is not about supplying needs, it is about monetary profit and only monetary profit. If it doesn't make a profit, if it only breaks even, then business tends to shutdown the service. Government agencies are not meant to make profits, they are meant to provide services.
Wages of government employees being matched against those of private industry, to increase them only, is not acceptable. Private industry comes and goes, and so do the respective employees. Government agencies are more long lived, and costs simply escalate if wages are not properly constrained. Government employees are public servants, they are there to serve the people,they are not masters of the people. If anything government job functions should set the minimum wages for industrial awards and private industry matched against the government, not the other way around.
So private industry offers above award wages and attracts the best talent. Says who? So talent only goes to where the high wages are? No! It does not! Talent goes where talent can be unleashed, not where get the highest wages. There is no point doubling wage, if got no use for half the wage currently get. For talent there is no difference between work and play: life is putting talent to use. Talent doesn't comprise of assembly line workers sticking cherries on cakes as flow pass on a conveyor. Talent works on what interests it. Talent seeks opportunity to work. Talent doesn't make choice based on wages (mercenaries do that), talent looks for the best opportunity to do the most good with the talent. Talent likely works 24/7, so bigger houses and flashy cars and lots of other superficial materialistic junk have little value to talent. Talent wants access to research laboratories, or any other resources it may require to get to work. Put more simply bludgers seek higher wages not talent. Any votes for proving we now have more bludgers in the agencies now than talent? That any talent that is there is hampered due to lack of resources and lack of opportunity. The lack of resources is because of lack of funds, due to funds draining to pay unnecessary employees.
We need to shake up government agencies, the get our due and proper representation, and destroy the political parties and their ideologies. It is our regions which need representing not the political parties.
So my electorate region is Narrunga. Apparently a Liberal stronghold. The farmers apparently have problems. And who are the first preferences biased towards: Liberal. Thus no change. But, but , but ...
Yes I get it. You've rearranged the furniture. The Liberals get to hijack government instead of Labor. You wanted change, but you didn't change. The change, you sought, depended on other parts of the state changing their preferences.
It doesn't matter which twit you vote into the parliament. What matters, is knowing who the twit is, that actually wins the seat in parliament. Not whether that seat is held by the party dictator. All that matters is they have a seat in parliament, and that should mean they are part of the government of the day. That this person is now beholden to you the people of the region. Now accountable and responsible to the people of the region: irrespective of whether all of those people actually voted for the twit. {I suppose I could use the word "candidate" rather than the word "twit". But a person would have to be a fool to believe they can properly represent and aid the needs of their community by joining a political party. If they otherwise intentionally joined the political party in preference to its policies rather than the needs of the people: then the word "twit" is the least derogatory term I can currently conjure up.}
So it would seem the change for Narrunga electorate is from the Liberal Steven Griffiths to the Liberal Fraser Ellis. And the reasoning this is a change, is because the previous liberal incumbent was subject to the dominion which came from the ALP having hijacked government. Now the Liberals can hijack parliament: and that will apparently allow them to get stuff done. Really?
We the people don't call on either Labor or Liberal to get things done, we call on the government. And the government isn't Labor or Liberal it is all the people who sit and speak in parliament, and those who are not the Labor or Liberal majority actually hold the majority. So do not have to allow one party to hold dominion and dictate the odds. Rather can crush the dominant party.
So here's the thing, everyone sat in parliament voted for what the ALP did, and it would seem they did not have absolute power to vote everything through on their own, which would make debate a pointless exercise. So if don't like what the Liberals are about to do, the real government, the true government can stop them.
So don't complain about what Labor did or what the Liberals are doing (or going to do), neither of them is the true government. And neither political party should be granted power to ignore the will of the people.
So people get represented. Speak and Get heard!
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Revisions:
[18/03/2018] : Original
