Democracy Is Broken Here Is a Fix

· 5 min read

What is this shit that’s called a government? Ok that’s a bit harsh - the roads, bridges, hospitals, police and doctors out there are because we have a working government.

I appreciate what democracy has done for our civilisation for the past 2000 years. But when does an old system become archaic and outdated? When has it served it’s purpose and is no longer fit for modern society?

I strongly believe democracy’s time is up and it’s time we elect our officials in a more thoughtful way and it all starts with WHO has a right to vote.

tldr Not everyone should actually vote. People in power need to be qualified before they’re even considered for election.

Voting rights

Anyone over the age of 18 in Australia can vote. Voting is in fact mandatory and you can be fined for skipping it. Yeah whatever I don’t care about those things. +18 year olds are smart enough and I still want people turning up at polls.

I care about who among us is qualified to vote though. Dead people obviously can’t vote, but the brain dead? I mean that in the offensive way you’re hopefully reading it as.

If you fail to comprehend basic logic - e.g. if you’re shown a clip of a person saying one thing very charismatically and then doing the opposite and you still like that person, perhaps you fail in recognising a conman from a person who should legitimately be representing the people.

If you think the Earth is flat you don’t deserve a vote. If you failed basic math or have an IQ below 80 you probably don’t deserve to vote. Similarly if you’re an old senile racist wank who won’t vote for a person of colour for WHATEVER reason you probably don’t deserve a vote.

I’m a fan of putting people up for a fair test before they’re able to vote. Similar to a drivers licence, anyone can get one really and people that break too many road rules lose their licence. Voting should be a similar thing, but we should encourage those that should vote to do so.

Elected officials - a background on my beliefs

I find it funny a person elected to government can be given an arbitrary role in the ministry, e.g. Health Minister - when they in fact have no medical or health background.

I say this after seeing this guy get elected and be the ‘Minister for Communications’, having responsibility over how the nations next generation of internet would be built.

He fucked it up. It’s not because he’s an idiot. No-one elected into government is. It’s because he has no idea about technology or the future of it in Australia. He failed to realise HOW CRITICAL THE INTERNET WAS IN 2014. He’s not all to blame though, there were many around him and the Prime Minister at the time Tony Abbott who is just as responsible.

I don’t want a ‘Minister for Education’ who dropped out of school at 16 and doesn’t believe in education.

I don’t want a ‘Minister for Health’ who isn’t a qualified health professional and thinks vaccines are methods of control.

I don’t want a ‘Minister for Women’ who has a record of misogyny and poor behaviour against women.

These are three extremes, but it’s fairly logical we need a system in place which prevents the unqualified from representing the masses.

minimum requirements to be an elected official

We need a minimum set of ministers to run a government. Education, Health, Foreign Affairs etc (current list here) which should be defined/renewed every so often.

You need to specify what role in government you’ll fill before election. This is your permanent role if elected. A government is not fit to govern if they don’t have all the right people elected into their relevant offices.

Anyone wanting to become a government member needs to pass a basic set of tests to check whether they know the ministerial role they are performing. Treasurers should have basic accounting and math abilities and maybe an understanding of economic principles etc.

We as people and a society need to be electing not just representatives, but also qualified people for a role in government.

More transparency into finances and financial backing of Ministers

We need to start asking ourselves how certain politicians got so damn rich. If you look at this list for USA Congress members, someone like Nancy Pelosi has amased a net worth of over +100 million (at the time of writing Oct 2021). How is someone so rich in politics? Who knows what conversations are had between her and her businessman husband Paul Pelosi.

It’s these kinds of iffy relationships that leave many people disillusioned and losing trust in the political institutions in place.

Closing statement

because we are all fed - Hacker News comment I once saw when there was discussion around why we aren’t revolting to the institutions in place.

The French revolution of the 1790s led to the end of the ruling elite. The Arab spring democratic revolutions of the 2010s led to the end of the ruling elite.

There are no ruling elite in western civilisation societies. We vote for our leaders in power. We need to change our systems of government so that we have the best people put in place for our society to move forward and get through issues we have as a society.