Democracy and direct elections
By Allen Myers
According to numerous polls, a major reason for the defeat of the republic referendum was the desire of many voters for a republic in which the president is directly elected. The referendum question allowed a choice only between a president elected by parliament and continuation of the monarchy.
It would not be too cynical to believe that John Howard and his advisers selected the referendum question with the deliberate intention of angering some republicans into voting "no". In any case, it was certainly a denial of democratic choice that voters were not given the opportunity to vote for direct election of a president.
None of this, however, answers the question: is direct election really the best way to select a president (or any other public official)? While we should have been offered that choice, would it have been the best choice to make?
Republican proponents of the referendum model made some valid points about how a direct presidential election was likely to take place. To have a serious chance, they said, candidates would need large sums of money, and/or they would be the nominees of the major political parties, selected by the powers that be in those parties. We might end up with an alienating and uncontrolled system like that used to elect the president in the United States.
There is another point that they could have made. When each voter is only one of millions voting to elect one person, it's hard to believe that your individual vote is very important. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons (in addition to disgust with all the candidates and alienation from the political process generally) that 40-50% of people in the US don't bother to vote in presidential elections.
Of course, the indirect election (by parliament) model didn't overcome this difficulty: if you feel powerless because you're only one among millions, it doesn't empower you to have someone else (MPs) do the voting in your place.
Theoretically, because the electorates are smaller, we should feel more in control when electing an MP than we would electing a single national president: we are each one voter among tens of thousands instead of one among millions. But the difference is pretty minimal. In fact, most people feel that their vote makes little difference even in situations involving much smaller numbers of voters, like council elections.
For your vote to make a difference, the outcome of the vote has to make a real difference. That's what's lacking in our elections.
This is not to deny that there is some choice in most elections. And yes, offered the choice between evils, it makes sense to choose the lesser one. But even if we elect someone we regard as "good" rather than a lesser evil, we have no control over them. That MP or councillor will go their own way after election day, and if we don't like what they do, there's nothing we can do about it except repeat the whole process again after three years.
Imagine how different elections and politics might be if there were regular meetings in each ward of each council, where all residents could discuss and vote on the issues that affect them, and could also elect a new councillor if they didn't like the way their existing councillor was voting in council meetings. Our vote would mean something because electing someone wouldn't mean giving up control over what they did.
It wouldn't be practical to have meetings open to everyone and covering areas much larger than a ward. But if we had control of our councillors, we could trust them to elect one or two of their number as delegates to a city-wide or regional assembly. The councillors who elected them would have to have the right to replace their assembly delegates at any time, just as the councillors could be replaced by the people who elected them.
Such an assembly could legislate for matters in the area it covered, and in turn elect delegates to a higher assembly dealing with issues that affected the area covered by two or more assemblies.
A structure like this, in which each council/assembly has full control over matters it is capable of settling and elects recallable delegates to a broader assembly to deal with broader issues, is the only conceivable method of instituting real democratic control in a modern large state.
Is it practical? This is not a scheme thought up by some utopian dreamer, but the actual structure developed in the early years of the Russian Revolution. It worked extremely well, despite horrific conditions of economic collapse, civil war and foreign intervention.
Unfortunately, however, there is no governmental structure that can provide absolute guarantees when material and political forces push society backwards. In the Soviet Union, the rising Stalinist caste gradually cut away the democratic functioning of the soviets (councils) and eventually replaced them, though keeping the name, with an electoral system not much different from those in the capitalist countries, except that only one party was permitted.
Similarly, such a system, if it were somehow to be introduced into a capitalist country like Australia, would soon be undermined by social realities. People with money would still have far more opportunity than others to influence what people thought and how they voted. Working people who have to spend long hours on the job or looking for work, who don't have access to care for their children while they attend a meeting and whose only source of information is media owned by capitalists would find it difficult to maintain an active involvement in their local council.
But in a socialist Australia, where the material and social restrictions on working people are removed, a system of councils like this will be a powerful instrument of democracy.