Comparing voting systems

[David]

I might quibble with aspects and not use the same wording, but that's basically my view too, Stui. Nobody needed to tell the proletariat in Russia in 1917, or in France in 1789, how bad their quality of life was. Rising up and overthrowing their governments was in many senses a material question of life and death (however we weigh up what came after versus what was endured before) – not a hobby of the already comfortable and complacent.

It's not merely the case that you can't easily transpose those conditions onto those of a wealthy, primarily middle-class society like Australia's; rather, the difference is so stark as to make it logical to assume that anything like the same approach here will fail. That's why I tend to think that, in terms of dystopian fiction, we in the West today are in conditions far more like those of Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four, with the difference being that we actually have, at least in theory, the tools for a populist uprising at the ballot box.

It's not that I'm wedded to the electoral system. There's certainly a lot about it that frustrates me and that I think stands in the way of any possibility of progress, and we all know how big money and media put their thumb on the scale. If anyone can propose a better model that would work and honour the will of the people, I'm all ears. But if it's not even conceivable to activate large numbers of people for a (say, revolutionary socialist) electoral platform that you think you're able to sell widely and get them to vote for it, then I don't see how it's possible to take the next step and achieve the same program by force. The latter really does seem like a cheap fantasy that opts out of the hard grind of electoral politics, which is an often generations-long struggle.