80
submitted 4 months ago by girlfreddy@lemmy.ca to c/world@lemmy.world

When Fatima Payman crossed the Senate floor to vote against her government she knew it would come with consequences.

The Australian Labor party has strict penalties for those who undermine its collective positions, and acts of defiance can lead to expulsion - a precedent with a 130-year history.

The last time one of its politicians tested the waters while in power was before Ms Payman was born.

But last Tuesday, the 29-year-old did just that - joining the Green party and independent senators to support a motion on Palestinian statehood.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

If you aren't voting for one specific person to be your representative, but rather, for the party as a whole, you generally want individual representatives to follow the party line, unless there's some sort of unusual drama that splits opinions long after the last elections.

In countries such as the US and the UK, you usually vote for one person to represent your territory, but in elections such as the European ones, because you're voting for lists of people to represent your country, you're actually voting for a party.

No idea about how Australian democracy works, though.

[-] febra@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Then there's absolutely no reason to have individual representatives. Just have one representative per party that represents the official party line in the parliament. No need to pay 300 people to do the exact same thing in the parliament when you can have one.

[-] SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago

Contemporary governments deal with taxation, healthcare, security, defense, education, law, labor rights, minority rights, infrastructure, prison systems, regulations of industries, and so on and so on and so on. It's very unlikely to find one person capable of having in-depth knowledge of all of these areas to properly defend their party's leanings on all of them in parliamentary debates, and even if you did, those parties are still going to need experts who draw the master lines of their policy proposals, and those experts need to be paid.

[-] febra@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

Have them vote inside of the party. You don’t need them inside the government. There’s no reason for that to happen. Stop putting lists of names on the ballot, just put a party name, and have these experts work inside of their parties then send a representative from said party to the government to cast the party aligned vote and weigh that vote by the amount of votes they got. You’d save on the administrative costs for the parliament and all of this business would be taken care of inside the individual parties. You can still give parties money to pay their own people according to their own preferences. You don’t need to have 700 people sitting in benches in a public building to virtually cast the same vote when they could sit in benches in their own party headquarters and deal with their discussions internally.

That is if we vote only for parties and not for people.

this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
80 points (93.5% liked)

World News

39021 readers
954 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS