Indholdsfortegnelse for 90.2 Apr-Jun 2019 i AQ: Australian Quarterly

EDITOR FORWARD Australia’s immigration history is rocky, yet while each wave of immigration into Australia has met with teething issues, our country is generally proud to call itself an immigration nation. But when it is refugees that are the immigrants, then modern Australia is deeply conflicted. The complex issues of refugee policy are nothing new for this country; the problems existed before the Tampa, before September 11, before mandatory detention, before governments were willing to sacrifice people-in-need by soap-boxing themselves to a point of no return and no compromise. It is therefore not surprising that Australia was debating ‘The Refugee Problem’ at what would become the most poignant moment of the modern age to be discussing immigration – in the very days before World War Two broke out. It is…

Yes, it’s the Brave New World of direct-to-consumer genetic testing – and it’s coming to a barbecue near you. Already, the companies that offer the service turn an estimated $100 million in annual global sales. On some estimates, the market will climb to at least $300 million in just five years’ time. That growth has been kicked along by some very determined marketing. My staff even spotted at least one company spruiking a testing kit as the ideal Father’s Day gift. It could certainly add some interesting complications to the family’s celebrations of Father’s Days forevermore. The same company has now entered into a partnership with the music streaming service Spotify, so that your results will come packaged with a customised playlist of your ancestral music. But it’s not just…

The aspiration of representative democracy is that this distance is bridged by strong mechanisms of accountability and responsiveness, as well as an ethos based on the public interest, all of which seek to ensure that government officials rule ‘for the people’. The obvious risk is that this distance becomes a gulf and that public officials govern for a few, rather than ‘for the people’ – that an oligarchy operates rather than a democracy. It is a startling fact that many Australians believe – and increasingly so – that government functions as an oligarchy. Survey evidence shows that perceptions that ‘[p]eople in government look after themselves’ and ‘[g]overnment is run for a few big interests’ have risen significantly since the 2000s, so much so that in 2017 more than 70% of…

1. Effective transparency of political funding 2. Caps on election spending 3. Caps on political donations 4. A fair system of public funding of political parties and candidates 5. Ban on overseas-sourced donations and donations from foreign governments 6. Stricter limits on government advertising in period leading up to election 7. Stricter regulation of parliamentary entitlements 8. Measures to harmonise federal, State and Territory political finance laws 9. An effective compliance and enforcement regime a b 10. A vigilant civil society…

The reason for this is that our electorates are bloating, as more and more people are crammed into each constituency. The root cause of this deterioration in our Parliamentary democracy is the limits imposed by section 24 of the Australian Constitution. Worse is to come. Australia’s booming population is estimated to double by 2066.1 Section 24 restricts the number of Members of the House of Representatives to twice the number of seats in the Senate. This is referred to as the nexus and it can only be changed by referendum. Already the number of constituents in many electorates is more than 150,000. An Australian 40 years ago lived in an electorate of about 70,000 people, sharing the privilege of voting with about 55,000 others. If there is no reform, forty…