There’s been quite a lot of discussion about the political views of former Senator Arthur Gietzelt, who died recently at the age of 93, and in particular about claims[1] that he was a secret member of the Communist Party.
Although it’s scarcely conclusive, this is one of the few occasions when I have some direct evidence to contribute to a discussion of this kind. In the aftermath of 1975, I formed the view (ill-advised in retrospect) that I could help fix Australia’s problems by becoming a Labor party staffer. I wanted to move to Sydney, so I applied to all the shadow ministers based there, receiving replies only from Doug McClelland and Arthur Gietzelt.
I can’t remember much about McClelland, or even for sure if I met him. As I recall, he was associated with the Right, but didn’t have the thuggish persona that generally went with that group, especially after the rise of Graham Richardson.
But, although I didn’t get the job, I did have a brief conversation with Gietzelt, who said something to me along the following lines “When I was your age [I was in my early 20s at the time], we all thought the Soviet Union was the way of the future. But you young people will have to find a different way forward”. My politics then were much as they are now, on the left, but strongly anti-communist, and of course, I was puzzled as to how the left should respond to the resurgence of neoliberalism/market liberalism, represented at the time by Malcolm Fraser(!). So this resonated with me in a number of ways, and I’ve never forgotten it.
I took it to mean that Gietzelt had once been a communist sympathizer (whether a party member or ‘fellow traveller’) but had ceased to be so. That wouldn’t be totally inconsistent with an association with the then Communist Party of Australia, which had broken from Moscow after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but that wasn’t the impression I had: I assumed that his views had changed well before that, presumably in the wake of the Hungarian invasion and Kruschchev’s secret speech.
As I say, this is scarcely decisive evidence, but Gietzelt had no reason to mislead me, and no need to say anything at all to me along these lines: in all probability we were never going to meet again, and we didn’t.[2] So, my own guess is that, if Gietzelt was ever a member of the Communist Party, it was well before he entered the Federal Parliament.
[fn1] Made most prominently, I think, by Mark Aarons, who, however, wasn’t drawing on personal knowledge but from a reading of ASIO files – scarcely a reliable source as anyone who remembers the ASIO of the Cold War era will attest
[fn2] It was a long time ago, and it’s possible that I was still a candidate for the job. But presumably, in that case, a secret CPer would be dropping hints in the other direction, to see if I was likely to be OK with the idea.
John Quiggin 
You don’t really suppose the White Forces would have put a resolution to reinstate Tsarist/Cossack rule do you? Any disruption would have served.
jungney :
You don’t really suppose the White Forces would have put a resolution to reinstate Tsarist/Cossack rule do you? Any disruption would have served.
@JKUU
Wikiquote confirms the attribution of ‘If men were angels, no government would be necessary’ to Madison in The Federalist Papers, No. 51. It also records how Madison has in other cases been the subject of misattribution, like so many others (Voltaire did not write ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’; that’s an interpretation of his attitude by a biographer, commenting on an occasion on which Voltaire’s actual words were translated as ‘What a fuss about an omelette’).
But the merits of any remark, correctly attributed, misattributed, or unattributed, depend on its content and not on its source.
@Fran Barlow
Strewth, I haven’t had a conversation like this for yonks. What fun! But…I respond…you did yerself admit the problems of communication and propagandization above in your comments about problems about the degree of intellectual commitment to a cause that few had the literacy to understand. The cause, of course, was pamphleteered, but it was as much about meetings and conversation as it ever was about reading. Such is the nature of peasant society.
The point is that you suggest that the Krondstadt rebels were manipulated by White Russian forces yet these ‘rebels’ were the same people and forces who had, during the February Insurrection, seized control of a vessel and fired on the Winter Palace. They don’t sound to me like counter revolutionary dupes. I think the anarchists of Kronstadt were much more modern and democratic than is generally recognized.
@jungney
Actually they were the same in name only. The best of them had gone on to fight on the red side in the civil war and Kronstadt had by 1921, a significantly different composition than in 1917.
@Fran Barlow
Oh really:
“The best of them had gone on to fight on the red side in the civil war.”
What, you have personal correspondence to that effect?
Democracy is the only struggle today. We need to re-imagine the past to highlight those prior outbursts of democracy, like the Kronstadt rebellion, that could inform contemporary rebellion.
@jungney
Yes, really. Kronstadt was not the same place in social terms as it was in 1921. They wanted, they said, “soviets without Bolsheviks”.
I don’t agree that democracy is the only struggle today, except perhaps in the sense that any substantive struggle for equity and reason will inevitably challenge democracy as it is currently configured in favour of structures that are inclusive rather than exclusive. I suppose one could call that “democracy”, but given the utterly soiled nature of the democratic garment, I’d probably favour setting it aside in some museum as a cautionary tale and speaking of inclusion instead.
Jim Rose
So when you posted your list did you claim that they:
When will the wall come down between Mexico and USA? when will the wall come down in Israel. When will the deaths of those trying to get across the wall between Australia and Indonesia exceed the deaths of those killed crossing into West Berlin?
How many walls, imprison how many prisoners in USA?
Despite the bizarre features of Stalin’s influence across East Europe and the defeat of Dubcek, those who clap and cheer at the fall of East Berlin, are preparing their own graves.
If you want to see your future – just visit a food stamp shop or nearby soup kitchen.
Yes, a list of countries by incarceration rate tells a very interesting story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
@Ikonoclast
What story do you think it tells, Ikon? I just had a look at the chart, and I’m struggling to see any kind of pattern to it.
@Ikonoclast
Good smackdown of Jim Rose.
In fact, as soon as they discovered flintlocks, the Brits and Americans killed and imprisoned entire communities right across the globe.
The Australians in Tasmania were the worst. They killed and concentrated an entire race over a territory almost as large as Belgium and Denmark combined. This is the world’s unbeaten record.
<a href="#comment-221275"@Ivor
Where any of these walls you mentioned designed to keep their own people in?
King George II and III, King William IV and some-one called Victoria said they were all their subjects as they herded them into their various concentration camps.
More often they just strung them up at Tyburn, or crammed them into dozens of hulks floating in rivers and estuaries dotted around the UK coast.
You cannot run an empire without bloated prisons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_internment_camps
Although, if you run out of walls, you can just throw your own people into the sea from helicopters as in America’s puppet-regime of Pinochet’s Chile.
King George II and III, King William IV and some-one called Victoria said they were all their subjects as they herded them into their various concentration camps.
More often they just strung them up at Tyburn, or crammed them into dozens of hulks floating in rivers and estuaries dotted around the UK coast.
You cannot run an empire without bloated prisons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_internment_camps
Although, if you run out of walls, you can just throw your own people into the sea from helicopters as in America’s puppet-regime of Pinochet’s Chile.
Jim Rose :
George II and Geo. III, King William IV and some-one called Victoria (Williams successor) said they were all their subjects as they herded them into their various concentration camps or chained them to their tasks.
More often they just strung them up at Tyburn, or crammed them into dozens of hulks floating in rivers and estuaries dotted around the UK coast.
You cannot run an empire without bloated prisons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_internment_camps
Although, if you run out of walls, you can just throw your own people into the sea from helicopters as in America’s puppet-regime of Pinochet’s Chile.
@Fran Barlow
The demand for ‘inclusion’ makes no sense if it is not within a general set of demands to improve democracy. The failure of liberal democracy to be inclusive is its great Achilles heel. The argument for inclusion only makes sense as a democratic objective. Or do you advocate inclusion without some sort of foundational purpose? Is it some sort of free floating signifier or sumfink 🙂
@jungney
In my case, the demand for inclusion is linked to measures designed to ensure functional control of the production of public goods by the producers and consumers of the goods. To the extent that there is an overarching supervisory institution, the system should be configured to render improbable any significant social homogeneity in the character of its membership, and ensure that the business of governance could not be a career option.
These outcomes could most easily be achieved by a system featuring iterative sortition, deliberative voting and direct polling on matters of serious controversy in real time.
The system, as part of its conventional processes, would have an andragogical aspect at candidate selection stage, supplying training and resources to putative candidates emerging from the sortition and presenting themselves for parliament. The aim here would be to improve the voter pool and facilitate inclusion in practice.
Years of abuse have, IMO, rendered the term ‘democracy’ and its variants problematic or an exercise in cant or demagogy. My system would be ‘democratic’ in the sense that the social composition of the populace would be a far closer match to all institutions serving the populace than the current one, but arguably undemocratic in severing some of the links between the ostensible express choices made by the populace and the shape of the parliament. This randomness is necessary, IMO, to break the hold the privileged exercise over public policy through non-governance related institutions — such as the banks, the MBCM, etc …
@Fran Barlow
Why are you assuming there would be a parliament? What for?
@J-D
I don’t assume it. I am proposing a possible model.
@Fran Barlow
Fran, your first paragraph above sounds very much like a system for the administration of things by things. I can’t imagine what sort of people would inhabit it.
As to the besmirched history of democracy, which you decry, is there some other form of governance that you think liable to be a success? I rather think that dictatorships of whomever, plutarchy and other systems probably won’t attract much attention from people raised in a system of liberal individualism.
@jungney
I thought I’d just outlined it. Briefly, a combination of sortition and deliberative choice (to select and finalise candidates for parliamentary office) and direct consultation (on matters of public controversy not adequately discussed prior to the convention of the parliament, in the opinion of members, and a similar system for selection of public committees administering public services.
I’d call that inclusive governance.
@Fran Barlow
All right then, why are you proposing a model that includes a parliament?
@J-D
Regarding parliaments as the apogee of democracy, the Indonesian military dictatorship elevated the role of its parliament after the 1965 coup as a way of depoliticising a society.
Indonesia had been locked in struggle with imperialism and colonialism for 55 years, resulting in growing mass activism and debate in the post-independence 1950-65 period, according to Max Lane (“Unfinished Revolution” 2008). This inevitably had a dominant Left character and Lane says that General Ali Murtopo saw “functional group” democracy as a way to achieve the quiescent and passivity of Western democracies during that period!
Basically, Indonesians workers and peasants were told it was “noses to the grindstone”, as national output was their main duty, with party mobilisations banned except for a licensed 3 days within a 10 day pre-election period, and then at district rather than local level where networks and identity originate. A strong element of this was the local administrative role as well as national defence role of the Indo army. Mass repression, bookbanning and a million dead served to eliminate not just activism but the literature and culture which expressed that struggle for self-definition, and hinders national identity and coherent goals in the post-Suharto period.
Lane is a partisan advocate for radical change, but convincingly shows how the dominant political forces in representative government failed the people in leading up to and after Suharto’s fall in 1998. He also documents the enormous grassroots activism and how this was decisive, not the demobilising and fickle responses of Megawati, Wahid, Rais etc.; it is one of the many untold stories about Indonesia. In Australia, without an independence struggle and not much fire in the belly, going beyond some tweaking of parliamentary structures seems a pipedream. Culture and history mean more than blueprints.
@J-D
I see a constructive role for a body that sets the legal and cultural framework within which decisions must be taken, which gathers and disburses funds equitably and efficiently, and negotiates with stakeholders outside the system.
Not all decisions can be taken locally with good results, IMO.
@Fran Barlow
Parliaments don’t gather and disburse funds, nor do they negotiate with stakeholders outside the system, and they’d be a poor choice of mechanism for either of those tasks.
Huh?
“Parliaments don’t gather and disburse funds …”
So, which bastard collected my taxes for fifty years and which anonymous benefactor is paying my pension now?
” … nor do they negotiate with stakeholders outside the system ..” (love that word “stakeholder”, it’s such a weasel word)
Now, while I agree that Tony hasn’t been negotiating with Indonesia (a stakeholder outside the system?) with the intelligence we would have expected in a Rhodes Scholar; acquired while he was enjoying the benefits of Whitlam’s socialistic free for all university education insanity; at least Julie, by constantly reassuring one of our closest and much appreciated allies that “Tony really doesn’t mean what he says” has restored some kudos to our mandate-ridden parliament.
Either I missed the definition of “parliament” within the context of this discussion or I’m enjoying false consciousness as to what parliament is.
Well, the whole thing’s going as planned, eh, Fran? Do you think that if I archly implied you are a “moderate”, say, you could respond with a quote from “Das Kapital”, just to kick the whole thing along for another week? (he said, with an absence of malice)
@Geoff Andrews
” … nor do they negotiate with stakeholders outside the system ..” (love that word “stakeholder”, it’s such a weasel word)
@Geoff Andrews
It would be more useful if you made a specific claim, salient to what is being discussed, rather than merely venting.
How is “stakeholder” a weasel word? Any term can be abused, but it certainly has a purely denotative application.
all this bruhaha – including sortition – and then you stick them back in parliament.
how is that going to improve the functioning of parliament or the accountability of parliamentarians to the citizens who they ostensibly represent?
first you need campaign finance reform.
then you need representative recall and then citizen initiated referendums.
and a role for parliament to set the “cultural framework”? give me a break. -a.v.
because without campaign finance reform your sortition pre-selected salt of the earth will be wiped out at the first hurdle. without recall you run the risk of a tyranny of the stupid or vicious. and in case they’re lazy or easily distracted you need to remind them by the threat of referendums that they’re servants otherwise being in parliament may give them illusions that they’re the boss or something of those they ostensibly are there to represent. -a.v.
@alfred venison
And without a system of entrenched and enforceable fundamental rights you end up with disasters like the wave of anti-gay and anti-election citizen initiated referendums that swept the US from the middle 90s onwards or the similar anti-immigrant initiatives in Switzerland. The US initiatives on marriage are slowly being reversed in the courts, but the measures designed to keep the electorate as small and Republican as possible are being upheld.
The great problem with liberal democracy is political capture, entities substituting their own preferences for those of the electorate as a whole. Campaign fiancé reform is a valid mechanism for guarding against political capture, but so is sortition. So are rigorous rules on conflicts of interest and transparency.
I’m also tempted by sumptuary laws, common in ancient Greece, where the upper income cohorts were limited in their participation in the state. A modern version might restrict the highest income decile from holding more than 10% of parliamentary seats.
Predictive spellchecking can give us wonderful things like ‘campaign fiancé reform’ which may or may not be relevant to marriage equality.
@alfred venison
Simple.
1. To begin with, nobody knows for sure who will win before the result. That makes bribery and capture harder.
2. Because the parliament isn’t party-based, discipline is absent, so people who are doing the wrong thing get marginalised and exposed rather than covered by colleagues. Also, because nothing that happens can negatively change your re-election chances from the zero they are, no MP stands to gain by covering up. You have a huge incentive to get the important stuff done, because you will return to your community and presumably your old job either as a success or a failure. Nobody wants the latter.
3. I would have recall for those who
a) lost the confidence of 2/3 of the parliament
b) were on the wrong end of a recall petition comprising 20% of their constituents.
An election would be held. If 50% +1 rejected him/her, then one off the short list that missed last time would be drawn by lot. If the MP survived, he/she would get immunity.
4. I favour a National Plan being the key business of the parliament. This would be reviewed and modified/affirmed every year and this document submitted for public assent, possibly with options. The Parliament would then report on the ways in which they were progressing towards the National Plan.
Matters that were clearly contrary to the National Plan would be ultra vires. If there were some dispute on that, again, direct democracy kicks in. We poll the public in total if 1/3 of the parliament says it’s ultra vires.
@Geoff Andrews
The Parliament didn’t collect your taxes; the Australian Taxation Office did. The Parliament doesn’t pay your pension; Centrelink does. When Tony Abbott negotiates with anybody, that’s the Prime Minister negotiating, not the Parliament.
And a good thing too, because Parliament is worse designed than the Australian Taxation Office for gathering funds, worse designed than Centrelink for disbursing funds, and worse designed than the Prime Ministership for negotiating with anybody.
@J-D
With the greatest possible respect, that’s nonsense. The ATO, Centrelink and the prime minister all do what they do because the parliament authorises them to. Claiming otherwise may be great rhetoric, but it’s also a hopeless confusion in principal/agent relationships.
first, you cannot legislate or constitute for democracy to be liberal. you seem to be counting on a level headed electorate.
sortition cannot ensure virtue nor prevent knaves from being randomly selected. vested interests can stack the pot. sortition in the context of illiberal democracy will perpetuate illiberal democracy.
besides, however you spin it, you’re just stacking another parliament, and, if you’re talking about an ideal arrangement, i would prefer some form of direct democracy, or popular oversight by perpetual plebiscite, facilitated by technology & sortition from among interested professionals for selecting the necessary bureaucrats. -a.v.
@Alan
‘With the greatest possible respect’? There’s no need to be insulting.
Regardless of how accurate you are about the relationship between Parliament on the one hand and the Australian Taxation Office, Centrelink, and the Prime Minister on the other hand, what you’re saying is beside the point of the original discussion.
I asked Fran Barlow for a reason for proposing a model that includes a Parliament.
The response was: ‘I see a constructive role for a body that sets the legal and cultural framework within which decisions must be taken, which gathers and disburses funds equitably and efficiently, and negotiates with stakeholders outside the system.’
The difference between authorising other individuals, groups, or bodies to do things and doing them yourself is relevant. If Parliament actually did gather and disburse funds, the next stage in the analysis would be to investigate whether Parliament is actually a good way of gathering and disbursing funds by comparison to other possible ways of gathering and disbursing funds. It isn’t, which is exactly why it doesn’t. But since what Parliament does is authorise the gathering and disbursement of funds, my next question is about whether there’s any reason to think that Parliament is a good way of authorising the gathering and disbursement of funds. Why Parliament? That was my question in the first place, and so far I’ve only seen an incomplete answer offered.
@J-D
Yes, it is and I’m perfectly aware of it. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t responsible to a body representing the community as a whole.
It’s clear that local bodies will often have to work in concert with each other to some extent under rules set by others encompassing all of the other bodies that are also local. Some infrastructure is regional or even national in its scope.
I can’t imagine why this fairly obvious banality should have caught your eye and troubled you so much.
@alfred venison
You miss the point. Our current system ensures that virtue is damn near impossible to select, and that knaves have a rails run to government not just once but for periods longer than a generation. My system subverts the mechanisms that guarantees the illiberal their rotten boroughs.
The most serious objection to what I propose is that the current gang would see in a flash that there could be no place for them in it, and would never allow it to see the light of day. We would nee can insurgent and radical movement to even get it discussed beyond fora like these.
Ancient Athens has a bad rep, but the Athenian democracy lasted longer than the Roman republic and didn’t suffer nearly as many civil wars, coups, purges, or disappearances. I’m quite prepared to have the Socrates argument but i don’t think it’s particularly significant.
Simply saying sortition would produce knaves is not a sufficient argument, especially if you count the number of knaves in various parliaments.
On the other hand I maintain the objection that a sortitive democracy simply would not work without a guarantee of human rights.
Fran Barlow – first, i did not say there were no scoundrels in the present arrangement.
but that saving me from being governed by the likes of malcom turnbull in order to deliver me into being governed by the likes of chapelle corby is no improvement.
it is no improvement because parliament is the problem. sortition is not a solution to the problem. sortition is prolongation of the problem.
in speculating on an ideal society you seem unwilling or unable to conceive it without putting a parliament in it.
is that what you’re getting at J-D?
Alan – no matter how robust your human rights legal regime you cannot guarantee it will not be repealed or perverted in its application. illiberal democracy is an inherent danger, you cannot legislate or constitute to protect against it. -a.v.
@Fran Barlow
What I’m questioning is not why you think there’s a need for some form of national coordination but rather why you’re proposing a parliament as a specific mechanism for performing such a role.
@alfred venison
If it’s true that you cannot legislate or constitute against illiberal democracy then there is no point ever discussing institutional reform. That rather nihilistic position applies if, and only if, the appropriate test for any reform (including campaign finance reform) is whether it will meet a test that can never be met.
@J-D
I mention a parliament because public policy needs to be an expression of the political consensus of the citizenry that it serves and parliament is the name given to bodies that ostensibly at least, play that role.
If you have in mind some other structure that could perform that role as well I’m certainly not going to die in a ditch over parliament.
It seems to me though that a key constraint on what is often called “democracy” is the question of informed consent. There’s very little scope at all in most parliamentary systems now in existence for the population to become involved substantively in decision making over policy, with the consequence that none of the antecedent cognitive skills develop in the population at large. Instead, people adapt to being passive and by and large vote for entirely frivolous reasons — tribal loyalty, moral panic, charm, hatred, ignorant fear, unsound hope or as one woman said to me in 1983, “I saw him in a shopping centre”.
Needless to say, this is nothing like inclusive rulership. To get inclusion, you need a structure that fosters andragogy — adult learning. People by and large don’t learn unless they see some point o it. Unless they believe that one day, they may be called upon to serve their community, and that in any event, they are likely to be polled on matters of substance, then their incentive to learn is for all practical purposes, zero. Passivity, acquiescence and maladaptive dissonance will be the rule. Only one class benefits from that.
The system I propose marginalises political parties as vehicles for the brokerage of careers in the service of the boss class, and denies the MBCM a key role in making and breaking candidacies. It severs the link between years of unprincipled horse-trading and political success, making it far less likely that the boss class will have some weapon to use against people elected with which they can be made to do their bidding.
Over time, under my system, the quality of the voter pool would improve and even the political parties, stripped of their role as career brokers, would improve, since now their only relevance would be as sources of ideas about public policy. In such a setting, I believe a parliament really could be an expression of the informed consent of the governed.
Alan – i’m not saying reform is futile but that your sortition is more of a mixed bag than you admit & would turn sour should your society turn illiberal. you could end up with rule by the lowest common denominator.
correct me if i’m wrong, its been a while, but didn’t the athenians use sortition to fill functionary roles – juries, administration of the agora, etc.? i don’t think they used it to select the archon, did they? certainly not the strategos. and of course they did not use sortition to select their representatives because as we know they represented themselves. so its a moot point whether athenians would have considered it *reasonable* to choose their personal proxy by chance, had they been permitted to consign their vote to someone other than themselves, instead of fronting up at the rock and voting directly.
so my preference for reform as i said above would center on finance reform, spending limits, transparency, recall, and anything that brings us closer to direct democracy & direct oversight of the representatives by the voters – we have the means for this and it will soon be too hot to go outside & hang around in lines outside schools. nor should we, we have the means to bring it closer to each citizen. you don’t need sortition in my opinion to discourage graft & corruption of the process and to bring your representatives under greater control of the people they ostensibly represent. we have the means.
but in an ideal society we would not have a parliament because we would do it ourselves directly. we have the means. i am going to work now where i cannot access this site as it is deemed a “personal site” by my net nanny so if i don’t answer its not out of rudeness but maybe i’ve said all i should say. -a.v.
I’m not proposing sortition si the sole and only institutional change. I think there are a couple of possibilities. My preference would be to identify inherent conflict of interest matters like electoral law and accountability laws and require parliament to legislate on those matters only with the consent of a citizens assembly randomly chosen for the purpose.
If there are to be citizen initiatives I’d much prefer them done by citizens assembly rather than petition. The vast majority of California initiatives are corporate ventures because qualifying an initiative is so expensive. Giving it to a citizens assembly would cut corporations out of the initiative process and put the people back in charge.
More radical alternatives would elect one house sortitively.
I’d still want human rights guarantees.
As to the Athenians, there was a representative body, the boule, which proposed decrees to the assembly. Athenian law distinguished decrees, psephismata, from laws, nomoi. The assembly could make any decree on recommendation of the council, but there was a different and more difficult procedure for altering laws. The archons were elected by lot, the only elective officials, in our terms were the 10 generals and the treasurers.
The Athenian system was fairly sophisticated in structuring how questions went to the people, not quite the mob rule that ideologues like Gibbon and Madison claimed.
Amazingly enough they achieved a secret ballot in the assembly (and the courts which could be up to 1001 strong) by using black and white balls which you placed in the voting urn or the dummy urn as you washed. The balls were then spread on a 250*250 grid which was very easy to count.
@Fran Barlow
Unfortunately (perhaps; or not?) on many significant political issues there is not a political consensus of the citizenry. Any political system has to deal with this reality and in fact all actually operating systems do deal with it in one way or another, even if not ways that you or I might like. No matter what the political system, it is impossible for public policy to be an expression of the political consensus of the citizenry in those cases where there is no political consensus of the citizenry.
Actual parliaments, the ones that really exist, are not well designed as mechanisms for determining what the political consensus of the citizenry is in those cases where it exists, and not even well designed as mechanisms for identifying those cases where it does exist. A well designed mechanism for that purpose would be radically different from any parliament that exists or ever has existed.
At odd moments over many years I have entertained myself by thinking over how I might design a political system starting entirely from scratch. When I started doing this I always assumed there’d be some kind of Parliament, and I toyed around with a few ideas for substantially re-designed models that were still recognisably parliamentary. Then I thought more deeply and started looking for reasons for including a parliament in the model, and ended up by deciding that there were no good ones.
So when I see somebody thinking about total re-design of the political system but still assuming there has to be some kind of parliament, I am curious about why and wonder how thoroughly the issues have been thought through.
i have little quibble about what you say, Alan, and thanks for the precis of athenian procedure. i was not aware gibbon had bagged athenian procedure, i’ll have to have another look at the index. if archons were chosen by lot they were damned lucky to get solon, or am i being anachronistic here?
sure referendums, initiatives, ballot measures, &c are a mixed bag, but i am in favor of them originating from the people – with proper checks & threshold requirements – because citizens in my opinion do not have enough power vis a vis *their* government – humble petitions are not good enough. there needs to be some way for the citizens to force *their* government to act when it is right to act & the government won’t – there is far too much of the penal colony about government in this country. i’m sorry if that offends amor patriae but that’s the impression i have formed after 37 years & it doesn’t mean i don’t like this place very much.
and yes, whatever it takes to minimise the influence of corporations, indeed i wouldn’t mind a restriction to natural persons only, corporations have far too much power than is good for the country.
as to human rights guarantees, this country is far, far overdue for a bill of rights – even old dart, home of common law, can manage a bill of rights. i despise all the pious cant about common law & parliament is good enough to protect our rights & interference from courts, &c. i most definitely do not need my rights protected by parliament, i need my rights protected from parliament and by courts if necessary ! -a.v.
Bear in mind we do have a copy of the decree made by the assembly before the battle of Salamis. The decree orders that ship captains and admirals for that battle be chosen by lot. The Athenians must have felt the outcome said good things about sortition. The rational managers advising Xerxes must have been appalled.