Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
With the recent revealTions about the loyalty of elected officials, it time to talk about their usefulness. Australia, and other countries with the British disease of representative government, has a plethora of elected politicians.
But why so many?
It’s not that they all do useful functions. That is rare for any politician. And if in opposition they do nothing useful at all. It must be time to trim down governments and representative chambers. No one has explained to me why every state NEEDS twelve federal senators. The cope out answer is that the senate has to have half the numbers if the lower house. My reply is, then cut the lower house numbers by at least half.
Then there is the matter of effectiveness. Even governments struggle to find enough work for back benches to do; and cross benchers do even less. Even opposition front benches do nothing important for the country. Most of the time they just automatically oppose whatever the government proposes. They are not needed.
Finally there is the cost to the nation of having two federal houses if parliament, eleven state houses of parliament {Queensland having got rid of its upper house}, two territorial assemblies and over 500 local council chambers. It is obvious that they cannot possibly all be necessary.
It is incredibly difficult to get a total cost estimate for all elected politicians in Australia. Especially with the over 500 local government tital number of politicians, that information must be collected for each area. But for federal politicians we are told that the 153 lower house politicians earn a combined annual salary of well over $ 39 million a year. As for the senators their total salary bill comes to over $19 million a year. Now this does not include fringe benefits and any allowances. So that $53 million a year is just the starting point. The on costs for these jobs could add on another 40 percent. That makes a total bill of about $100 million a year.
The ancillary staff at all of the :seven parliament houses, two territorial. hammers and over 500 council chambers; can only be a great burden on tax and rate revenue. These all have to be paid before one tax dollar is paid out every week for things like Health, Education and essential services. So much more could be done in these areas if we trimmed the political fat. Each elected representative would also get, on average, two assistants. This makes the labour bill even higher.
Councils can be run by a committee of three people. So let’s start there and limit local council politicians to three per council. State governments cannot need more than fifty people all up, so let’s make that the maximum number of politicians voted in. Territories cannot need more than twenty politicians. Already we must have slashed the total annual salary bill.
Economists talk about productivity being the sole reason for real wage increases.This should be applied to politicians too and enforced by an independent body. No increase in productivity means no increase in salary. If their salary increase is tied to judges then impose the same condition on those judges.
It’s time to stop free loaders clogging up our elected assemblies with time servers. If they do nothing then get rid of them.