The debate over the Coalition government's proposed senate voting reforms has highlighted the inter-party brokering that brings candidates into office. It is a wonder that preferential flows and group voting had not previously elicited such high levels of inquiry, and indeed the motivation for doing so now is open to inspection.
Yet if representative democracy were predicated on transparency, then another area deserves scrutiny: preselection.
Preselection is the area in which the distinction between politics and governance gets frayed. We only need look at the US primaries to work out how important that line actually is. There we see the spectacle of too many people convinced that ideological sentiment can pass for administration of the things that make civilised life possible: healthcare, education, work, housing, security.
Politics can't feed the hungry, or provide shelter. It doesn't put competent teachers in schools, reliable doctors in hospitals, decent police officers on the streets. It takes governance to do that, and good governance involves the best decisions that can be made honestly, within context and in the interests of ordinary people.
To some degree, this commends the US presidential system, where in theory the president is able to appoint the best possible person for Cabinet portfolios. Sometimes that person is someone on the other side of politics. Specialists, or candidates with relevant qualifications, are more likely to become departmental chiefs (secretaries) than a political careerist.
In Australia, it is much harder to be confident that the people who get handed a portfolio have relevant qualifications. In some cases, there is nothing to commend them other than that they were elected or have been around for a while — elevated to office via a preselection process that bears no resemblance to recruitment processes in other lines of work.
For example, if one were to believe that merit is genuinely the baseline in preselection, wouldn't one then have to conclude from the composition of our parliaments that competence must be rare among women and people of colour (POC)? Who benefits from drawing such conclusions? How have low levels of diversity shaped the policy excesses that directly affect non-whites?
It is not just that preselection processes have not delivered the representational mix that we should expect from national demographics. Some of the political scandals of recent years also raise questions around how candidates are vetted and/or retained.
Craig Thomson was eventually convicted of 13 charges of theft. Mal Brough is currently under police investigation