Australia is preparing for the federal election this weekend, but I feel as lost as ever. It’s always seemed to me that democracy is just a step in the path to something better. It’s never been the answer to all problems in the developing world as the US, UN and most Western leaders would have us believe.
While reading Alexandra Adornetto’s article on how youth are being left out (I’m twice her age, but it rings true for me too) I started to think about what the next step might be for us.
I think my major problem is that I’m voting for a person or a group who represent a package of policies. I’m not voting for the policies themselves. What if I like the environmental policy of one party, but the internet policy of another? Surely technology is now at the level to enable us to vote for individual policies rather than parties. We could have a government of people working together to educate and implement the will of the people rather than tossing accusations at each other.
I know that each policy requires money and labour and resources to implement and policies must be packaged together, but we could at least vote on what was most important and let the government handle the details of putting the pieces together.
I don’t know how it would be done, but with the strength and reach of social networking technologies, we can’t be too far off something better than current democracy.