When Fatima Payman crossed the Senate floor to vote against her government she knew it would come with consequences.
The Australian Labor party has strict penalties for those who undermine its collective positions, and acts of defiance can lead to expulsion - a precedent with a 130-year history.
The last time one of its politicians tested the waters while in power was before Ms Payman was born.
But last Tuesday, the 29-year-old did just that - joining the Green party and independent senators to support a motion on Palestinian statehood.
If you aren’t voting for one specific person to be your representative, but rather, for the party as a whole, you generally want individual representatives to follow the party line, unless there’s some sort of unusual drama that splits opinions long after the last elections.
In countries such as the US and the UK, you usually for someone to represent your territory, but in elections such as the European ones, because you’re voting for lists of people to represent your country, you’re actually voting for a party.
No idea about how Australian democracy works, though.
Then there’s absolutely no reason to have individual representatives. Just have one representative per party that represents the official party line in the parliament. No need to pay 300 people to do the exact same thing in the parliament when you can have one.
Contemporary governments deal with taxation, healthcare, security, defense, education, law, labor rights, minority rights, infrastructure, prison systems, regulations of industries, and so on and so on and so on. It’s very unlikely to find one person capable of having in-depth knowledge of all of these areas to properly defend their party’s leanings on all of them in parliamentary debates, and even if you did, those parties are still going to need experts who draw the master lines of their policy proposals, and those experts need to be paid.
Have them vote inside of the party. You don’t need them inside the government. There’s no reason for that to happen. Stop putting lists of names on the ballot, just put a party name, and have these experts work inside of their parties then send a representative from said party to the government to cast the party aligned vote and weigh that vote by the amount of votes they got. You’d save on the administrative costs for the parliament and all of this business would be taken care of inside the individual parties. You can still give parties money to pay their own people according to their own preferences. You don’t need to have 700 people sitting in benches in a public building to virtually cast the same vote when they could sit in benches in their own party headquarters and deal with their discussions internally.
That is if we vote only for parties and not for people.