Yeah I'm not a constitutional expert but I'm 90% sure this won't work. Like professor Twomey said, we elect individuals, not parties (which is what this basically is) - and what happens if they have a falling out, or disagree on a policy position?
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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I'm all for it to allow more diverse representation, but I also think Twomey is on the money that this will need to go through a referendum to allow the constitution to be modified.
Potential positives:
- More representative parliament
- Capacity to sit in parliament and be in the community simultaneously
- Reduce career politicians; increase apolitical experience brought to Canberra
- More women in parliament to bring us closer to 50/50 representation
Potential issues:
- Legality/Constitutionality
- How to settle disagreements between jobshare candidates, particularly on voting
- Division of salary and benefits
- Ballot display issues
- Old codgers who just don’t want anything to change ever
I don’t see any genuine issues that would prevent this from becoming a reality, and I wholeheartedly think it’s a great idea.
I think another way to achieve something similar would be to make multi-electorate seats from single-representative seats (either by dividing or amalgamating) and making each district voted by proportional representative voting, much as we do for the senate whose electorates are entire states/territories. We could then let those candidates jobshare across their districts if they wanted to in order to help facilitate better work-life balance.
I love when any ideas that shake up the political status quo are brought up in this country because I think we’re overdue for re-evaluating if our democracy is functioning as well as we’d like.
Additional issue:
Argument ad absurdum: if two people can share the role, what's stopping three, or four, or an entire suburb?
Also possibly related to "how to settle disagreements", there's questions around clarity for voters about what exactly they'll get.
And related to constitutionality, what happens if one of them is found to be ineligible? Or if one gets Named or otherwise censured?
what's stopping three, or four, or an entire suburb?
If this leads to spontaneous direct democracy I'm all for it
Agree with all the positives. I think disagreements could be solved the same way any group solves disagreements (i.e. not always very well) - so yep the framework would have to very well defined. And yeah fairly sure a constitutional change would be needed, but that's semantics as are the rest of those issues. I think the real crux of the issue is the change from elected person to elected group.
I don't think there's much of a difference between multi-electorate seats and what we have now, surely thats just a case of bigger electorates? Multi-representative seats are not a foreign concept either, i believe that's how it works down in Tassie with their hare-clarke system.
I don't see any immediate issues and I'm not opposed to the idea. I assume they would share the single wage which might require some fiddling around for tax purposes. I wonder if/how this would impact their expenditure for taxpayer funded travel.
If two people can do it why not a company?
It is a nice romantic idea…