But Glenn, you don’t even live in Tangney! It isn’t YOUR community! And you failed simply because you were a poor candidate. You should reserve your ire for those who encouraged you in this folly (Cameron, take a bow) and promised you so many things.
Did they even tell you they approached more than 30 others who turned them down before asking you to stand?
And you think you had a tough time of it? What did you expect? Everyone to acknowledge your brilliance and let you walk into the job?
Best go back to selling cars.

The upshot of my challenging the local member is I have had venom and spite poured on me and my family from people I have never even met. I have lost my job.

To the Liberal Party I say, If you do not want to hear the truth don’t ask for anyone to stand for Preselection. You are so inward looking you don’t want to know what the public think. So, resign yourself for years in opposition. To you armchair experts…give it a go you nongs, see how it goes. I doubt you have the cahounas/willpower/intestinal courage or strength…get stuffed.

So you’re asking control freaks running major parties to give up their power. To give up their power not to someone else, but to the broad community as a whole. To potentially elect candidates who owe the party organisation fuck-all. Candidates who won’t necessarily jump when party hacks crack the whip, because there is no whip to crack.

Riiiiiiiiight. Good luck with that.

and

I would like to see the party hacks of either Macquarie or Sussex St win a State election without the support of the rank & file membership of either party.

Not relevant to this discussion, as NSW Labor at least has a 100% local component pre-selection system.

The fact is, 97% of people can’t be bothered with politics enough to join, vote in or organise in a political party. So the internal power falls to those willing to do the work to get and keep votes.

Hardly unfair, or some sort of centralised megalomaniacal conspiracy. Its fun to paint the major parties as closed shops, but the reality is that anyone with a bit of time, commitment and intelligence could become a major force in any state branch of any Australian political party in 3 years.

And they wouldn’t have to raise millions or be media tarts, as an open, US-style primary system would require.

But we probably have to be close followers of political news to know about some of them, so what proportion of the electorate is that? 6%? 8%? 2%??

there’s no local angle in Senate elections. The elections are state-wide and the voters probably haven’t has any contact with the candidates in any way or have even heard of them except in a senate election context. There’s no reason for the voters not to follow their party’s ticket in terms of the order of their votes for the candidates of that paper.

In the Tasmanian/ACT context, it’s different. The electorates are small enough so that local personalities can and do play a part.

I would like to see the party hacks of either Macquarie or Sussex St win a State election without the support of the rank & file membership of either party.

Factional warlords of head office, manipulators and the bourgeoisie party hacks need realise that at the end of the day their lurks and perks will cease to continue with-out being able to place men and women on the ground to stuff propaganda into letterboxes or hand out ‘how to votes’ on election day, these people will end up stacking shelves in Woolworths for minimum wage.

Riiiiiiiiight. Good luck with that.

The nearest you’ll see to this is in the Liberal Party in Victoria, which has the sort of free and open preselection process that makes the Greens or the Democrats look as inscrutable as the Chinese Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution. The door is wide open to challenge State MPs but nobody is stepping up to do it – well, one person, but the incumbent is likely to be returned because “he hasn’t done anything wrong”. This model can only be vindicated, preserved and extended by victory.

If the Victorian Libs win state government and in the federal election get at least 28 Federal seats from that state, and three Senators with the possibility of a fourth, then we’ll see about this open democracy stuff and can think about extending it. Pretty big if, though. I don’t see it happening either.

By Christmas next year the Liberals will have lost federal and state elections. The State Director, Tony Nutt (John Howard’s former chief of staff and a former State Director in WA and NSW) will put an end to this namby-pamby democracy bullshit, and will start tapping dud MPs on the shoulder and replacing them with candidates who can think for themselves (including knowing on which side their bread is buttered).

The Liberal Party in Victoria loves a strongman. Bolte and Kennett realised they’d have to grab the party by the scruff of the neck, and that’s what happened. Baillieu, despite being a former state party president, hasn’t done/can’t do that. Nutt is well positioned to play the role that John Carrick did in NSW and Nick Minchin in SA, which is reshape the division in his own image and deliver the votes federally (provided the federal leader is acceptable), with state politics as a sideshow to be treated with disdain if it gets in the way of the feds.

Voters have similar clout in Senate elections, if only they will seize the day and vote below the line. How many take the time to do so?

However I do think it is somewhat egotistical and perhaps somewhat self righteous to assert that this problem relates only to the major political parties as there are just as many zealots within the minor parties such as the Greens who on the current issue appear to be deliberately misleading the population in regard to Climate Change and are not being completely honest in regard to the cause such as the Earth tilting upon its axis.

As for the complete disregard and contempt for the internal Democratic processes that is the current modus operandi, the only way to alter the current status quo is by encouraging ordinary people to play a role in the policy making process as opposed to allowing the old Stalinist power base of Centralised decision making continue, a system largely supported by party hacks, cronies and those who have never had to wring the sweat from their undies after a day on the tools.

As the Earl of Chatham declared in the House of Lords “Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it”