It’s not a conflict of interest. It’s a convergence of interest!

You’re actually reviving an ancient argument from the century before last. In colonial NSW, for example, there were stern arguments that shopkeepers and the like could not be JPs (when local government in the colony essentially consisted of a meeting of all local JPs) because they would favour their customers over others. Roughly the same argument was mounted at every debate over expanding the franchise or paying MPs.

I think it was most succinctly stated by the late Russ Hinze, who once said the ALP are always in favour of integrity reforms (not his actual words) because, and I quote:

‘If you shook the whole ALP caucus upside down, you’d be lucky to get 20 cents between the lot of them.’

I am not a member of the CLP (nor have I ever been a member of any party), I don’t work for any politician, and this is all my own work, right down to the grammatical errors and general atmosphere of tentativeness. As you know I resigned from student politics at the beginning of this year - that also included declining to join the CLP.

Now that I think about it more, I think that cam’s was the best reply. As usual the underlying problem is not this law or that legislator, but rather the power of the state in the first place.

I suppose that the genesis of my “what if?” in this direction was the famous old chestnut, usually attributed to Alexander Tytler:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.

The Australian Constitution forbids politicians from holding offices of profit under the Crown (or contracts with it), because politicians are meant as far as possible to represent the public interest and not their own private ones. However, that isn’t and can never be true of the general voting public. We not only can but must project our private interests in the voting decisions we make. Thus, once you attempt to contruct an argument for disenfranchising people who hold some particular sorts of self-interest while treating other sorts of self-interest totally differently, you instantly and unavoidably tie yourself in inextricable logical knots.

In fact, as I observed in my initial rather flippant comment, people don’t generally vote in accordance with any one particular aspect of self-interest anyway, because we all have lots of aspects to our self-interest, not to mention broader belief systems that don’t even flow from narrow self-interest at all. Hence the NT CLP had little difficulty in garnering the majority of public servants’ votes over 23 years of unbroken rule, despite several purges to public service numbers during that time. Their/your best prospect of getting back into government is to stop navel-gazing with silly plans like this one (or for that matter advocating a resumption of the Cannonball Run or whatever), and start presenting positive, sensible mainstream economic policies while forcefully pointing out the Martin government’s failings. Jodeen Carney doesn’t do a bad job of the latter, but she’s essentially a one woman band as things currently stand. It isn’t healthy for democratic accountability. I hope you’re not still working for David Tollner and filling his cavernous cranial spaces with nonsense ideas like this post, or God help us all.

Taking the position that my scheme is the “simplest possible”, how would you go on to generalise it?

More (or possibly less, seriously) I do not why see why the test of simplicity allows you to escape private sector conflicts of interest while repressing public sector conflicts of interests. The test of simplicity (the simplest workable scheme) is a nothing argument. Shooting everyone charged with murder is the simplest workable scheme for dealing with such cases, but has little else to recommend its adoption.

Take for example this gem: “With a population of just over 200,000, the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly is composed of 25 MLAs”

Probably should have read “the Northern Territory’s” to avoid the confusion about a 200,000 person Assembly being composed of 25 people.

I did give consideration to that problem before penning this wildly unpopular ditty. But more than anything it just highlights the way the state has entangled itself in every aspect of our lives. In much the same way that every drop of water I drink has been urinated out of something during the life of the planet, every movement I make and every dollar I spend has been touched, regulated, or spent by the state before I got there.

To put it another way, how far can this scheme be pushed? Is it applied only to wage-earners, as my proposal above implies? Or can it be extended to those who get FTBs or work for companies on the public tit?

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I’m not saying “individual snouts in the public trough are evil but corporate snouts in the public trough are not”. I’m just choosing the simplest workable scheme based on the principle that conflicts of interests exist not just in the private sphere, but every time a person reliant on the state goes to vote.

Cheers.

It goes without saying I assume you’d ban all advertising by government as a blatant attempt by the current trough-holders (and their advertising and media consultants with their attendant lordships of shareholders, employees and subcontractors) to keep their snouts up where they want them to stay.

their dogs will line up to try and write their pet cause into that Constitution.

dogs - write - pet quote. pet.dogs.

beautiful

NT will only become a state when it has the population to make it so which means never

While I appreciated that most excellent slippery slopery which followed, your reply raises a more important legal issue that I did not consider.

That is, the interaction between this proposal and Ss 7 & 30 of the Australian Constitution. Can state votes be disentangled from federal votes?

The other thing you may noticed that I did not address is that in reality, Territorians in the private sector are not paying anything near the wages bill of the public sector. It’s coming from elsewhere, so it could be argued that such a system is pointless when voting patterns are upset by the “silos” of state bounaries.

And if your broader principle is that people who may have a vested interest in voting for a particular party which (allegedly) favours a set of policies which advantage the public sector, why should we not (equally in the interests of eliminating voters who might have a vested interest in voting for a particular party which favours a specific set of of policies which advantage that group of voters) also disenfranchise all participants in motor sports (because the CLP advocates the resuscitating the Cannonball Run), all participants in gun sports (because the CLP advocates legalising paintball), and all people who have drivers licences (because the CLP appears to oppose moves to impose a mandatory speed limit, demerit points etc even though these initiatives are apparently being imposed at the behest of the Howard government)? Why sould we regard some vested interests as warranting disenfranchisement but not others? If we eliminate everyone with a vested interest that might appear to some to militate in favour of their voting for a particular party (even though in fact many of these people vote for other parties), elections would be very simple to administer: there would only be half a dozen or so Territorians eligible to vote. It wouldn’t be democratic, but it would certainly be cheap.