Australian Politics

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?

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.

They wouldn't have two votes in parliament if they win a seat as you seem to have misunderstood. They said that whoever of the two was rostered that week would vote on a bill.

reddit.com/Australia is very hostile to the idea but I am partial to it, especially because it makes campaigning feasible when it otherwise might not be. Not just for candidates with kids but for anyone who is not time/money rich (which is most of us since time and money are usually mutually exclusive).

The main problem I see (which nobody has mentioned) is that politicians develop relationships with each other, even sometimes with opposition members. These relationships are important but the job-sharing thing weakens the chance of rapport.

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.

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.