In this issue.

• Author: Ayres, Philip
• Position: Editorial comment
• Pages: 5(2)

The current issue of National Observer is headed by a powerful, scholarly article on the limited nature of Australia's form of democracy, which is not, strictly speaking, democracy at all, but something more accurately described here as a ballotocracy. The ancient popular assemblies in Greece and Rome were direct democracies in which the ordinary people participated in the making and ratifying of laws. We, like most modern democracies, have taken these popular assemblies and reduced them to elected lower houses of parliament with the people given a say only once in every three or four years. We have also taken the (never democratic) idea of the Roman senate, which was to a large extent an aristocratic preserve, and created our upper houses. The only Western country that has a real democracy is Switzerland. And yet, early in Australia's history as a political federation, there were serious attempts made to ensure that it would be a real democracy, with citizen-initiated referenda, the right of recall of elected representatives, and other truly democratic features. And the party in which most of these attempts were made was the Australian Labor Party, which only abandoned the ideal...