Saturday 19 April 2014

Get Wealth Out of Politics

I'm proud to say that this post is about an idea I put forward to the Australian Greens Thought Experiment. And obviously many people have the same thoughts and ideas.


For the past few days, while some of us wind up or down for the Easter break, the Australian Greens have launched an online though experiment to collect innovative ideas from the community. You can add ideas and you have ten votes to give support ideas. You can give from one to three votes to any idea including your own.

There have been many related ideas and votes for renewable energy and urban renewal and education programs all of which are worthwhile projects.

But for the past few days, there has been an idea that keeps topping all the others and it is to:

Amend the constitution to allow only limited government funding of election campaigns.  
This would stop wealthy companies contributing to election campaigns and thus controlling the government and its agenda. Such constitutions are in place in northern Europe.

It's been exciting to see this idea rise from third to second to first and stay there for the past day. Thanks Green thinkers. Let's work out how to make this happen.

Here's a screen grab from just now: