Mark Triffitt writes in The Conversation (26.8.16) about some of the implications for our democratic system from the 2016 federal election results, arguing that major reforms are needed urgently to maintain political and policy processes under duress from widespread voter dissatisfaction.
‘A week has always been a long time in politics, but now it is longer than ever. In a world of increasingly truncated media cycles, short-term politics and fragmented parliaments, the political world is being splintered into more and more singular events.
‘This means more news, events and antics are crammed into a political week and analysed in blow-by-blow detail. Combine that with an increasingly volatile electorate and the question is: what’s the use of predicting the political week ahead in this age of democratic disruption, let alone an entire electoral cycle?
‘But sometimes when micro-events seem chaotic and disconnected, the overall patterns are more obvious.’