Decisions in modern democracies are not made by the people themselves, but by elected representatives who in effect are given the proxies by the people for several years, until the next election. People choose a candidate largely on their electoral promises (which successful candidates have no obligation to keep) or past performance. Unfortunately, whoever people vote for, a politician gets in, and these are generally the worst people to act in other people's interests.

In the 21^st century, technology offers the ability for direct democracy. The model works as follows

Each citizen may connected via Internet (or something like it) to parliament house and watch or listen to proceedings in parliament. They can literally vote on every issue via a cell-phone, Internet computer terminal, or PDA device.

Anyone sufficiently interested in a particular decision being made in parliament has the ability to vote on it. Anyone not interested in direct involvement in the parliamentary process, or without the time or interest to vote on a particular decision, may give a temporary proxy to another person, in much the same way that shareholders of a company give their voting proxies for a particular meeting. Proxies remain in place until they are removed by the owner.

Clearly some issues, like when politicians should break for dinner, don't seem appropriate for nationwide referendum, but in fact this doesn't matter.

While there is always the risk that a proxy carrier (who unfortunately would still be a politician) would make decisions that the proxy owner didn't want, this is not a serious problem. In practice, the parliamentary agendas would still be published in advance so people would know what was coming up, and they could watch their proxy carefully, or take it back right at the critical vote.

Even if someone could misuse the proxies, there would be little point because the decisions could be reversed so quickly, and the proxy carrier would lose so many future proxies they wouldn't bother.

This may sound like science fiction, but in fact the technology is here to do this today. Objections like 'no computer system could handle the load of 18million votes at once' etc are rubbish. A distributed log-n based system similar to Akamai.com architecture could cope easily - encrypted digital signatures and all.

However you won't hear this system being promoted by the politicians because such a system would make them powerless to do anything except try to convince people of the correct system. You won't hear this system being promoted by the special interest groups because they know full well that actually faced with a bill 'do you want to spend $10 million on obscure special interest group X?', that the majority of Australians will click the 'no thank you' button. Nor will you hear this from the business lobby groups, who would suddenly find that multi-million-dollar donations to political parties were no longer an effective way to affect policy.

Such a system will only come into being when the people themselves realize that they will benefit from greater control, and are willing to see through the misleading campaign ads, through the vote buying of the special interest groups, and though the politician's fundamental need for power, and vote for someone who just quietly says 'this way is better' **.

** and no, I'm not applying for the job. Let some other sucker get assassinated for what he believes in.