The idea of Democracy Dollars isn’t for everyone. I get it. But for our fifth and final little idea, we’re going to look at a way to reduce the need for them in the first place — by increasing how much public election funding is available. In 2015, the ACT…

For our fourth little idea, we’re going to do something that is most people’s worst nightmare: making it easier to see political ads. Political ads are everywhere: social media, TV, radio, podcasts, streaming services, billboards, on your neighbour’s fence, on your plumber’s ute, on screens in bathrooms and elevators, and…

Parties in Australia are in a privileged position of getting special placement on ballots, access to extra funding and better pay for their MPs. But parties aren’t particularly well-regulated — with the idea that they’re somehow just voluntary associations of likeminded fellows like the local Rotary Club, not a key…

A lot of focus is on how much MPs are paid and all their extra allowances, but we don’t pay nearly as much attention to how many staff they have. Our second little idea aims to make that more transparent and equitable by letting the Remuneration Tribunal decide staffing levels. …

I’m under no misconceptions that these ideas would ever get implemented or even seriously considered by whoever’s in power. That’s why I tried to think of more moderate, easier-to-stomach changes that achieve many of the same objectives as the five Big Ideas, but cheaper and with a lot less political…

I wanted to focus on improving democratic participation rather than democratic integrity with this project, but it’s hard to go ignore political donations entirely. Rather than advocate for banning or capping donations, I took a different tack: a government clearing house for political donations. Reforming campaign finance is really hard…

Now we’ve got a bigger Parliament, a bigger electorate and bigger political parties, it’s time to blow it all by giving people the right to say no. None of these. None of them. Preferential voting is really effective at ensuring no-one is disenfranchised, even in optional systems. …

In parts 3 and 4, we increased the size of Parliament and the size of the electorate. Now we’re going to make our political parties bigger too. Australians aren’t big joiners. In post-war period, it was a good chance you were a member of a trade union, progress society or…

In part 3, I looked at the first big idea: increasing the size of Parliament because there’s too many voters for politicians to represent. Now I’m going to go the other way. …