Conscience voting

I have at times in the past pontificated on the dereliction of duty that political parties get into under the name "conscience vote". So often both the Labor and Liberal parties, Federal and State, have declared matters of conscience on issues that have not only had the potential for electoral backlash but more for electoral whiplash...click here for some Google responses or check with your own search engine.
So it is interesting to see that neither Mr Howard, nor Mr Beazley, will be allowing a conscience vote on senior Liberal backbencher's, Petro Georgiou's, bill to mollify mandatory detention policy.
The Parliament will be allowed to discuss it. They will not be allowed to decide individually how to vote on it. Some may indeed allow their consciences to inform what they are doing but whether or not they will stand against the party machine or should remains to be seen.

It does seem to me that there should be stronger guidelines about what issues are "conscience" issues and what are party issues. We do after all have not an individual democracy but a party democracy. The two concepts work side by side but they are not always compatible. The American system, one imagines because of such a strong emphasis on individual rights, does see many more people "crossing the floor"than the Australian or British systems, where betrayal of the party line almost certainly means strong sanctions, and even expulsion from the party. An interesting paper from the St James Ethics Centre is here.

Deeply flawed

Tony Abott was interviewed yesterday on the ABC about what it means to be a Christian and a politician. He was asked whether or not various political elements were trying to commandeer politics...and emphatically denied it. Nor surprisingly!
What is interesting about Abbott of course is that he is recognised very publicly as a deeply flawed person. The recent debacle about his giving a son up for adoption, who then subsequently turned out not to be his son...left no one in doubt about how deeply flawed he could be.
He is of course no more deeply flawed than I am! Or perhaps I could more happily express that in reverse.
The non-Christian public, of course, doesn't seem to to get that Christians are flawed. They delight in the spectacle of Christians caught, as it were, with their trousers down. Christians deserve this, generations of pomposity and claiming the high ground are exposed all the time; and no more so than in recent years when the hideous spectacle of sexual abuse of children and other vulnerable people is being ever-increasingly flaunted in the media.
So, though I am not keen on Abbot's politics, nevertheless, I am glad that he is a brave and flawed man.