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.