It is easy to blame the lack of reformist zeal in Australia on the politicians, the politicians on both sides of the aisle. Low comparative productivity. Very high personal income tax rates. A ballooning debt and untamed deficit. Over-rigid labour relations. A dysfunctional federal system, that includes a world’s worst vertical fiscal imbalance and an incentive-destroying and bizarre algorithm for the GST carve-up. Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.

I could go on. So could plenty of others, on both the right and left of the political spectrum. And yet there seems almost no move from either main political party to push the case for change and reform.

Why?

Most commentators seem to put it down to some sort of personality defects in the current crop of politicians. ‘Abbott, Shorten, Gillard, Rudd the whole lot of them have given up on reform and are just focused on staying in office’, goes this line.

Well, frankly I think that is rubbish. Mr Abbott or Mr Shorten are no less keen on bringing about what they see as needed reforms than are their counterparts in New Zealand, Canada or Britain. The difference is structural.

Here’s what I mean. Win an election in Canada or Britain or New Zealand and you will get whatever budget you want through the Lower House (assuming it’s not one of those once every five decades minority government situations). Prime Minister Harper of Canada did. Prime Minister Cameron of Britain did. So did Prime Minister Key across the Tasman.

The difference is that in none of those countries is there an elected Upper House. So win the confidence of the lower house and you can pass any of the laws you signalled to the electors you intended to have enacted. New Zealand has no Upper House and Canada’s and Britain’s are both unelected, which makes them both something of a joke in the year 2015 and also deprives them of the legitimacy needed to block what the elected lower house wants.

So it is easy to do what you promised the voters in all those countries. You can try what you think needs doing. At the next election the voters then pass judgment on what your government has done.

In Australia things are very different. Our written constitution is the most American written constitution in the world, certainly when it comes to federalism and bicameralism. So we opted for a very powerful Upper House. It is elected. Mimicking the US each State here sends the same numbers of representatives to the Senate. That means there are 12 Senators from tiny Tasmania’s half-million population just as there are 12 from the nearly eight million voters of New South Wales. Put in other terms, your vote for Senate is worth nearly 16 times more in Tasmania.

This elected Senate therefore clearly does not have as robust democratic credentials as the House, where each district or constituency has basically the same number of electors – where everyone’s vote is close to equal. Plus, the Senate here can block all laws, even money Bills. It can bring down governments.

In Australia your party can win a landslide election after which some Clive Palmer type, or a Jacquie Lambie or someone with a supposedly keen interest in cars, can block the government from enacting its promised changes. This is a straight out copy from the American set-up, except that here in Australia there is a sense in which the Senate is even more likely to block the wishes of a government.

Consider that in the US they use a first-past-the-post majoritarian voting system for both the House and the Senate (and the Presidency for that matter, albeit filtered through an electoral college). That means that about half the time the President’s party will control the Senate. The Democrats controlled the Senate for the first few years of Mr Obama’s Presidency, but they don’t now. They got Obamacare through when they controlled the Senate; they never would now.

In Australia it is much, much more difficult for any government to control the Senate because of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) voting system we use there, and also in a lesser way due to the move from 10 to 12 Senators per State. This proportional voting system makes it overwhelmingly likely that come what may – and unlike the US – the Executive will face an Upper House it does not control. In the US this only happens, as I said, about half the time.

Remember that the next time someone waffles on about ‘checks and balances’ or about ‘separation of powers’. James Madison was the genius who was largely responsible for the US Constitution. In his wildest nightmares he would not have wanted a handful of Lambies and Palmers doing any checking or balancing whatsoever. Nor would the people who put together our Constitution along the lines of that American model.

If you want to hear this in more colloquial terms, the voting system for our Senate sucks. It takes a body that arguably has too much power already – and certainly more than just about anywhere outside the US – and then makes it more powerful still. This STV voting system has undermined the ability to use the s.57 double dissolution provision, especially with 12 Senators per State as you’d end up with even more Motor Enthusiasts afterwards.

Frankly, there is little democratic justification for the power that the independent Senators wield at present. Personally, I would change the Senate voting system back to what we had before 1948. You would then have big swings between the main parties, but for about half the time a government could – you know – actually get things done and the voters would pass judgment at the next election.

Now some like to say that a government ought to be able to negotiate with a Family First Senator here, a Palmer person there (if any still exist), or a Car Loving Enthusiast over there in order to try to fix this country’s problems. But why? Try to get any answer to that other than ‘well, it has to because of the idiotic state of affairs at present’ and you simply won’t be able to.

Paul Keating was right. The Senate is unrepresentative swill. It has grown too big for its boots. The two big parties can come together any time they like and make a big change to the voting system. Or, they might actually offer the voters a sensible constitutional referendum, this time to take away the Senate’s ability to block money Bills. I’d vote for that in a second.

Reform is super hard in Australia NOT because of deficient politicians.

No, the problem is in the system.