Confidence in our political system has collapsed, as the internationally respected 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer records. Politicians usually justify our system of representative democracy by quoting Edmund Burke’s speech explaining that politicians are chosen by us for their judgement. They invariably omit his denunciation, in the very same speech, of what is now normal in Australia’s parliaments – ‘authoritative instructions; mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment and conscience’.