New political party like the Lib-Dems

How do people feel about a new, centrist political party, maybe led by Turnbull and Rudd, and other politicians too close to the centre to be leaders of either the Coaliiton or ALP?

The unions won't take Rudd, the Christian nutcases won't take Turnbull.

Would you vote for them?

You mean like the Democrats?

A party genuinely in the centre of the political spectrum or between the ALP and LNP coalition? If the latter, no. If the former, possibly.

Some answers:

Schad - The Democrats were always an upper house party (keep the bastards honest). The more power they gained the more they got confused.

Cutter - I'm not sure a "true centre" exists.

Sul: There's not much room in between ALP and LNP, but there is a lot of room between Gillard and Abbott, and there was between Howard and Rudd, too. The centre of the ALP has to appease the unions (who perform a useful function in life, but whose leadership are corrupt thugs) and the centre of the LNP has to appease both the Christians and big business.

If we had a Centrist Party, then the centre of that could reflect the centre of the current polity.

The problem with being centrist is that no-one gets excited about it.

Rudd is not the centre, sure he is socially conservative but he is just as fiscally left wing as many in the party's left.

For me personally, I find myself sympathising with people like Turnbull, Bob Carr, Paul Keating, Bob Hawke, George Brandis to name a few. so I am definitely in the centre, I consider myself extremely socially progressive and reasonably fiscally conservative.

But would I like a centre based party? Maybe in the senate like the Democrats as opposed to the radical absolutist Greens. But I like the two party system as it is, and I don't want to see it undermined.

Bob Carr? Clearly you're not from NSW. In his last 5 years he did nothing but keep himself in power. But I take your point.

You're a hard marker if you think Rudd isn't centrist. Both Rudd and Gillard have accepted that we needed to spend our way out of recession and we did that very successfully. I'm sure Rudd would be putting the brakes on now, just like Gillard.

(And I don't know why I'm defending the ALP, they are spineless vote-grubbing no-hopers.)

P.S. 4 votes and it's one vote in each group. We have a good old fashioned Australian constitutional crisis on our hands.

I actually like the hung parliament. It looks more like democracy.

I think I read somewhere that every single major Westminster democracy is in a hung parliament. Not sure whether it is correct although at first hearing it, indeed it made sense. The UK, New Zealand, India etc;

Definitely, I was lamenting to a mate the other night that I feel neither party currently represents my political views. This is probably exacerbated by Tony Abbott being Liberal leader and he currently appears to be fundamentally opposed to compromise on any issue, even when it is in the nations best interest.

The real question is how do we get trust back into a political process. Through the first 60-70 years of the twentieth century, people were willing to trust their political leaders, relying on the fact that they had access to better information used to make decisions. Since technology has taken off and the guy sitting at his computer at home can get real time information about anything and everything, including what is happening on the other side of the planet, there has been a general decline in the public's willingness to place blind faith in their political leaders. This has worsened to the point were the opinion of the majority of the public is that the majority of politicians are self serving incompetents.

I know personally that tax payer funded elections, banning political party donations from companies and limiting personal donations to $100 per annum would go a long way. They also need a mechanism to deal with politicians who may appear to have broken the law. Look at the time frame it has taken to deal with the Craig Thompson affair. I would like to see a policy of something along the line of jury alternates, where each party has a couple of elected members abstaining from voting each time, and if a party member is under a legal cloud and public confidence in them is damaged, they permanently abstain until the issue has been dealt with.

This parliarmentary term has been particularly grubby and the system needs an overhaul if they are to regain public confidence.

God that's disheartening, it seems so plausible.

I doubt it would work as the centre shifts as society changes. Rudd and Turnbull feature in this thread but remember we have had politicians like this in the past like Keating and Frasier for example.

Two words: spoiler effect.

If a centrist part got enough votes, the big guys would have to form a coalition. The Libs might even drop the farmers if they didn't need them.

Anyway, it would make politics a lot more interesting.

Another party in the centre could work, but only if they made policy for the good of the country rather than the good of their own political skin.

Not sure if Rudd is centre at all. Lindsay Tanner and Martin Ferguson are two that come to mind to join Turnbull.

I foresee the day that the ALP as we currently know it will split and the left faction will have a genuine coalition with the Greens and the right will stand alone and try and be that middle ground. Much of the "problems" with Labor has been this dichotomous position they have federally when the leader traditionally comes from the right and the deputy from the left. The left are the most vocal internally and the right most vocal externally (ie to the media with leaks etc).

Of course Gillard's takeover changed things - she was from the Victorian left, but her leadership within the party made her the inly viable choice for the overnight "knifing" - but she knows that to remain where she is she has had to pull to the right.

Of course in politics timing is everything, so it would probably take some significant event/saga to see such a split.