To many levels of Government, duplicating, confusing and costly. Let's ditch the States.

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In business, if a member of the board has a conflict of interest, then they abstain from voting (if they're ethical). The same should apply to voters. Recipients of government benefits, and members of the public service, should not be permitted to vote whilst receiving these benefits. This reduces conflict of interest, and might even stop politicians buying your vote (since if you accept, say, a first home-buyers grant, you'd be ineligible to vote during that electoral cycle).

This might sounds strange at first, but it makes sense the more you think about it, and is consistent with the views of John Stuart Mill. In his words: "as required by first principles, that the receipt of parish relief should be a peremptory disqualification for the franchise."

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My idea is to split the Federal House of Representatives into two sub-houses. One is the "money" house, the other the "moral" house.
The money house is responsible for taxation, federal spending (eg: welfare, health, military, federal public infrastructure, etc.), IR, corporations, banking, trade, etc.
The moral house is responsible for citizenship, marriage, human rights, personal property rights, general federal crimes (eg: treason), general international treaties and relations (it could override money house trade agreements on human rights grounds), etc.
A voter votes for a candidate for each sub-house at election time. Implementing this gives the voter more power and control by way of increased choice. It also allows for specialisation of politicians due to the new division of labour.
A moral house law overrides a money-house law for issues where the two houses share powers/powers overlap and they produce conflicting laws. Though the money house should be allowed to embrace and extend the spirit of the moral house law when creating law relevant to its responsibilities in areas of shared power.
The judicial system resolves questions of conflict of shared powers.

We could introduce a similar split into the lower state houses also: eg, at the state level- the moral house could pass legislation controlling which sort of medical procedures maybe performed (eg: euthanasia) while the money house would build and maintain the public hospitals.

In conclusion I would like to point out that the other branches of government are already specialised. The judicial system at both the federal and state level is split into different courts each with their distinct area of responsibility and the executive at both levels is split into many different departments. I believe that if we likewise allow for specialisation by splitting the legislative branch it would positively advance government in Australia.

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