A new voting mechanism

Comments on Joel Rathus’ “The Chiang Mai Initiative: China, Japan and financial regionalism”, 11/05/2009, http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2009/05/11/the-chiang-mai-initiative-china-japan-and-financial-regionalism/comment-page-1/#comment-27065

I'd like to propose a new voting mechanism. I work for the Australia federation and there are eight state level governments in Australia. In our work, we often are faced with the question: what is the average policy of the states in a particular area? The following thought has benefited from that work.

The agreement between China and Japan is helpful in progressing the CMI cause and should be congratulated. It is, however, still in the confine of the traditional “power” representation of politics and governance. There is no “breakthrough” in thinking to combine the “representative style” of the IMF voting mechanism and the somewhat more “senate style” voting mechanism of the United Nations. The latter is more reflective of equal rights for every nation, irrespective they are big or small, although it can suffer its own shortcomings.

An alternative to either of those mechanisms is to have a voting mechanism combined both. Half of the votes will be decided by the representative style votes based on economic contributions and the other half by an equal vote of every member. This will give the community more humanitarian flavour and also recognise the economic reality and accountability.

In fact this voting mechanism, if adopted, could be better than or superior to the current parliamentary system of two separate chambers, with the requirement that both have to pass in majority. Indeed, some of the parliamentary dramas in the Australian system where a minority senator can hold the whole parliament and the nation as “hostage” have shown some of the serious shortcomings with that system. Maybe one day they will be reformed.