Politicians (America, Christian, Christ, philosophy, conservative)

[robtex]

Tcprowling in Australia how does it work? You have provinces and reps for each who belong to a parlament that represents the country as a whole and a prime minister right?

To answer your question about representation the USA is a republic which means we elect representatives to represent our needs and wants. These people have the authority to petition goverment change. We can make requests or demands but we do it through our local represenatives who are called senators and congressmen. That representative however, can decide if our personal issue is worth pursueing or not. Sometimes large groups of americans will protest or right to pressure change through a representative but unless our rep fights for a change we are less apt to get one.

In regards to the doctor senerio america does not practice socialized medicine. Doctors work on a for-profit basis in a capital system. The result is the "doctor shortage" senerio is less applicable in the USA than in your country. the govement is not responsible for providing doctors but we have some socialized medicne for the poor and elderty called medicaid and medicare. It is very hard to become a doctor here though..Lots of schooling in a very competitive atmosphere.

[Neale]

I've contacted the Indiana Libertarian Headquarters and got a multi-paragraph, non-form-letter reply within the hour. :

[PureX]

Originally Posted by tcprowling

Here we, as individuals, can actually write to our politician, ask a question and have that question raised in parliment.
For example,we have a shortage of doctors in our regional areas. Now we can write to our local member and ask what is being done about this.
Now during a parlimentary session they have what is called question time, now our local member can stand up and say I have a question for the minister for health " what is being done about the shortage of doctors in Regional Australia?' and he has to answer!!!!
What's more this question time is both televised and broadcast on our national communicator the ABC.
Do other countries has a simular system in place?

That would be tough to do in the U.S., remember that there are 250 million of us. That would work out to a LOT of questions.

[tcprowling]

Robtex
I'll try and put it in a nutshell for you Hopefully other Australian members can elaborate.
Starting from the top
Australia is a commonwealth of Six states and two territories. each of these are broken up into electorates A polician is elected to represent the constitutants of these electorates, in federal matters, that affect Australia as a nation. Hence federal elections. The leader of the most popular political party is the prime minister
Before federation, Australia was make up of six colonies each responsible for their own government and answerable to England. After federation each of these states retained areas of government that were concidered state issues like education, health, etc. So, our states are divide up into "proviences" for want of a better word, these may or may not be the same as the federal electorates. A state politician is elected to state parliment to represent the constitutantson state matters. the head of the state government is a premier.. State and federal parliment are seperate.
Then we come down to local politics.
Ok for a simple explaination these state " proviences" are further divided up into Shires with a major town or city as the centre These shires are " governed" by councils headed by a mayor. these are responsible for issues pertaining to local issues. Local councils can either be elected or appointed.
Ok that's it in a very brief nutshell. Please, any other aussie members, feel free to correct or elobrate. I don't profess to be an expert on this, so I am very open to any futher comment.