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Podcast: Talk with Ben Ballingall about Flux Party and Issue-Based Direct Democracy

Ben Ballingall is a representative of Flux Party's Victorian branch. This conversation with Brian Khuu was recorded on 11 February 2020, ten days before DOD's 2020 Primer, and the same day as a chance encounter at Federation Square with a British expat who had left the UK over Brexit — which became the opening frame for the whole discussion.

A bonus warm-up recording covers additional ground on how Flux itself operates as a party.

Brexit as the opening frame

The conversation starts from a concrete failure case: the Brexit referendum. Just before recording, Ben had met a British expat who described leaving the UK after the result. What struck Ben wasn't that the public got it wrong — it was the design of the question. Who wrote it? Why did it take two years to implement? Brian adds that after the vote, the biggest Google search in the UK was "what is the EU?" That, Ben agrees, is not a failure of the people — it's a failure of the instrument.

"Is it a true representation of democracy when the people who voted and took part in the vote didn't have a clue or didn't even really care or didn't even really know what they were voting on?" — Ben Ballingall (probably; the transcript has no speaker labels, and the turn could be Brian's)

What is Issue-Based Direct Democracy?

IBDD combines three elements that each address a separate problem with simple majority voting:

1. Direct democracy — citizens vote yes or no on individual issues, not just on parties at election time.

2. Liquid democracy — if you don't feel informed enough on a particular issue, you can delegate your vote to someone you trust on that topic. You're not handing them a blank cheque: you can revoke it the moment they act against your interests. Ben flags the weakness in pure liquid democracy (the "hubris" problem — people sticking with one delegate past their useful life) but argues the revocability mechanism keeps it honest.

3. Issue-based vote sharing — if none of the options on a given vote are acceptable to you, you can abstain and bank that vote's energy toward an issue you do care about. This rewards specialisation and prevents people from being forced into positions they don't hold.

Ben's cable-TV analogy is useful: right now, voting for a party is like being forced to buy a bundle — you get the sports package, but you also get the channels you never wanted. IBDD lets you subscribe only to the sports package and put the savings toward something you care about more.

This conversation is the accessible, human-scale version of IBDD. The deeper theoretical foundation — Flux founders Max Kaye and Nathan Spataro's argument from selectorate theory (why corruption is structural, not personal), Popperian fallibilism (democracy should be designed to eliminate bad policy, not to enact an authority's will), and the critique of static majoritarianism — is laid out on the Flux Party page in the Democracy Landscape, along with the full mechanics of the political-capital token economy.

IBDD vs citizen juries

Brian asks directly: DOD had Nicholas Gruen present on citizen juries in 2017 — Gruen's goal was "the well-considered opinion of the population." Why didn't Flux go that route?

Ben's answer is that citizen juries and IBDD diagnose the same problem (poor representation) but make different trade-offs. Juries bring in ordinary people with no skin in the game — which is good for impartiality — but they don't reward people who actually know the subject, and a juror who does excellent work may never be called again. IBDD, by contrast, allows specialists to accumulate political weight in their domain over time.

"We don't want to try and create these representatives that are really great at most things, or jack of all trades at most things, when we could have masters at everything, delivering the results that are … confirmed by the people." — Ben Ballingall

Corruption resistance

A recurring DOD concern is whether any democratic innovation is resistant to well-funded interest groups. Ben's answer is the blockchain ledger: every vote is publicly visible (anonymised to protect individuals, but verifiable as one-person-one-vote). A Flux MP is committed to one rule — vote how the app says. The moment they deviate, everyone knows immediately. This means money can't buy a quiet backroom vote; it can only buy a public information campaign, which then has to compete with counter-information. Lying becomes expensive.

"You can't destroy money wanting to affect politics, but you can make a system where it's stupidly expensive to try and lie, and you have to be transparent to the people." — Ben Ballingall

His example was Clive Palmer's heavy 2019 advertising spend. Under IBDD, a campaign like that would have to argue why people should vote yes on a specific issue, and it would be competing with, in Ben's words, "Dave on his couch" who "just did a live video on YouTube for free, and it explained why I should vote no."

What if a Flux MP defects?

Brian pushes on the weak point: what stops a Flux MP ignoring the app once elected? Ben concedes an MP's freedom to vote as they like is normally "actually a really nice thing", since it stops a party making them "sign this contract that says you'll vote how I tell you". For Flux it is a vulnerability. But a defector is "not able to ever come back": a party-hopper can claim the party has changed, while a Flux MP who defects is saying, in effect, "I believe I'm smarter than the people". Brian reframes defection as "I no longer believe in the system". Ben's verdict: "it would look shit… But it wouldn't kill flux. It wouldn't kill the idea of being represented by the community voting."

Electoral path

At the time of recording (early 2020), Ben estimated Flux needed around 4% in a federal Senate race to get a seat. More promisingly, WA state election law gave them a realistic shot at a seat with 2–3%, with strong support from micro-party preference flows. The goal at that stage was to get one MP into parliament, prove the model, and release an app allowing any citizen to mirror parliament votes and push results to their local MP.

See also

Detailed notes

A fuller, timestamped breakdown of this recording — who said what, transcription corrections, and claims worth checking before repeating them — is kept in the site's repository next to the transcripts: analysis notes. Speaker labels there are inferred from the automated transcript, not checked against the audio.