As has become abundantly clear over the last month, it is not just Bronwyn “Helicopter” Bishop who has been rorting her travel allowances. MPs from both sides of politics have had their snouts buried deep in the “entitlements” trough while at the same time demanding cutbacks and austerity from the rest of us.

Why is it that our supposed representatives are so out of touch with public expectations? The born to rule mentality of the Liberals is clearly part of it. They don’t feel bound by the rules that apply to the common herd.

The Labor MPs simply ape their “betters”. They have adopted the old motto of those on the make: “The working class can kiss my arse. I’ve got the foreman’s job at last”.

However, there is a much deeper underlying problem with the whole system of parliamentary government.

The mass of voters have virtually no control over our supposed representatives. Every three years we get to number our ballot papers, but in between the MPs are totally unaccountable.

They can break promises, impose cuts, give handouts to big business, pass laws curtailing our basic rights and send us off to murderous wars, but short of storming parliament and driving out the lot of them, we are stuck with them for the full three years.

We lack the right to recall our representatives – something that should be a fundamental element of a genuinely democratic system. If the people we elect are refusing to carry out their promises or are rorting the system, we need to be able to replace them straight away with someone we have confidence in – not let them get away with three years of misrepresenting us.

Precisely because the mass of voters are atomised individuals who have no day to day connection with or control over our parliamentary representatives, the MPs become the playthings of powerful vested interests. The entrenched state bureaucracy – the very well-paid heads of Treasury, the army generals, the police chiefs, the ambassadors, the top legal officers and the ASIO chiefs – have powerful sway over day to day government business. All of them are thoroughly committed to neoliberal capitalism and the rule of the rich.

Then there are the media barons, the bankers, the mining company executives, the heads of the various business associations, the property speculators, the vast array of lobbyists and assorted spivs. All of them have well-developed connections with MPs on all sides of politics.

If a quiet word in the ear, a spot of lobbying or a large donation to campaign funds is not enough to ensure that the big end of town gets its way on core issues, then they can mount massive advertising campaigns or threaten to withdraw investment or cut jobs, as Gina Rinehart and Co. did to scuttle the mining tax.

The lack of accountability of MPs is also connected to the fact that they are elected on a geographical basis. The mass of people in your average suburban electorate have very little in common with each other.

A geographical electorate is composed of people coming from a variety of different and often antagonistic class backgrounds and innumerable different jobs, who never come together as an organised collective. This is very different from a workplace situation or a school or university campus.

In the workplace, it is possible to hold mass meetings that can discuss all the issues confronting everyone who works there and make collective decisions. This provides a much better basis for electing delegates or representatives.

Representatives elected in the workplace share the collective experience of those they represent. Their performance can be judged by their peers on a day to day basis on the job.

Meetings can be held on a regular basis, at which workers can make their views known on all the issues of the day to their representatives. If the performance of the elected representatives is not up to scratch, then they can be removed at one of these regular meetings and someone else elected in their place.

Similarly on university campuses or in schools, mass meetings of students can be convened to discuss both the immediate issues confronting students and broader political questions. At these mass meetings, delegates or representatives can be elected with a specific mandate and can be recalled if they don’t carry out the directions of those who elected them.

In almost every great mass revolt over the last 150 years – from the 1871 Paris Commune to the 1905 and 1917 revolutions in Russia to Hungary in 1956 to Chile in the 1970s and Poland in the 1980s – workers and the oppressed have established forms of direct democracy on the model I have described. They arose initially as a means by which workers could organise to defend their living standards, but they went much further than that.

They became a direct challenge to the rule of the rich and powerful – the basis for a new genuinely democratic socialist society rather than the parliamentary pseudo-democracy we have today.