This however isn’t relevant to the issue of why party politics forces you to be a swinging voter or a party member to have your preferences noted.

I agree that voting for a party you can’t work with it not a good idea, that is why I don’t vote for a major party. At the same time Australia still has a 2 party system (we love our duopolies). Even when a minor party holds the balance of power, the 2 majors agree on so many areas of policy that the minor parties are mostly irrelevant, many people don’t know that on most bills, Labor and Liberal vote together. For example, both parties voted for the DMCA style provisions of the US FTA enabling legislation.

The minor parties do have a role to play, but it isn’t really in the parliament. Minor parties advocate policy positions that the major parties are unlikely to fully adopt, but they help shift the middle ground of political debate. The Liberal party was able to implement its extreme immigration policies, yet still appear reasonable as One Nation’s policy was even more extreme. The Greens play a similar role with the Labor party, albeit dragging the ALP to the left. I think David Hicks is a good recent example of how the minor parties helped shift the debate.

Any quality policy developed by a minor party is likely to take at least 5 years to be adopted in a diluted form by the major party aligned to the minor party. In order to get good policy adopted by either a major or minor party you need to be patient. The Greens play an important role in Australian politics, but getting one of the major parties to adopt a Greens policy (or a variation of it) is the key to having implemented. Developing good contacts within a major party is as important as having people join the minor parties.