I absolutely agree that the voting system is the tip of the iceburg, but Australia is actually progressing towards getting deeper into the bottomless hole of br

I absolutely agree that the voting system is the tip of the iceburg, but Australia is actually progressing towards getting deeper into the bottomless hole of broken incentives. The US, due to its founding documents, is permanently stuck on the surface, where at best people see the iceburg and can't even fathom the depths beneath - hence the near willful ignorance. But isn't your example just demonstrating the incentives problem? Instead of it being at the level where, in the US, politicians are incentivized to preserve the status quo because that is what elected them, and to enable better representation would be to use power only they wield against their own self interest, you are just a graduated level lower - you start to enable more democratic elections, but then have the problem about educating anyone about it. It is truly a hydra, because the education example plays out the same way - those that set the policy agenda of what is taught in schools, where civics and voting and taxes and budgeting should be taught but are not (at least stateside) were put in power by the ignorant, and thus it is in their own self interest and continued viability in politics to keep their voters ignorant. And it really does not matter who is elected or when - any person elected is always in a position to minimize the degree to which their electorate is educated, because emotional appeals are much simpler, and much more useful for personal ends, than rational and factual ones. You can't say one thing and do another and still get reelected when being scrutinized by an engaged, logical electorate who operate in a system that enables them to actually pick who they want to rule.