A lot of ink and pixels have been spilled in the debate about senate voting reform. One side claims that raising the bar for minor parties is undemocratic, the other claims that the current voting system allows elections to the upper house to be gamed by grifters and microgroups, and perverts voters’ intentions.

But whether or not we tinker with the voting system to put the kibosh on microparty machinations, it won’t solve our biggest problem in the upper house: the calibre of many of the senators either appointed or elected down the ticket for major parties.

It’s true enough that extremists and cranks show up on the cross-benches. Right now we have a senator, the LDP’s David Lleyonhjelm, who’d like to undo Australia’s popular gun laws, and advocates for an industry whose products are known to kill their customers.

In the past, senators like Family First’s Steve Fielding – elected on Labor preferences – pressed their dumb luck in a finely-balanced senate to do what they could to impose the values of an evangelical minority on the rest of the nation.

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But members of the religious right and libertarian zealots don’t need to create their own parties in order to park their bums on green leather. They can have much more influence by being elected or appointed as members of the Liberal Party.

Take Cory Bernardi. It would be difficult to get a struck match between his social conservatism and former cross-benchers like Fielding or Brian Harradine. He is anti-choice, anti-marriage equality, and was partly responsible for lighting the garbage fire that was the senate inquiry into Halal food.

His comparison of same-sex marriage to bestiality was a bit too rich for him to stay, even in Tony Abbott’s cabinet. That hasn’t dented his enthusiasm for defending and giving encouragement to the far right, though: last year he went in to bat for Reclaim Australia, insisting that the racist rallies were nothing of the sort with the old canard that “Islam is an ideology, not a race”.

Bernardi is not just the most reliably reactionary Liberal senator, he is something of an impresario on the right, nurturing the next generation of young fogies with largesse from his Conservative Leadership Foundation. And now one of the alumni of that institution – James Paterson – has entered the Senate at the age of just 28.

Age should not disqualify people from representing their state in the senate. Many 28 year olds have a wide range of life experiences, and a mature political outlook to bring to political roles. Yet Paterson’s entire working life has been spent as a cloistered professional ideologue.

After working and interning with some do-nothing conservatives here and in the US, Paterson worked for the bosses at the Victorian Employers’ Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and then struck wingnut welfare gold when he scored a job at libertarian think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs.

There, he rose to the dizzying heights of deputy executive director, while penning wounded defences of the rich, paeans to Margaret Thatcher, and helping out with masterpieces of political strategy like “Be like Gough: 75 radical ideas to transform Australia” in which he, Chris Berg and John Roskam offered some free advice to the incoming Abbott government.

To the extent that their suggestions were heeded, the authors deserve some credit for ruining Abbott’s prime ministership. As they recommended, Abbott tried tightening up Medicare and repealing section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, thus embarking on the road to ruin.

Paterson’s reward has been an appointment to the senate to replace the retiring Michael Ronaldson. There he will have more latitude than the former PM did to emit ideological brain farts. In his maiden speech this week, he got out of the blocks by proposing the scrapping of the national curriculum, claiming that it was all a sinister effort at leftist indoctrination.

More surprising and amusing was his demand that the Israeli embassy be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It’s not clear that the Australian senate has much sway in that matter, but bringing it up might earn him a study tour or two.

These matters are remote from the concerns of ordinary Victorians, many of whom will understand the national curriculum as a pragmatic measure aimed at ensuring common standards, and who, on the basis of opinion polling, are more likely to be sympathetic to Palestinians than the Israeli state.

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It would be more amusing if he were not joining a group of right-wing senators who have been instrumental in frustrating Malcolm Turnbull’s efforts to put a more moderate face on his government. Paterson can’t shift Middle Eastern embassies, but he can play a part in dragging the Liberal party, and our politics, further right.

It may be that senate reform that brings results closer to voters’ desires is a positive move. But the bigger threat to the esteem of the upper house is the machinations of major parties, and their installation of people who don’t really represent anyone except a faction or an ideology, who have little connection with the Australian community, and no apparent desire to do anything except pursue boutique political projects.

Labor, too, has used the senate to reward time-servers and factional warlords. Both parties, increasingly bereft of any substantial connection with the broader community, continue to their own internal dynamics to determine who sits and draws a parliamentary salary.

Real senate reform might require the wholesale transformation of our politics.

A previous version of this article said senator James Paterson called for the Israeli capital to be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He called for the embassy to be moved. It was amended on 17 March 2013.