The Senate either rubber stamps or blocks legislation along party lines, or compromises it when there is a balance of power. A British proposal for a reformed House of Lords might provide the inspiration we need for a better system, writes Joff Lelliott.

The Senate was the focus of a lot of attention in the second half of 2013, and not much of it for good reasons.

Following the federal election it seems certain there will be some tinkering at the edges, ostensibly to reduce the chance of senators being elected with only a tiny number of primary votes.

Not that this will address the real problem, which is that it is hard to fathom what the Senate's real purpose is these days.

Its nicknames underscore the difficulty of pinning down the point of having the 76 senators: "upper house" says nothing, while "second chamber" is true in a kind of bland factual way.

Then there are the two more meaty alternatives: the "states' house" and the "house of review".

Australia's constitution was written before the party system became properly entrenched, and in that context it seemed reasonable the Senate would allow state interests to be represented directly in Parliament. But the vast majority of Senate seats are now in the firm grip of Labor, Liberal, Nationals and Greens. Even micro-parties and independents generally push partisan positions over individual state interests. It is laughable to imagine votes in the Senate breaking along state rather than party lines these days.

In terms of being a house of review, it is easy to believe the Senate lives up to this name. At some vague, general level it is true that its existence can prevent untrammelled power for the House of Representatives. But that is not the same as being a genuine House of Review.

None of the three possibilities for the Senate results in a genuine house of review. When the Senate has a majority the same as the House of Representatives, it becomes a rubber stamp, as it was for the Howard government after the 2004 election result. Alternatively, when the Opposition occasionally controls the Senate, it can simply block legislation, which it is able to do because constitutionally the two houses have almost equal power.

The third possibility is the one that will greet the Abbott Government from July this year. That is a balance of power held by a handful of senators from outside the established parties. This results in some of the worst kinds of deal making and repeated serving of vested interests, and is perhaps best encapsulated in the memory of Tasmanian Senator Brian Harradine.

But Australia need not persist with its outdated upper house. There are models elsewhere which Australia could look at, including a recent proposal for Britain's House of Lords.

House of Lords reform has been a semi-permanent feature of British political and constitutional debate for over a century now. In the later years of the last Labour government, the political parties began working on a complete overhaul of the House of Lords, not least to make it democratic. By the time the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government released a White Paper in 2011, the major parties all backed a truly radical proposal. The model eschewed the normal democratic conventions of politicians facing regular elections and serving several terms at the will of electors.

Instead, most members would be elected for gargantuan 15-year terms and would not be allowed to stand for second terms. They also would not be allowed to stand for the House of Commons for at least four years after leaving the Lords.

The proposal aimed to create a chamber free of the grip of tight party control. Members of the Lords would be free intellectually and politically because they would be unlikely to ever face another election. If they were party members, their parties would struggle to control them because many of the threats normally wielded by parties were removed.

In addition to the elected members, 20 per cent of the Lords would be crossbenchers appointed by an independent commission. Not only would this help ensure a wide range of talent in the Lords, it would also make it harder for any party to have a majority.

As with the present relationship between the Lords and the Commons, the reformed Lords would have had limits on its ability to frustrate the will of the Commons, especially on manifesto commitments of governments. Combined with the lack of firm party control, this would help ensure the House of Lords remained a genuine house of review. In a feature almost designed for Australia's federal system, members would have been elected on a regional basis, with one third of places elected at each general election.

In the end, the proposal was killed by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government. Having continued with Labour's project, the two parties slowly fell-out over a range of constitutional reform issues, and having already shelved a referendum on Lords reform, an internal Conservative revolt finally killed the legislation in mid-2012.

The Australian public overwhelmingly wants a Senate which attracts the best and brightest, is not in the iron grip of party control, and which genuinely reviews legislation rather than simply rubber stamping or rejecting it based on the political make-up of the other house.

Australia should not blindly adopt a (rejected) British proposal, but the model for the reformed House of Lords might provide a useful starting point for debate on a second chamber that better meets the wishes of voters.

Dr Joff Lelliott is state director of the political think tank The Australian Fabians (QLD). View his full profile here.