Greg is a 56-year-old man from Brisbane. Which of these people do you think he has more in common with: Steve, a 52-year-old from Adelaide, or Melanie, a 24-year-old from Toowoomba?

It’s Steve, right? Sure, they live in different states, but Melanie is a different gender, age and comes from a regional town.

So the question that occurred to me recently is: why do we still elect our Senate based solely on the state in which we live?

Historically, of course, the Senate was the “states’ house”, set up to assuage the concerns of smaller colonies that their voice would be drowned out by the biggest population hubs.

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That made sense 118 years ago, but the world also seemed a lot bigger then, decades before the advent of Australian radio, never mind budget airlines and the internet.

Meanwhile, in a diverse adult population ranging from teenagers to hundred-and-teenagers, we pulled 84% of our elected senators from the ages 40-69 in 2016. This age bracket makes up less than half (47%) of the adult population.

More than any other in my 40-something lifetime, this election seemed divided along age lines as Labor sought to tap into the pent-up frustration of progressive young adults who feel they’re not progressing. But it’s worth asking how that frustration was allowed to build up in the first place.

It might be the fact that generational inequality is on the rise. In 2003, for every $100 held by a household led by a 70-year-old, a 30-year-old’s household had $33. By 2016 that was down to $24. Someone aged 25-34 is also 27% more likely to be underemployed or unemployed than someone 55-64, and the wage for a 21-34 year old in 2018 was $1,127 versus $1,544 for a 45-54 year old.

Identity politics gets a bad wrap, some of it with good reason, but if at least one house of parliament was more representative of the population it serves, maybe that would become less of an issue.

Imagine an upper house consisting of 12 senators taken from, and elected by, six different age brackets: 18-29, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70+, and divided 50/50 male and female. In a Senate like this, some of our very real age-based differences would have to remain front of mind. If you’re relying on 20-somethings for your vote, you’re not going to ignore their concerns.

That’s not to say there aren’t substantial differences between the states. Average full-time income ranges from $1,400 a week in Tasmania to $1,800 in the ACT (although the cost of living is also very different). Household median net worth is $820,000 in NSW v $420,000 in South Australia.

But how many times in the past 20 years can you remember senators bucking the party line to vote in their state’s best interests? Not many, right?

However, in Paula Waring’s 2016 report, The Pursuit of State Interests in the Senate, she found that while senators very rarely crossed the floor to side with their state over their party, “in a myriad great and small ways Senators do attend to state interests as the need arise”.

“In many senators’ minds, it is the equal representation of the states in the party rooms rather than the parliament which has the greatest influence on policy,” Waring wrote.

It is this internal pressure that an age-based Senate might be conducive to creating.

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So rather than scuttle border-based voting, you could retain the state system but combine it with age- and gender-based representation. The 12 senators from each state could consist of six pairs, a man and woman, from each age bracket. So if I’m a 60-something Queensland voter, all I have to do is select a male and female 60-something from Queensland every six years. So long, metre-wide senate papers. Hello, more pressure on parties from independents willing to focus heavily on their constituents.

The danger is that politicisation heightens tensions betweens generations rather than reducing them. But who knows, new alliances might emerge. Baby boomers and millennials might find common ground to question Gen X’s higher income bracket and penchant for Seinfeld references.

Of course, once you start going down this path, where do you stop in your bid to make the Senate more representative of wider Australia?

24% taken from single-person households?

44% of the Senate with no education beyond high school?

49% of the Senate either born overseas or the child of someone born overseas? (Oh wait, section 44.)

There are clearly practical limits. But that doesn’t mean the current system can’t be improved. Making the Senate a more representative sample of Australia’s population can’t be a bad thing, can it?