How much longer are we going to go on imagining things will get better if only Labor or the Coalition could get their acts together or find the right leader? Folks, it's over. We need to reinvent the way we do politics, writes Tim Dunlop.

It's time we faced it: the image we have of democratic politics as one where major parties use the power of office to generate a viable and coherent platform for governing in the name of a majority of citizens is dead.

The divisions that caused Labor's leadership ructions, and that are causing the current unrest within the Coalition, are not some passing phase that the parties are going through and that can all be put to rest if they could just find the right leader to unite them.

They are part of the wider disruption of how we organise our society.

Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten are not the problem, any more than they are the answer: they are the symptoms of a crumbling paradigm. They have risen to the top because the system rewards a particular sort of operator.

Division and mediocrity are not bugs in this system, they are a feature.

This means that most analysis and commentary on political events is starting from the wrong premise, which means, in turn, that we are all being chronically ill-informed.

It's time we looked at all this much more honestly rather than working from the assumption that what is happening now is some sort of aberration.

How much longer are we going to go on imagining that things will get better if only Labor or the Coalition could get their acts together and we could somehow replicate the "good old days" of a Howard, or of Hawke and Keating, or of a Menzies?

Folks, it's over.

A re-elected Abbott Government is not going to suddenly be any more viable than the version we currently have.

And if they happen to take over, neither Scott Morrison nor Malcolm Turnbull has the secret sauce to magically turn everything around in way that has eluded Abbott.

Shorten is not going to reinvent the Labor Party and find a way to rule for the right-wing factions, progressive inner-city voters, and conservative suburbanites in a way that any of those factions is likely to approve.

The Greens are not suddenly - or even in the medium term - going to become a viable alternative to the big two.

The Greens and Labor are not suddenly going to work together and deliver unto us an actual unified progressive government instead of the ticky-tacky version that sometimes emerges as a by-product of preferential voting.

No fantasy "centrist" coalition or other third party will emerge to square the circle of our broken politics.

It is disruption all the way down, and the sooner we learn to live with that, the happier we are all going to be.

And believe me, that is the direction in which happiness lies: reinventing and adjusting our expectations, not in endlessly trying to hold together the system we have grown up with.

We have to get over the idea that good governance can only come from a major party in control of both houses, a notion that informs many of the assumptions of our political class.

We have to normalise the idea that parliament is a place for actual policy debate and that we would be better served by more smaller parties and independents than we are by the faux control of the majors.

(I mean, it is telling that the minority Gillard government - even with a "hostile" Senate - achieved more in terms of actual reform than Mr Abbott and his "landslide" Government has come close to replicating.)

Look at the issues that currently suck up all the oxygen in our political debates: equal marriage; renewables; asylum seekers; industrial relations; economic "reform".

They are important issues but they also present us with irreconcilable differences.

Which is fine, as long as we have systems in place that allow for some sort of synthesis.

But we don't. Instead we have party structures that force members into voting for and supporting positions they don't actually believe in the name of "unity".

Thus, decent people within the parties are forced to publicly argue for positions they don't believe in, or they are left to play a dead bat to important matters.

The electorate understands the subterfuge and it infuriates them.

And why wouldn't it? It makes we-the-people complicit in the deception and we end up hating the politicians and the system that forces us to choose in this way.

An entrenched "least worst" approach is an insane way to do democracy.

The problem in a democracy isn't different points of views; it is having systems that presume the winner-takes-all. That used to work OK when the nation was more homogenous, but in the globalised, technologised world of today, our current systems are a recipe for gridlock and despair.

Given all this, it is good to see some younger politicians at least trying to rethink things. The book, Two Futures: Australia at a Critical Moment, is an attempt by Labor backbenchers Clare O'Neill and Tim Watts to analyse what ails us.

I genuinely applaud their efforts and some of their ideas are perfectly sensible.

For instance, their proposal for an Online Policy Action Caucus (OPAC) sounds worthwhile, but see if you can spot the problem:

All party members could be given the right to establish OPACs that advocate on specific issues (for example, Labor for Ethical Live Cattle Exports or Labor for Equal Marriage), without organisational approval, if they are able to sign up at least fifty existing party members to each group. A special class of membership could then be created to allow members of the general public to join not the Labor Party proper but a specific OPAC, for a nominal fee. OPACs that achieve a predetermined organising goal, such as signing up five thousand members to their group, could have the right to move an amendment to the party platform at the relevant national or state conference. The amendment would then be voted on by elected delegates in the normal way.

Do you see? The idea is an attempt to work outside the party as a way of encouraging ordinary, politically engaged people to involve themselves in the process.

Good idea.

But the OPAC method is basically admitting that people don't want to join the Labor Party in order to get things done, but it then tries to shoehorn them into that very structure in order to get something done.

It's like complaining the vacuum cleaner is too loud so you turn up the telly. Surely it would be much easier - and smarter - to turn off the vacuum cleaner?

Read that OPAC section again and ask yourself: why exactly do you need the Labor Party (or any party) in this scenario, other than because such parties currently control the parliament?

My point is, if we really want things to improve, the changes we are going to have implement will have to go a lot deeper than adding some technological or procedural innovations to the existing party and parliamentary structures.

At some point, we are going to have to stop turning up the television and simply turn off the bloody vacuum cleaner.

Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. He writes regularly for The Drum and a number of other publications. You can follow him on Twitter.