Most professional commentators, the journalists who cover federal politics for a living, the polling companies — and even the politicians themselves — thought Labor was going to win the 2019 federal election, but as we have seen, spectacularly, that didn't happen.

This unexpected outcome tells us something really important — we don't understand how power actually operates in our democracy.

It reminds me of a comment made by US businessman John Wannamaker: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half."

Something similar happens with power.

Clearly things like the mainstream media, social media, the millions spent on advertising by political parties — both established and new — lobbying by business leaders and others have some effect on the way people vote, but we can't really specify how or to what extent.

This uncertainty is itself an instrument of power.

In other words, the victors interpret the result as vindication for everything they did, and we have, for instance, heard the re-elected Prime Minister speak in terms of the "quiet majority", suggesting a source of power that is not registered by media and polling companies, but that he somehow understood.

The media talk of "Scott Morrison's renewed authority" within his own party, and the idea that he is uniquely positioned to enact an agenda of his own choosing.

Scott Morrison can interpret the election result as vindication for everything he did. ( Getty: Tracey Nearmy )

Journalist Katharine Murphy went so far as to suggest this will mean he can address the issue of climate change in a more meaningful way.

Writing in The Guardian, she said: "Morrison has the capacity to recalibrate not only because of his enhanced internal authority post-election, but because he was not a frontline protagonist in the internal climate wars of the past decade."

Of course, the same sort of thing was said about Kevin Rudd, that he had a unique authority within his party, that he was not beholden to the factions, and instead "went over their heads" to the people themselves.

How'd that work out?

Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard fought each other for control of the Labor Party. ( Getty Images: Ian Waldie )

The problem with most of the media is that they interpret power through the lens of individuals, rather than systems.

They see Mr Rudd (or Mr Morrison) as the locus of power when in fact such leaders are embedded in institutions that shape and channel what individuals are able to do.

Understanding this is the key to meaningful democratic reform. It isn't just about electing better leaders, it is about building better institutions. Institutions that share power more widely.

The harsh reality is that we the people are sidelined from real political power, and part of the way this is achieved is by focusing on voting rather than other forms of participation.

Voting itself is raised to almost spiritual levels, as indicated by, for instance, this tweet by ABC political writer and commentator Annabel Crabb:

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While we might applaud the sentiment, it is a misleading way of understanding what it means to live in a democracy.

The point of a democracy is self-rule, and voting once every three years is a poor proxy for that.

In fact, what recent elections in Australia have shown is that people are looking for something beyond what the two major parties offer, but that voting alone is failing to deliver it.

Academic Elizabeth Humphrys notes the trend: "As the count currently stands, the combined vote for the ALP and the Coalition sits at 75.3 per cent, continuing the trend down over a number of decades — and down slightly on the result of 76.8 per cent in 2016."

Bill Shorten waved goodbye to any leadership aspirations after the party's loss. ( Getty: Scott Barbour )

At the 2019 election, 24.7 per cent of voters gave their first preference to minor parties and independents — the largest percentage ever.

This means a quarter of the electorate is voting outside the major parties in the Lower House, but the ALP and Coalition will collectively take over 95 per cent of seats because of the compulsory preferential voting system.

Such results do not reflect "the biggest collaborative decision-making process our country offers", as Crabb tweeted, but a direct undermining of the will of the people.

Again, this reflects the power of systems, the way in which it flows through institutional processes — in this case, our voting system — and drains power away from we-the-people and directs it towards a political elite.

So what do we do?

One way to address this would be change the voting system in the Lower House to something more proportional, using multi-member electorates.

But I would actually prefer we took a leaf out of the book of those who invented democracy — the ancient Greeks.

In Athens, office-holders were rarely decided by election.

Instead, citizens themselves took turns to serve in office and they were selected on a random basis, in much the same way that we now choose the members of jury for a court case. This system is often called sortition (as in 'sorting').

The Acropolis is a symbol of democracy and ancient civilisation. ( Getty )

The logic of this is that democracy is actually self-rule, and that citizens have a right, at some stage in their life, to govern as well as be governed.

What's more, the founders of democracy saw sortition as guarding against the tendency of power to concentrate in a few hands.

As Aristotle said: "It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot (sortition); and as oligarchic when they are filled by election."

A maximalist version of this idea would be to replace the current voting system in one of our houses of parliament with sortition.

But I would prefer a minimalist approach where we develop a system of adjunct "People's Houses" in which ordinary citizens come together and deliberate on policy and other matters. These "citizen juries" or "citizens' assemblies", chosen by sortition, would have the power to influence the decisions made by parliament itself.

Our current system of representative democracy is in fact hugely unrepresentative. On almost any axis you choose — gender, profession, ethnicity — our parliament looks nothing like the country itself. Worse still, it is dominated by professionals who have little experience of life outside the rarefied air of party politics.

Less than 1 per cent of Australians work as political consultants or lobbyists, but such operatives make up 11.9 per cent of parliament.

Party and union administrators are also a vanishingly small part of the general population (again, less than 1 per cent) but they make up 8.4 per cent of parliament.

We mightn't know exactly how power flows through our body politic, but it is clear that it favours an elite and not the majority.

This has real-world effects and it is why Australia is becoming less equal, why owning a house is increasingly out of reach, why our power bills are high and our wage-growth is low.

If we want to avoid the sort of democratic breakdown apparent in Brexit Britain or Trump's America, then new institutions — such as citizens' assemblies — that give ordinary voters a share in public power, allowing us control over our own lives, are essential.

Tim Dunlop is an author and speaker. His latest book is The Future of Everything: Big, Audacious Ideas For A Better World.