But it's incumbent on us to not only work within our democratic system, but also to think about the design of the system itself.

How could it function better? How can we leave the system stronger than we found it?

The health of the system is at least as important as the decisions made within it.

If we were to devise a system today from scratch, we would not say: "let's have an election roughly every two-and-a-half years, at an unknown date, to be determined at the sole discretion of the Prime Minister of the day."

That's how our system currently works. We should change it.

Moving to a fixed four-year parliamentary term would bring substantial benefits to the nation.

This is not a new idea. Four-year terms were argued for prior to Federation, parliamentary committees have repeatedly supported them, and a (flawed) referendum was held on this issue in 1988.

But it hasn't happened. A few points on why it should:

Short parliamentary terms make it more difficult to get things done. A longer term would mean more capacity to implement policy – particularly complex reforms. Business groups like the Australian Institute of Company Directors have been making this point for a long time;

Uncertainty around election times reduces business investment and consumer confidence. This is compounded by the phony war prior to election campaigns, where media commentary speculates about when the election might be, leading to needless uncertainty in the community;

It would be fair and transparent. A known election date means that any participant in the election – or anyone whose activities are affected by the election – would know where they stand years in advance

One of our challenges as a nation is to keep finding structural reforms that enable our economy to grow. This change would be one of those reforms. In the long run, economic growth is driven by productivity improvements. And productivity growth basically means doing things better than we do them now.

A fixed four-year term would both reduce the amount of time spent in election periods, and completely eliminate the uncertain prelude that we see every two-and-a-half years or so. More business investment would occur, and governments would get more done. 

A fixed four-year term would make our system stronger, bringing obvious benefits to the nation.

Why wouldn't we make the change?

To move to a fixed four-year term, you need to change the constitution through a referendum. That's the part of the conversation where people roll out statistics about how hard it is for a referendum to succeed, because you need a majority of the people in the majority of the states to support it.

This means that in practice you would need both sides of politics to support a referendum question before putting it – there is not much point otherwise.

Getting everyone to agree is never easy, and this provides a convenient excuse to say that the process of change is all too hard.

We should resolve the terms of a referendum question, and put it to the people. In my view, the most logical time to put the question is at the next Federal election.