Democracy. We fight for it, kill for it, we send our young men to the other side of the world to die for it. We’ve fought wars to impose it on other cultures (and stood back bewildered when they didn’t then use it to choose the government we wanted them to have).

It’s the worst form of government (except for all the others) and the problem with venerating it as the sovereign remedy for the world’s ills is that it leads us to expect far too much of the people who use it as a path to power.

If you look up integrity or man of principle in any dictionary you’ll find a picture of Nelson Mandela, grinning puckishly back at you. When he was protesting against apartheid he was prepared to die before he would compromise on what he knew to be right, but what apartheid could not do to him, democracy could - and did. During Mugbe’s rise to power in Zimbabwe, Mandela would not take the strong stance against him that he knew he should, because as the president of South Africa and the leader of the ANC he had to toe the party line in order to hold his position.

Phillip Adams was discussing the new book about Mandela on Radio National with RW Johnson last week. Johnson told a story about being with Mandela at a meeting. As they were talking Mandela saw a group of children playing in a field nearby, he walked away from the people he was with and joyfully joined in their game. It’s a scalp tingling image: Nelson Mandela playing in the sunshine with the children of South Africa. But put that image of Mandela next to one of the stand out images of the recent Federal election: Tony Abbott running through a football field with the children of Faith Lutheran College in Redlands.

That may well be the first time Tony Abbott name was put in a sentence with Nelson Mandela that did not include the word antithesis, but the truth is that politics is a great leveller. Pragmatism and principle cannot coexist, so why do we expect politicians, whose lives are centred on the acquisition of power, should equally be able rise above the requirements of gaining and keeping that power?

The truth is that politicians are just people; none of them are purely good or purely evil. John Howard was not the devil incarnate, nor was he the Right aspect of the Holy Liberal Trinity. The man who stood staunchly in front of an enraged rabble of screaming, gun-toting rednecks and refused to let them have their guns back was the same man responsible for the Tampa travesty.

Accepting that politicians are, by their nature, both venal and pragmatic means that we can require of them only that they follow their own self interest. What is then required of us, as voters, is to align their interest with our own. If politicians who venture out on the smallest of limbs are met with vocal support by an informed public then democracy corrects itself; where the disapprobation meets every action then the safest political action is to take no action at all.

That’s pretty much where we are now, and it’s easy to blame politicians and the media for that, but they truth is that they go where the money is. It’s up to us to put the money where we want them to be.

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