The cause is our conscious decision to appoint people who are "qualified" and who have "experience" and to avoid discrimination on racial, religious or gender grounds.
Unfortunately me old China, that means that the old measurement dimension of "Character" has been ejected from our lexicon
I don't follow your train of thought here Sunny, because we now elect women, non-Caucasians and non-Christians we can't judge their character?
I think it's got nothing to do with the fact our parliament is finally looking like some sort of demographic representation of our society but is more to do with the fact the media is working on the sound bite strategy so that we have NO IDEA what their character is like. It's also much less about voting for your local member and more about voting for a party. These two things I have noticed change in the political landscape in my relatively short lifetime.
Secondly, I'd say the fact we seem to have seemingly more controversy these days is not only due to the fact our pollies are worse but also that there is much, much more media scrutiny (ie; they are looking for a tabloid shock story). I find it hard to believe that the pollies of the 60s and 70s didn't have their hands in some pretty unsavoury cookie jars as well, as you said it's human nature to abuse power.