Gladiator Keating stabs viciously with his short sword. Gladiator Hewson goads him with his trident waiting to throw the net into which Keating will fatally stumble.
It is Question Time. In the public gallery and in the loungerooms of the nation, the masses turn their thumbs down.
They are putting their thumbs down to politicians and politicking. But matters are more serious than that. We are watching the failure of Parliament to do its job. Parliament has two essential tasks: to provide a check on the Executive and to legislate. It is failing in both.
The main check on the Executive comes at Question Time. It is through the questioning of ministers at Question Time that failings are brought to the notice of the Parliament and the people, and if serious enough cause ministers to lift their game or resign.
But Question Time is not working like that now. It has always had its share of colour and movement, but the gladiatorial, personally pitched life-and-death struggle between Hewson and Keating is quite unparalleled. Calwell against anyone; Whitlam against Gorton, McMahon or Snedden; Fraser against Whitlam or Hayden did not come close. Hawke against both Peacock and Howard was closer, but not by much.
Gladiatorial is the right word. Presidential-style politics gives it too much dignity.
Only recently has Hewson risen to (or fallen for) Keating’s sharp jabs in Question Time. For nearly two years since taking on the Opposition leadership he has kept reasonably aloof, ungoaded. Clearly Keating’s rise to the Prime Ministership has changed that. Just like Keating as Treasurer goaded John Howard.
It appears that Keating is capable of causing anyone, no matter what their reputation for being calm, rational or phlegmatic, to get riled. Hewson is now drawn into the slanging match. “”You have stuffed Australia,” he said in Question Time. He is reputed to mutter to Keating at Question Time: “”You’re a loser. You’re a loser.”
We always knew Keating’s style was to dish it out, describing Hewson as a “”creature of the 80s boom, driving around in a Ferrari” and worse.
Now he has succeeded in getting Hewson to join him in the playground rough and tumble, despite Hewson promising himself and us that he would not. It is supposedly good politics, but it is bad government.
It has turned Question Time into a colourful television contest, but the questions have little to do with the administration of the government. They are mainly semantic point-scoring questions from Opposition Members over statements the Prime Minister or a senior minister might have made, or Dorothy Dixers from Government Members.
The House of Representatives Question Time on Tuesday and Thursday last week were especially instructive. Only nine questions were asked in the hour-long Question Time last Thursday _ four from the Government, four from the Opposition and one from an Independent. That’s nine questions in one hour; it must be a record low. The Speaker called for order in the House 30 times and on 23 occasions had to ask individual Members to stop interjecting or to restrain themselves.
Tuesday was little better. Fourteen questions were asked. Things had got so bad that one question was actually directed at the Speaker, Leo McLeay, by Warwick Smith (Lib, Tas) asking whether the Speaker agreed that a limit of four minutes on ministerial answers was appropriate, given that the Senate had applied that limit (with the concurrence of the Government, which does not have numbers).
Mr McLeay said it was not a matter for him, but a matter for the House (where the Government does have a majority). If the House changed the Standing Orders, he would apply them in the way the House gave them to him.
To which Andrew Peacock interjected: “”The way the Government tells you.”
The Speaker, who is elected by the House where the Government has the majority, has no will to control Dorothy Dixers. Ministers are allowed to waffle on. Though Dorothy Dix was a US agony columnist, the application of the term to fore-warned parliamentary questions apparently was originally Australian.
Dorothy Dixers have given rise to what public servants call, with dread, PPQs _ possible parliamentary questions. Armies of public servants are engaged in preparing answers to questions that may never get asked (given the paltry number of questions the House gets through). If they are, Ministers have to read them with all the spontaneity they can muster. It’s a farce. Why not publish all the PPQs as press releases without putting them through Parliament. After all, we paid for their production.
Indeed, Hewson is so frustrated by it that he has promised that the Opposition, if it wins Government, will reform Question Time, and Parliament generally. Good, if he can stick to it. He says he wants to put a time limit on ministerial answers in Question Time.
If the coalition wins, he will have to act quickly. Once he has been in government he, too, will have incompetencies that he will not want aired, just like the present Government. Governments with incompetencies to hide will want to wreck Question Time, one of the few times the Executive is accountable to the legislature, particularly its Opposition members.
There are two contradictory theories about Question Time. One is the Gough Whitlam theory: if you can’t win in Parliament you can’t win in the country. It was a theory that suited a great parliamentarian, especially one who as Leader of the Opposition trounced the Prime Minister in Parliament in the lead up to the 1969 election, only to lose. He needed some credentials to encourage his colleagues to let him bat on.
This theory has now been refined. The refined theory partly explains the demise of Bob Hawke. Although Hawke had a love affair with the Australian people, he was not performing in Parliament. He had not had many press-gallery-accredited wins in the year before his demise. The new theory was that “”wins” in Parliament boosted the morale of the backbench and without that there was no impetus and enthusiasm by backbenchers in the electorate, which meant defeat.
The refinement was similar to the Whitlam theory, except for the added element of the backbench. Whitlam, of course, did not need a backbench to portray impetus and enthusiasm to the electorate. He did it directly.
The second, quite contrary, theory is subscribed to by Dr Hewson. This is that the debasement of Question Time into a playground game of hoppo-bumpo reflects more badly on the Government than the Opposition. The average punters at home say “”this lot” don’t deserve to govern us and should be thrown out. That the Opposition is partly culpable for the fiasco is lost on the average voter who sees only the 20-second grabs on the TV news.
The second theory is perhaps more relevant now that more Parliament is seen on television. And like everything, television goes for action and conflict, it makes good footage.
So, since parliamentary grabs have been televised, the people have been more likely to turn their noses up and thumbs down . Their now more jaundiced view is directed indiscriminately at the whole process of governance, which perhaps manifests itself more in distaste for the Government than the Opposition.
What can be done? The Senate is a good example. Neither Government nor Opposition has a majority. They either have to appeal to each other, or to the Democrats. In procedural matters, then, steamrolling or wrecking is often not successful. Dorothy Dixers that wreck Question Time have been curtailed. Ministers are restricted to four minutes.
So some independence and reason are imposed. In the House, this is unlikely, despite the increasing number of Independents in Australian politics.
A more independent Speaker is required. At present the Speaker is always from the governing party, and always tends to favour the governing party.
The Speaker should, upon election, resign from party membership. (C’mon, Dr Hewson, make it part of your reform of Parliament.) The Speaker’s electorate would suffer from the absence of a local Member, but that happens now, and happens in the case of Ministers anyway. It could be overcome quite sensibly if a senator or MP from an adjacent electorate agreed to help out with electorate work of the Speaker (and ministers for that matter).
In Britain the Conservative-dominated Commons elected a Labour MP as Speaker after the last election, knowing she would not stay active in the party. MPs in general respected her skill and independence. It could happen in Australia.
Time limits on answers and an independent Speaker would go a long way to cure Question Time, but what about Parliament’s legislative function.
Without the Senate, Federal Parliament would be a rubber stamp. Even with it, legislation gets rammed through at the Executive’s whim.
The rushing of legislation and the insistence by the Government (of both complexions) that it has a monopoly of wisdom cause the House of Representatives to pass some idiotic Bills. If the Democrats agree, they go through. Oppositions (of both complexions) are not devoid of ideas and worthwhile suggestions.
I am willing to lose a bottle of champers on this: can anyone point to three successful Opposition amendments to legislation in the House of Representatives in the past, say, four years?
Very simply, Opposition amendments do not succeed, unless they are forced through the numbers game in the Senate.
We should open the legislative process up more, and slow it up more. Then we would not get idiotic legislation like the broadcasting ban, the first corporations folly, the present superannuation stuff up and so on.
Incidentally, the legislature should have electronic voting at the press of a button which records every MP’s vote. Why does the time-wasting farce of shuffling across the Chamber to record a predictable result continue in a building alive with expensive electronic gadgetry.
The clerk of the Senate, Harry Evans, made a very sensible suggestion in a lecture earlier this year. He thought more legislation should go to committees which listened directly to public comment. He applauded the British committee system where the chairs of committees were shared between Government and Opposition, instead of the present Australian system where the Government took all the chairs. (Britain has its own tyranny of the majority problems, but some of their procedures are worthwhile.)
Of course, executive governments do not like the public and lobby groups having their say before a committee. Committee members on the government side might become less doctrinaire and more reasonable.
If we are to have better government in Australia the legislature must assert itself, and not just through the Senate, which is just an extension of party playground politics. It must improve the way it questions the Executive and the way it legislates. Its members, Government and Opposition, must get away from number-crunching.
In the absence of them doing it, the judiciary is expressing a limited willingness to do its bit to curb the excesses of the Executive and the legislative fruits of its controlled program in Parliament. The judiciary can only do it in a limited way, by negating what is done, not by activating new legislation. So it would be better is the legislature did the full job in the first place.
Perhaps we have come to this because, despite the avalanche of all sorts of legislation, politics is now obsessed by economics and is paying less attention to other issues.
We have a Parliament full of single-issue candidates; and it is not good for government.