Prime Minister, Paul Keating, and the Leader of the Opposition, John Hewson, are now committed to looking at whether a referendum should be held for a four-year term.
The theory is that a longer term would provide better economic management and enable politicians to make the tough decisions without fear of an immediate electoral backlash. They could be making long-term decisions which would bear fruit further down the track. This would be better for the nation. Great theory. But wrong.
What has been the Australian experience? All states except Queensland now have four year terms. Could anyone seriously argue that Victoria, South Australia or Western Australia were better managed under their four-year terms than Queensland under its three-year term? The contrary is demonstrably true. The Cain-Kirner and Burke-Lawrence four years were not brilliant examples of prudent economic management. The longer term only meant that voters had to put up with those Governments for one year longer than they should have. Carmel Lawrence used the extra year to do a repair job and went some distance in doing it. However, Joan Kirner did not make things any better in her state while the voters waited to throw her out. South Australia was similarly mismanaged under John Bannon and now the voters have to wait out an unnecessary extra year to get rid of Lynn Arnold’s lame-duck Government. Tasmania’s four-year term did not save it from an early election after the breakdown of the Green-Labor Accord, and its finances are still fairly sick. Queensland, the only state with a three-year term, is the only state which has had sound financial management over the past half decade. The Australian experience shows there is no case for a four-year term on economic grounds, or indeed on any other ground.
Queenslanders very sensibly rejected a referendum proposal for a four-year term in March 1991. When they look at what has happened in the other states since they can be proud of their decision.
If the Federal Government and Opposition put up a proposal for a four-year term, voters should similarly reject it for the self-serving, power-grabbing scheme that it is.
Far from creating stability and constitutional certainty and reducing the number of elections, a four-year term will have the opposite effect. What is to happen to senators’ terms? They cannot be left as is without putting the fixed Senate term out of kilter with the House and thus generating more elections. If the Senate is to rotate, as now, and elections are to run in cycle, senators would have an eight-year term. That is far too long for a politician to be unanswerable to the people. On the other hand, having the whole Senate elected at the same time as the House could result in it being weakened as a House of review.
The thing is fraught with complication and difficulty for no demonstrable gain; indeed a demonstrable loss.
If we are serious about reducing the business disruption of too many elections at uncertain intervals, we should fix the term. Elections for the House and half the Senate could be held on, say, the second Saturday in December every three years. But such a simple and obvious proposition will never get put in a referendum because that would take power away from politicians, a power that was enjoyed immensely by Mr Keating in the six months up to the last election and will no doubt be used by the other side in the future, to the detriment of the nation.
While ever the procedure for referendums demands that they be initiated by politicians instead of by the people we will get half-baked or overly complicated questions that increase the power of politicians. Small wonder they get rejected so often. The method of constitutional alterations should be changed to give the people a greater say. At present only politicians can propose referendum questions and they have to be passed through Parliament. It would be better if that in addition to this the people could initiate referendums by petition of, say, 3 per cent of the electorate collected over six months and verified by a sampling process or overseeing by a court.
With such a proposal no doubt there would be at first a few lunatic far-right and far-left issues which, if they struggled over the line to get 3 per cent of the signatures, would get knocked back, but after that the system would settle down and be dominated by more reasonable proposals. Certainly, it could be no worse than the present system under which politicians have for ninety years put up half-baked proposals, proposals which carried overtones of a hidden agenda, proposals which unnecessarily increased their power or pig-back proposals under which every sensible and acceptable proposal was inseparably linked to a suspicious one.
Citizens would be more likely to propose, for example, a simple Bill of Rights in which each right is put as a separate question. Freedom of religion; freedom of speech; freedom from unreasonable search and seizure; trial by jury for major crimes; and a right to vote would be examples. These are fundamental and well-recognised rights which could be put in the Constitution by the people, not in a half measure through the back door by the High Court as is happening now. It is likely that citizens would put up a better proposal for a republic than the politicians. Last week, for example, Mr Keating hinted that a president would be chosen by the Prime Minister and ratified by Parliament, once again concentrating power in the hands of ruling politicians rather than the people or at least their representatives from both sides. Nominations for president, surely, should not be restricted to the hands of the Prime Minister.
The politicians’ record on constitutional reform (from both sides) has been dismal in the past 90 years. They keep putting up proposals that increase their own power. The four-year term is another example. The last time it was put to the people, in 1988, it was rejected by all states and received less than a third of the vote. It was far more comprehensively than the GST. Yet here is the Prime Minister wanting to give it another go.