The Prime Minister, Paul Keating, said at the weekend he wanted to have another bash at getting a four-year term.
You’d think these politicians would learn.
We have already had a referendum on four-year terms, in 1988. And it was knocked back. It was not just a minor rebuff, but it failed in every state and territory. Less than a third of voters approved it.
The cry goes up that we have too many elections. The constant uncertainty is bad for business. A four-year term would reduce the number and allow politicians to make decisions for the long-term good of the nation, not in the short-term interest of getting re-elected next time.
Nonsense.
If we have a four-year term the stakes get higher. Politicians would have an even greater incentive to manipulate the truth, the economy, the deficit and everything else. The Liberal Party now is in dark despair and Paul Keating is in “”mandate-to-change-the-nation” mood. Imagine how much worse that would be if the next election were four years away.
Further, a four-year term would increase the likelihood of a 1975-style blocking of Supply. If Malcolm Fraser could not wait a mere 18 months for power to fall into his lap, how much less likely he would wait 2{ years.
We need more democracy, not less.
There are ways of reducing the number of elections and reducing the uncertainty, but you can rely on them never being put to the people in a referendum.
Paul Keating and other politicians are right to argue that there is a flaw in the Constitution over elections. The flaw is that senators have a fixed six-year term with half elected every three years, whereas the House has a maximum term of three years the exact length of which is determined by the Prime Minister. The House election may or may not coincide with the Senate term. At present it does. But in the past is has been out of kilter. Also in the past the Prime Minister has called early elections. The upshot has been that between 1969 and 1984 Australia had nine elections in 15 years. Absurd.
We have also had four attempts to fix the problem. Each was rejected. The reason for the rejection was not because the people are stupid, but because the politicians are power hungry. Each time the question was put to the people, the solution offered was the one that would put more power into the hands of the Prime Minister. The solutions offered would have enabled the Prime Minister to determine the term of senators or would have given the Government a longer term if the Prime Minister wanted it. The solutions all left intact the power of the Prime Minister to determine the election date.
Look at the way Mr Keating toyed with the election date in late 1992 and early 1993. When asked by John Hewson why he didn’t call an election “”now”, he replied, “”I want to do you slowly”. Then he tried to bamboozle people by suggesting Parliament would sit again in February. He tried to keep the other side on the hop. No Prime Minister is going to surrender that advantage.
So the people are to be presented for a fifth time with the wrong question. If, however, the people were asked to vote for a solution to the problem that lessened the power of the Prime Minister, they might approve it. Instead of mucking around with the Senate’s term to suit the House and the Prime Minister, why don’t we align the House’s term to the Senate’s _ that is have a fixed three-year House term. Elections for the House and half the Senate would be held every three years on, say, the second Saturday in December.
The idiocy of proposing a fifth misguided referendum on this question highlights a more fundamental flaw with the Constitution. While the Constitution correctly demands the people üapprove@ proposals to change it, it leaves the power to üinitiate proposals to change it in the hands of Parliament _ in other words, in the hands of the Government of the day.
That means, of course, no referendum of importance will be proposed that üdecreases@ the power of government and the ruling elite.
Significantly the only question that removed (a tiny) amount of power from the ruling elite _ retirement of judges _ was passed with the second-highest majority in Australia’s history.
Nearly every other proposal since 1901 was to somehow give more power to politicians, and the overwhelming majority were knocked back.
The reasons referendums are lost is not because the people are stupid or ignorant, but because the wrong questions are asked. And the wrong questions are asked because the wrong people are doing the asking _ the politicians not the people.
In one of the cerebral Senate Occasional Lecture Series last week, Professor Geoffrey Walker put the view that in a nation with as strong a democratic tradition as Australia, the people should be able to determine their own questions. If a set number of people, say 3 per cent, petitioned for a referendum to change the Constitution, or repeal a law or enact a law, then the referendum should take place. The validity of the signatures can be checked quite cheaply by sampling.
“”In the early part of this century, political science textbooks over all of the world treated Australians as being second only to the Swiss as innovators of practical democratic reforms,” he said, citing the secret ballot, and early male and female universal suffrage.
We inherited the rule of law and a tradition of liberty from Britain, but not democracy; we were there first, he said.
Professor Walker has been putting these views for some time. Many have dismissed citizen’s initiated referendums as madness from the new right. However, Professor Walker points out, that same madness had infected the old left as well, and is now infecting a whole range of sensible people in Parliaments throughout the democratic world. It is in force is Switzerland, Italy and 26 of the American states.
Those who reject the idea as new-right madness often cite fickle public opinion as another reason against it. It is a “”people-can’t-be-trusted” argument. Lunatic ideas might be put to referendum, wasting time and money, the argument goes.
Well, there are two rebuffing points. Citizens’ initiative is no better or worse that the present method for putting up unacceptable fringe ideas as evidenced by the fact that 34 or the 42 proposals since 1901 have been knocked back. The second point is that after one or two referendums are forced by fringe groups gaining enough signatures and are knocked back, enthusiasm for petition signing and signature gathering wanes and fringe issues do not get on past stage one. This has been the experience in US states.
There seems, however, no limit to the number of times governments are willing to put the same wrong question to the voters. If Mr Keating goes ahead it will be the fifth referendum on the terms of parliament and there have been a raft of referendums to increase federal power over monopolies, prices, incomes and industrial relations.
The fickleness of public opinion is perhaps more perception than reality. When an idea first gets wide publicity it is often well received, usually because no counter arguments have been put. People express approval in early opinion polls and the like. Then the counter arguments are put, and people weigh the issues up and come out against it. Examples abound: the Australia Card and Fightback are good recent ones. Rather than a fickleness, the process shows a maturity.
One of the difficulties in Australia is that big single issues are often clouded in the broad election campaign. Australians to not get choices of policy like they get choices of products in a supermarket. Rather they get a choice restricted to two supermarkets in only one of which they must do all their shopping. They cannot take Edgell tomatoes and Streets ice-cream from Labor’s supermarket and Arnott’s biscuits and Cadbury’s chocolate from the Liberals’. No; if they want Edgell tomatoes they have to cop Nestles chocolate.
A citizens’ initiative system would enable the people to modify specific policies without throwing a government out.
Mr Keating has drawn a distinction between himself and Menzies and has sought to carve out an Australian identity very separate from the British identity.
Menzies’ experience with constitutional change was singularly miserable. The only nation-wide poll Menzies ever lost was a referendum to change the Constitution in 1951.
It was an ill-conceived piece of anti-democratic paranoia to ban the Communist Party and to hound its members. The Australian people sensibly rejected it (though it got majorities in Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia). In his remaining 15 years in power, Menzies never put another referendum question to the people _ the do-nothing policy.
Mr Keating could learn from the experience, by not putting a question that, on past experience, is likely to get defeated.
He could, of course, go for the big picture.
He could recognise Australia’s democratic tradition that is separate and stronger than Britain’s and take it a stage further. Rather than seek to increase the power of the rulers through a four-year term, he could increase the power of the people by seeking to add an extra way to cause a referendum to be held: by a certain percentage of citizens signing a petition.
If he did that, the question of a republic might fall into place through a citizens’ initiative.
It’s unlikely, though. People in power do not relinquish any of it unless they have to. Indeed, they seek more of it. Mr Keating’s thinking, at present, seems to be like that.
In the same interview as he mentioned the four-year term, for example, Mr Keating suggested that the president of the republic should be nominated by the Government and approved by Parliament. Notice there was no role for the people in nominating the president or no role for the people’s representatives to nominate the president. Rather, the Government would keep control over who should be the President.
If that sort of thinking permeates what is supposed to be a decade of constitutional change, it will be a disappointing decade.
The great changes of the 1890s were democratic ones. The changes of the 1990s should be in the same mould.