In the week that Kate Carnell introduced her Community Referendum Bill, those in favour of citizens’ initiated referendums must be indebted to National Party Leader Tim Fischer. Fischer is opposed to CIR, but in arguing against it he exposed some sound reasons why it would be good for Australia.
In classic John Cleese style he mentioned the war. Fischer, a Vietnam Vet, said that if Australia had had citizens’ initiated referendums at the time of Vietnam, who knows what might have happened? Precisely. There probably would have been a citizens’ initiated referendum in about 1970 to extricate Australia from that folly.
Fischer argued that government was done better by representatives alone. The people elected them as a package for three years, and they got on with the job.
The folly of that argument is being demonstrated over Tasmania’s anti-gay laws this week. The people elected a Liberal State Government, most likely on a package of economic and other policy. Yet the opinion polls show clear majorities against the anti-gay law.
The Tasmanian Government dug in against Federal pressure and refused to change the law arguing fallaciously that it had a mandate to keep it. But if they had citizen’s initiated referendums in Tasmania, that mandate could be put to the test. The law would have been off the books by now. The diligence with which Tasmanian gays pursued the case in the United Nations would have been pursued directly with the Tasmanian people _ almost certainly successfully.
Then we would not have had the spectre of hotch potch United Nations committees influencing Australian law. Nor would we have the spectre, as we do now, of a Federal privacy law which can be extended and amended in ways which have nothing to do with Tasmania’s gay laws _ such as civil suits for damages for “”invading the privacy” of leading public figures.
The states’ rights arguments have little to do with the rights of the people of a state. They are really about the power of the states’ parliamentarians, particularly government ministers.
With citizens’ initiative, people imagine that an extreme measure can be put up today, signatures (most of them forged) presented next week, referendum the week after and the first public castration held in Garema Place the following Friday.
As the fluoride fiasco (and a dozen others in Federal Parliament) show, Members of Parliaments are more likely to do such things than the voters directly. Governing parties often act quickly (or refuse to act at all) in the search for the quick approval of some minority pressure group that will sway a few percent of the vote or run a marginal-seats campaign.
Citizens’ initiative is not for the far-left and far-right lunatics. To the contrary, it is for considered issues of major public concern that politicians have proved incapable of dealing with _ Tasmania’s anti-gay laws and the Vietnam War are good examples. Another might be a balanced approach to the Supply time-bomb in the Constitution _ something the politicians have left in the air for 19 years.
The Carnell Bill will enable proposed laws to be put to referendum if supported by 5 per cent of electors.
No doubt we will hear the conservatives, those timorous souls who have little faith in their fellow human beings, put all sorts of arguments up as to why people are too ignorant, stupid, meddlesome or whatever to propose their own laws or to make a considered judgment about a law proposed by their fellow citizens.
It is a bizarre argument. Surely, if voters can be trusted to consider maturely every issue at election time and make a balanced judgment, they can be trusted to deal with just one or two at referendum time. If not, why give them a vote at all?
The other main objections are machinery ones before and after the referendum.
Canell’s Community Referendum Bill proposes a considered process over at least 10 months. A proposing committee starts the process. It drafts a proposal in less than 100 words. It gets 1000 signatures to support it and presents it to the Electoral Commissioner. The commissioner certifies that it is a matter that is capable of being an Assembly law and gazettes it. The committee has six months to get the signatures of 5 per cent of the electorate. The signatures are verified by 10 per cent sample by the commissioner. If the committee gets the signatures, it gets the help of the Attorney-General’s Department to draft a law that is consistent with the 100-word proposition.
The Attorney-General certifies the law which is then presented to the Assembly.
If it likes, the Assembly can see the writing on the wall and pass the law, obviating the referendum. Otherwise, it goes to referendum on the next election day. Attached to it is an Auditor-General’s financial-impact statement.
Minor amendments (certified by the Attorney-General as not inconsistent with the 100-word proposition) can be made during the lead up time because public debate may reveal minor glitches.
There must be four months minimum from the tabling to the vote.
The provisions provide that the proposition and the names of the proposing committee must be at the top of every signature sheet.
In other words, there are detailed machinery provisions with appropriate appeals to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal to ensure officials run the system properly.
The law cannot be substantially amended for 12 months.
Nothing is utterly foolproof, but by and large in Australia, electoral matters run extremely fairly, and there is not reason to think this would not be the same. Yes, you can have forged signatures, just as you can have people voting a dozen times at present Federal elections. But there are offences created to deal with this and by and large Australians are fairly law-abiding.
Notice, it is not a case of government by referendum. It takes a lot of time and work to get one up, and it can only happen at election time, except in an extreme case. The extreme case is when of the proposing committee getting 10 per cent of the electors’ signatures. In this case they can demand a referendum on the following third Saturday in February even if it is not an election year. (Elections are held every third year on that day).
But it would be a foolish Government that did not enact such proposal well before a referendum was needed. Ten per cent of the voters is a fair amount of community concern.
Basically, government would go on much as now, except politicians would know that if they do something over the top (because some noisy pressure group or powerful bureaucracy has convinced them) it can be repealed.
Moreover, citizens’ initiative gives the pollies themselves a perfect answer to the noisy ones: go to the people.
The machinery provisions in the Carnell Bill seem fairly well-thought. They may need some tinkering. I suspect 5 per cent is too high a threshold. The organising committee would need to get 200 new signatures a day to meet the deadline. But this does not detract from the substance of the Bill.
In any event, this Bill combined with the timely example of the recalcitrance of the Tasmanian Government, must move citizens’ initiative from being some way-out far-right agenda item to a serious, thoughtful, mainstream, democratic proposition.
If it gets up in the ACT, and people see that the sky does not fall in, people might start demanding it elsewhere because they are heartily sick of some of the things our politicians do or don’t do and are frustrated at being powerless to force the issue. A general election is no good because you may not want to vote for the other lot, and the other lot may not help on that issue anyway.
In any event, if citizens’ initiative is unworkable, stupid, undemocratic, then the people can always use citizens’ initiative to repeal it. It is odd, though, that none of the jurisdictions that have it have ever done so.