The leader of the Australian Democrats, Cheryl Kernot, made some sound points in her party’s charter to reform government processes and improve public access to information.
Senator Kernot has rightly called for an independent parliamentary budget office to do its own fiscal analyses. The public would no longer have to rely on the executive to get information about what the executive is doing with the money. It is true that Labor has improved some of the standards of budgetary performance, in particular creating forward estimates. But it has still been guilty of fudging the figures, making its performance appear better than it really is. The value of an independent information provider is well exemplified in the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which is created by a statute that guarantees its independence.
Other elements in Senator Kernot’s charter include: steps against jobs for the boys, truth in electoral advertising, a parliamentary commissioner to deal with MPs’ standards, parliamentary approval for treaties, more independence for the Speaker and Senate President, fixed terms for Parliament and cutting the Senate’s power to reject supply.
Each of these deserves discussion and action.
There may be grounds for a system of parliamentary disallowance (by either House) of appointments to certain jobs created by legislation. It may not be suitable to have full-scale hearings for major jobs, as in America, but there would be no harm in a system of disallowance to be kept up the Parliament’s sleeve for extreme cases. It would have to be exercised rarely for a government to get the massage, and might have prevented some of Labor’s stacking of bodies with union and party mates.
Often redress for parliamentary misbehaviour becomes a game of pressure and numbers, rather than attention to substance. The injection of an independent parliamentary commissioner has some merit, though as the Greiner-Temby experience showed, it can go off the rails unjustly.
More independence for the presiding officers will be difficult in Australia as long as the overall numbers are low enough to make a one-seat majority a realistic proposition. No party will surrender the chance of winning a seat to enable the British convention of the Speaker resigning from the party whip and not being challenged at election time. However, a more independent presiding officer would enable more fairness at Question Time.
The present election campaign reveals that an unfixed election enable the prime minister to play a silly cat and mouse game and it in no way makes the overall election period any shorter than what would have pertained if everyone knew the precise date of the election three years in advance.
Supply is difficult, but with a fixed term, it would be at least possible to reduce the reward gained by the party blocking supply, by restricting any term it wins at a subsequent forced election to just the remainder of the fixed term.
After 13 years of Labor there has been much executive abuse. It needs redressing with formal rules because there is no reason to believe that if the Coalition gets in for a substantial period it will not behave the same way.