The suggestion by parliamentary secretary Tony Abbott to change the Senate voting system to favour the major parties must be taken very seriously indeed. The reason is not because his plan to make life difficult for minor parties has any merit. Rather because it shows, yet again, the willingness of politicians to engage in underhand tactics in the face of a fundamental flaw in Australia’s constitutional system … the excessive strength of the Senate.
It is a far more serious constitutional issue than the republic. That can be done by a few cosmetic changes and after the event everyone will wonder what the fuss was about. Changes to the role of the Senate, however, will generate enormous disagreement and require uncharacteristic goodwill from politicians from all quarters. Otherwise it will remain a running sore in Australian political affairs for the indefinite future … unless there are changes to the tight discipline and intractable conduct in the major parties that generates the friction in the first place.
And whether the Head of State is a Queen, Governor-General or President, he or she could easily be thrown in to an unseemly role a arbiter in any showdown of power between the Houses.
There are two essential problems. The first is bad wording which has caused the unintended consequence of giving the Senate far too much powerful compared to the people’s House where government is formed or lost. The Constitution says the Senate cannot originate nor amend money Bills. It is silent as to whether it can block them, leading constitutional lawyers and judges to assume it has that power. A common-sense view would indicate the constitutional framers did not want the Senate to have power over money Bills at all. The second problem is that the Constitution’s provisions to resolve deadlock between the Houses is very cumbersome. It requires a double-dissolution election, which costs about $50 million and knocks five or six weeks out of national governance.
It means when a reformist government comes in, facing a hostile Senate, it cannot enact the mandate given it by the Australian people.
Since the election of the Howard Government, the Senate has threatened to block key elements of its program, just as it did to the reformist Whitlam Government in the early 1970s. As just as in the 1970s, the Senate has now threatened the very underpinning of government in a democratic society … the Budget. Both the leader of the Democrats, Senator Kernot, and the deputy leader of the Labor Party, Gareth Evans, have said as much.
Piously, they say they will not block Supply (the money to keep government going) and bring down the government, but mucking about with the Budget still goes the heart of government.
Of course, both major parties have been hypocritical about the Senate. In government, both have denounced the Senate as a mandate-frustrating thorn in the side of democracy. In opposition, both have extolled its virtues as a legitimate house of review and caution in the face of the tyranny of the majority and abuse of power by executive power.
Perhaps now the conservatives, who had hitherto puffed that the Senate was the states’ House and that Her Majesty’s representative in Australia could dismiss an elected government at its behest, are tasting the fruit of its excessive power, there may be some hope of recrafting the constitutional provisions to make it a house of review, delay and suggestion rather than one of obstruction and execution.
But it should not be an issue at the Government’s proposed people’s convention. It will only muddy the waters to the detriment of both issues.