On Tuesday night the Senate rejected the Government’s plan to have voluntary postal voting for the proposed constitutional convention. In doing so it set the first of several conditions for a double dissolution and delayed the convention by at least several months, if not indefinitely.
The detail of the double dissolution process is not well-understood. The Constitution provides several steps. The first step is for the House to pass a law and the to Senate reject it or fail to pass it or pass it with amendments to which the House will not agree.
That is what happened last night. The House passed the law about the convention and on June 18 the Senate passed the law but with crucial amendments about the voting system. The House then very quickly said it did not agree to those amendments and put the law back to the Senate which on Tuesday night stuck by its amendments.
So the conditions for the first step have been satisfied: the Senate has passed a proposed law but with amendments to which the House will not agree.
The second step is for an interval of three months and for the House to pass the law again.
The third step is for the Senate to fail to pass that law or to pass it with amendments to which the House will not agree.
After that the Governor-General, on the advice of the Prime Minister, can order a double dissolution, provided we are more than six months out from the time of an ordinary election.
So even though the Senate has voted twice on the convention Bill, one of those votes was merely to establish that it was amending the Bill in a way unacceptable to the House. It is the second formal rejection after an interval of three months that gives the Government a trigger for a double dissolution.
Apparently the Government wants that trigger, not necessarily because it will pull it, but to have it just in case. The Government has announced that it will wait the three months required by the Constitution and then present the Bill again.
That three-month requirement, of course, puts the proposed timing for the constitutional convention into disarray. Accusations will fly. The Government will be accused of deliberately delaying or jeopardising the convention altogether through its insistence on an untried, exotic voting system instead of using the system we have had for decades. The Labor Party and Democrats will be accused of jeopardising the convention by haggling over the voting system. The republicans will accuse the monarchists of getting their mates in the government to stymie the convention so the whole republic question can be abandoned. The monarchists will accuse the republicans of getting their mates in the Labor Party to use the voting issue to stymie the convention because they do not want a genuine debate on the issue.
The people of Australia who in opinion polls have increasingly asserted they would like an Australian head of state and not a monarch (who is also the monarch of another country) as head of state, meanwhile, are the playthings of the politicians’ power games and one-upmanship.
It proves, once again, that constitutional reform is far too important to be left solely in the hands of politicians and some mechanism other than a Bill passed by federal parliament must be devised in order to put proposals for constitutional change to the people.
The events in Parliament this week have now made the republic a party political issue. The Government’s announcement that it will wait the three-month double dissolution period might well have been a delaying tactic by people who do not really want a republic. It may be just a fanciful try to get an experiment in voluntary voting up and running. But it also is a signal that a double dissolution could be fought on the question of which party will move on a republic. The Coalition will be painted as the anti-republic parties who will not give the people a say and Labor will paint itself as the party to give the people a say. However, elections are fought on more than one issue. Some voters might change votes on this issue alone; but not many will.
In this respect the Labor Party and Democrats have played into the Coalition’s hands in both the short term and the long term. Or worse, sold out any chance of a republic before 2000 in order to pick up a few votes by committed republicans at the next election.
In the short-term, they have given the Coalition an excuse to dump the convention. However, flawed that process was, it was the only process. They should have allowed it. Moreover, as the Coalition won the election with the convention as part of its platform, it should have been allowed to go ahead.
In the long-term, unless one side relents to allow the convention to go ahead, the republic issue will feature strongly in the next election. If, as is likely, the Coalition wins it (because it will not be fought on the republic alone), it will give the Coalition the excuse to abandon any move to a republic indefinitely whatever the majority view in the nation is.
It is not too late. The Labor Party should relent and allow the convention to go ahead, even with the Government’s absurd electoral process.
If Labor blocks it on that point, it should be condemned for putting its own political gain over the desire of a majority of Australians to have an Australian head of state. It will be putting its philosophical objection to voluntary voting ahead of a more important issue.
And so what if the Coalition gets one little experiment with voluntary voting to go ahead. Labor and the Democrats can still block any attempt to have voluntary voting in real elections if the Coalition ever dares to attempt it.