The leader of “”most reformist Government since World War II” faces a grim choice. As he makes it, he must realise that he has squandered, like Malcolm Fraser before him, the best opportunity for reform (from a conservative perspective) for more than two decades.
After the vote in the Senate this week on the Wik Bill, John Howard’s grim choice is whether to have a double dissolution between July 4 and October 24, or whether to have an ordinary election sometime between July 4 and the end of April next year.
The advantage of a double dissolution is that all the legislation rejected twice by the Senate (including Wik) can be submitted to a joint sitting of the House and Senate after the election (presuming Howard wins). The legislation would then pass because any deficit in a usually fairly evenly split Senate would be more than off-set up by the Government’s majority in the House.
If there is an ordinary election, with only half the Senate up for election, there is no joint sitting and the Government is back where it started with the rejected legislation.
So how important is this rejected legislation? It now amounts to two or three sticking points in the Wik legislation. These are the subjugation of the Bill to the Racial Discrimination Act and whether native-title claimants should have a right to negotiate over mining proposals on pastoral leases. A third was still before the Senate at time of writing.
The other two pieces of legislation are to exclude small business from unfair-dismissal requirements and reform of industrial relations in the Public Service (much of which can be achieved by regulation under other Acts anyway).
Now, that is not a very big list of important reforms for the most reformist government since World War II to take to a double dissolution.
What is the downside of a double dissolution compared to an ordinary election? In a double dissolution all 12 senators in each state are up for election. (The two territories have two senators elected for a term concurrent with the House of Representatives and always return one Coalition and one Labor senator each. So they can be ignored.)
With 12 senators up for election rather than six, the quota of votes to get a seat is only 7.7 per cent, rather than 14.2 per cent. So it is easier for independents and minor parties to get a seat. It is worse for the major parties.
In a half-Senate election they need just 42.9 per cent to get three of the six seats. Repeat the effort three years later and a major party has six out of 12 seats in a state. The Coalition has done that in five states (all bar Tasmania), in 1993 and 1996.
In a full Senate election, you need 46.2 per cent to get six senators. The major parties do not get that in most states in the Senate these days.
At rpesent, the Coalition has 35 of the 72 state Senate seats. After a double dissolution that would fall to 31 or 32.
John Howard has to ask himself, are a couple of section of the Wik Bill and some relief from unfair dismissal actions for small business worth four Coalition senators?
The plot thickens. The National Party is pressing hardest for Wik, yet a double dissolution election will cause it the most grief. The Nats have two senators in each of NSW and Queensland. They will have to prevail upon the Coalition to put those five Senators among the winnable top five positions on the Coalition ticket in each state. A Coalition lamb has to go to the slaughter in NSW, where the Coalition has six senators now, and will only have five after a double dissolution. Should this lamb be a Liberal or a National? Well, the Nats want the Wik Bill through, surely they should offer the sacrifice. Perhaps Howard can use the threat of a loss of a National Senate seat when he justifies to his Coalition partner why he wants to avoid a double dissolution and cop a watered down Wik Bill that the Nats don’t like.
In Queensland, the Coalition is more likely to get six senate seats in a double dissolution, but being sixth on the ticket is still worrying. The Liberals have had enough strife with the ticket proposed for an ordinary election; there can only be more sparks with a double-dissolution ticket.
The Nats have another senator in Victoria who presumably would get a winnable spot.
But if the Nats don’t get their way, they can always threaten to put up a separate ticket in Western Australia to capture a Liberal seat. At present the Western Australian Nats are not represented in the Federal Parliament, but they have been flexing their muscles at the state level.
(The Nats are a non-entity in South Australia and Tasmania.)
You have to wonder why Howard would go through all this grief for so little. Why all this sacrifice for the National Party — a party doing its damnedest to undermine Howard’s greatest achievement, gun control?
From the Liberal perspective, there is little in it. The Wik Bill, even on the Government’s terms, is about giving things to the pastoral leaseholders, who are a National Party constituency. It is only because the High Court ruled that native title (partially) survived the granting of pastoral leases in the Wik decision last year that the Government has legislated. The legislation is aimed at doing the utmost to overturn that decision. On the mining front, which is more a Liberal constituency, the Wik legislation does not help a huge amount. In any event, mining interests have both the money and willingness to negotiate with indigenous interests in the existing legal framework in a way not countenanced by the pastoralists.
The unfair dismissal change is more in Liberal (as distinct from National) interests, but it is fairly small beer in scale of things. Despite industry hype that it will create 50,000 jobs, it is more symbolic than real. Liberal business interests were far more interested in a comprehensive reform of industrial relations.
So Howard must now be thinking of what might have been. Instead of being forced by the Nationals to contemplate sacrificing four Coalition senators (maybe all Liberals) to pass a couple of sections of one Bill which are dear only to National hearts, the greatest reforming government since World War II could have had bucketloads of reform measures ready and rejected twice by the Senate set for passing by a joint sitting after a double dissolution.
There could have been tax reform and real industrial-relations reform, not the compromise industrial-relations reform waltzed out between Peter Reith and the damsel in red who later showed her true colour.
The situation is very similar to the other government that had a more genuine claim to be reformist — that of Gough Whitlam in 1972. Whitlam, coming in after years of the other side having government, made the same mistake as Howard. He delayed, compromised and mucked about with a hostile Senate. Both of them, upon election, should have banged through a dozen or more essential Bills and raced off to a double dissolution within six months, while the honey was still sweet.
If Howard had done that he would have gone to an election, citing obstruction and fair go, at about the time of the Lindsay by-election in which the Coalition got an increased vote, precisely on the fair-go question.
Now, Howard faces spending his political capital on the Nationals, on an issue which will earn him few friends and few voters in the city and might indeed tarnish Australia’s image overseas, especially if the election does become a race election.
One can only hope that this week’s double dissolution threats are merely scare tactics to beat the Senate in to line. It will cause little fear with Labor, though. Labor has most to gain by a double dissolution. As the table shows, in an ordinary election it needs to get 15 senators out of 36 to keep all its seats. In effect it is defending its moderate 1993 performance. In a double dissolution, on the other hand, it has those 15 plus the miserable 12 it won in 1996 to win back — a total of 27. That is a very easy target.
In effect, by going for a double dissolution, Howard will be expunging Labor’s dismal Senate result of 1996 — a result it would normally have to live with for six years. In a double dissolution, Labor could expect to win 38.5 per cent of the vote (and five seats) in every state, giving it 30 seats.
The Democrats, on the other hand, will not like a double dissolution. They have to defend two seats in both Queensland and South Australia and one in each other state except Tasmania where they have none. It is likely they will lose a seat in Queensland (without Saint Cheryl) but maybe gain a seat in Tasmania. In an ordinary election, however, they would be defending their miserable 1993 result of only two senators — obtained in the days when Janet Powell, not Saint Cheryl, was leader. In an ordinary election they would convert those two seats to four, perhaps five to give them a formidable total of 10 senators.
Maybe that prospect alone would be enough for Howard to opt for a double dissolution with Labor cheering at the side, because there is no other reason for Howard to opt for it.
Why sacrifice so much for the Nationals who simply do not deserve it?