The ACT Government will publish its draft Budget tomorrow. The draft will go before committees of the Assembly which contain MLAs from the Opposition and cross benches as well as government members. The committees will be able to make recommendations for changes before the Budget is voted on by the whole House. It is an experiment in governance not undertaken anywhere else. The fact no other jurisdiction has approached budgets this way does not matter. There is nothing wrong with trying new things. However, this experiment so fundamentally alters the checks and balances of the Westminster system that its wisdom must be questioned. So, too, must the motive for it.
The normal Westminster model has the Executive or Government determined by a majority on the floor of the lower house of parliament, or in the case of the ACT, the only house of Parliament. Sometimes that can be a permanent majority locked in by party discipline. More commonly these days, the majority is not permanent or guaranteed. It is made up of a major party plus independents or members of minor parties. Or sometimes the majority is solid in the lower house but there is no majority in the upper house. In any event, a majority of the members of the legislature hand executive authority to a prime or chief minister. Executive authority is power to apply the laws of the legislature and to spend money in accordance with those laws.
Critical elements of executive authority are the power to make regulations under legislation so the legislation works in detail, the power to make appointments and the power to spend money to give effect to legislation. The executive must always abide by legislation. It must always abide by the law.
Executive power, subject to the law, is a critical element of democracy. It is the delegation of the people’s power. The normal Westminster pattern is that the Executive gets judged by the people according to how well they have exercised that power. The judgment occurs at election time when voters are disposed or ill-disposed to vote for candidates of the party that hitherto had formed the executive. If that party fails to get a majority (either with or without the support of independents and others) it loses executive power.
The trouble with the proposed ACT system is that it undermines the capacity of voters to make that judgment. If the Budget (a major part of executive power) is arrived at though some sort of consensus by all members of the legislature, there is less to differentiate between the parties.
Chief Minister Kate Carnell says she wants to take acrimony out of political system. She wants a less adversary, less confrontation system, and less opposing for the sake of opposing. Up to a point these are laudable aims. But can be taken too far. Sure, let’s remove the petty point-scoring and bickering at Question Time and in debates in the House. But in doing so it would be a mistake to take out of politics the vigorous testing that opposition brings, particularly to the priorities a government might set in a Budget.
One of the great strengths of the Westminster system is that ideas and priorities are tested through contest and opposition.
Priorities of money spending are inherently political. We should not expect an opposition to agree to line items in a budget and then be held up as agreeing to the political thrust of the Budget, as this new Budget process proposes.
It seems that part of the motive for this consensus approach with the Budget is to pre-empt opposition. It seems that the Government wants to get ammunition now so it can say later, “”Well, the Labor Party and the cross-benchers had their chance during the budget process and they agreed to the Budget.”
The trouble with this approach is that it presumes the Opposition has the same resources and access to information as the Government, which it does not. It also deprives the community of the advantage of a constantly testing opposition.
A major reason for having the Hare-Clark system of voting in the ACT is to ensure a credible Opposition. In a fairly homogenous electorate like the ACT, a single-member system would have provided very large majorities one way and then the other with very small or even negligible oppositions. That would be unhealthy for democracy. And so does the proposal to have a draft budget with Opposition approval after a comment period.
Labor should not have a bar or it. The Government should put up its Budget and be judged on it.