The ACT is now facing an unnecessary election. It seems the Liberals, Michael Moore and the two Osborne Group Independents, Paul Osborne and Dave Rugendyke, will agree to change the Electoral Act to change the normal fixed-term election and bring forward the election set for the third Saturday in October to sometime before Christmas. They will do it to save Chief Minister Kate Carnell from a certain vote of no-confidence on Wednesday over her handling of the Bruce Stadium reconstruction. If they do so it will be a constitutional outrage. It will be a warping of the ACT’s normal constitutional framework for short-term political expediency. The Hare-Clark voting system and other electoral matters were entrenched in 1994 by referendum. True, the fixed term was not included in the entrenching provisions, but it was always understood to be part of the fundamental constitutional set-up. If anything, the proposal to change the Electoral Act by a simple majority of the Assembly highlights the need to entrench the fixed term. The whole aim of the fixed term was to take away from the Chief Minister the power to set the election date so there would be no short-term advantage-taking by the Executive with all that entails for engineering spending and vote-buying.
It became apparent Mrs Carnell would lose the no-confidence motion after Mr Rugendyke took his stand a week ago on the Auditor-General’s report on the Bruce Stadium. But the question now has gone beyond the stadium and the Auditor’s findings. It a way it is not a question of whether Mrs Carnell has done anything wrong. Maintaining the confidence of the Assembly is not a question of right or wrong. A no-confidence motion is not a trial or a judgment. It is a political statement. It may arise out of ministerial misconduct, but it might also arise out of just policy differences.
In political systems where majority governments are the norm, Mrs Carnell would have no difficulty.
However, the ACT has a different political system. A very important part of it that the people elect the MLAs and the MLAs in turn elect the Chief Minister who in turn choses the four ministers. There is no Governor. The fate of the Chief Minister and therefore the ministry lies in the hands of the people’s representatives, as it should.
Ultimately, it is for the MLAs to make their decision on who should be the Chief Minister in whatever circumstances are thrown at them. It is a numbers game. That is democracy. In the ACT, the proportional Hare-Clark electoral system invariably yields minority governments. That is no bad thing. It makes government more accountable than a single-member majority system. In a majority system, the leader of the majority party decides whether a minister or himself or herself should resign for misconduct and that is usually based upon the perception of voter reaction rather than high principle, as the ministerial-resignation record of the Howard Government attests. In a minority system, the Chief Minister comes or goes according to her performance as perceived by the 17 MLAs who have to present themselves every three years to the people.
The critical democratic element of that arrangement is that whoever is Chief Minister must maintain the confidence of a majority of MLAs, who in turn represent the will of the people. And they represent it fairly accurately in a proportional voting system.
It would be a perversion of democracy for a Chief Minister to evade her accountability to the people’s representatives by tipping them out of office prematurely and going for an election whenever it conveniences her.
The MLAs were elected for a fixed term and they should serve it, carrying out the task entrusted to them by the people.