THE inevitable failure of today’s referendum in Queensland is a classic example of innocent media distortion, with some federal lessons.
The Queensland Government, with the agreement of the Opposition, business, unions and nearly all the media, is proposing to introduce fixed four-year terms to replace the present unfixed three-year term.
It is a good, straight-forward reform. Fixed terms give certainty to politicians, their staff, the public service and the businesses and people who deal with them.
Four years allows at least a couple of years of before a government goes into irresponsible election mode – handing out goodies and dodging hard decisions.
But the Yes vote will go down, according to what little polling has been done. And part of the reason will be media distortion.
How can that be? Well, it is not because journalists or media proprietors have conspired to publish biased material against the Yes case. After all, nearly all the media is in favour of a Yes vote.
Rather it is an innocent distortion. Every journalist writing about the issue could honestly say that every article they wrote was accurate and fair. And nearly all the coverage would withstand scrutiny for fairness and accuracy.
The innocent distortion arises out of the application of news values to the coverage. In this case there has been very little coverage. This is because nearly everyone is in agreement. There is little or no conflict. But conflict is one of the core news values that drives editors to give a story more prominence and more space or airtime.
Importance is a news value, too, but it rates much lower in the eyes of most news organisations than conflict, celebrity, unusualness and currency.
The referendum is very important in Queensland. It is important in the rest of Australia, too, because the Federal House of Representatives has an unfixed, three-year term like Queensland, and some would like to see it move to fixed four-year terms (like nearly all other Australian jurisdictions).
The only conflict has been a bit of opportunistic opposition from Katter’s Australian Party. And, of the paltry amount of media coverage, it has got a disproportionate amount of it.
It is a shame. Without a dramatic turnaround between time of writing and time of voting the reform will fail.
Hitherto, we always thought that without the support of the two major parties, any referendum (federally or at state level) was doomed. Some people thought that the logical corollary of that was that if a proposition had the support of both major parties it would win. But it is not an exact logical corollary. As we will see when the votes come in tonight.
Having both parties support a proposition will not guarantee its passing. If both parties support something, there is no contest, there is no conflict, there is no narrative, no story, and little or no media coverage. So, in the electorate, there is no knowledge, no understanding. Without that, they will just vote No.
So, it seems that having support of both major parties is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a referendum on constitutional change to go through. All it takes is apathy and low media coverage, and a good reform goes under.
This does not augur well for future referendums on indigenous recognition or the republic.
It seems these days that we have a paralysis of distrust. If both sides of politics say it is good, it must be bad. It is a pretty sorry state.
This does not mean the marriage-equality plebiscite will go down. The issue is well-understood. It will get the Yes vote precisely because of the distrust. People will vote Yes because they see it as a way of getting something that the politicians cannot or are too scared to give us. It will get up because of the distrust, not despite it. Why are you politicians wasting our time and money on something so obvious, is the sentiment.
Also there is the media magnet of conflict: the lunar right of the Liberal Party v the Turnbull left.
In queensland, the Yes case has not been helped by Premier Anastasia Palaszczuk threatening to call an early election after losing yet another of her Labor backbenchers to the cross-bench, thereby making it even more difficult for her minority government to get legislation through.
As soon as she did that, she highlighted the big weakness with fixed terms: what do to if the Government loses a confidence motion in the House or cannot get its appropriation bills through?
This is a question that will have to be dealt with in any federal republic referendum.
The way it has been done in the Queensland referendum was vague and unsatisfactory.
It says the Governor may dissolve the House and call an early election in several circumstances. The first is if the government loses a no-confidence motion and does not get a confidence motion through within eight days and the Governor considers no government can be formed that will command the confidence of a majority of the Assembly. The second is if the Parliament rejects a Bill for an ordinary annual appropriation Act or fails to pass one before a day notified by the Governor. The third is “following an exercise of the Governor’s reserve powers under established constitutional conventions”.
It puts a lot of power in the hands of an unelected Governor ,or if we are talking a federal republic in the hands of a President.
A more democratic and republican model would have the Constitution state that any no-confidence motion would be void unless it named the new Premier or Prime Minister and abolished all “reserve powers under established constitutional conventions”.
Queensland has only one House. Federally, you would have to do something about the Senate and its present power (not exercised for 40 years) to reject the ordinary appropriation of money to govern. Perhaps, the Constitution should provide that if the Senate rejects an appropriation then the most recently passed appropriation would be apply (with an allowance for inflation) for the next year or until the Senate does pass it.
The Senate is supposed to be a House of review, not the house which determines whether a government should fall.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Fairfax Media on 19 March 2016.