Prime Minister, Paul Keating, has said that if the Coalition wins the election he would allow the GST legislation through, but would combine with the Democrats to defeat the Coalition’s industrial-relations legislation.
He says that the GST would be a money Bill and therefore should pass. On the other hand, he says that because the Coalition had not presented its IR Bill before the election it would not have a mandate for it.
The arguments are specious and ill-founded.
Mr Keating no doubt is still smarting from the Whitlam dismissal in 1975. That watershed in Australian politics is an event likely to colour perceptions of the role of the Senate in Australian politics, and rightly so.
Labor people, even 20 years after the event, are likely to hold the view that the Senate should not be allowed to tip out the government elected by the majority of the Australian people.
Gough Whitlam quite rightly held the view in 1973 and 1974 that the Senate should not frustrate the will of the people expressed in the House of Representatives election to enact major reform.
The role of the Senate must be viewed long-term and in a broad perspective. At the time of federation the Senate was established to represent the views of the states. That raison d’etre quickly fell away. It became the creature of party politics. Before federation, it was thought that the Senate would protect the smaller states against the larger ones. It proved unnecessary from the outset. Victoria, a protectionist state, was never going to gang up with NSW, a free-trade state, to deny the rights of the smaller states. As soon as the first Senate met it was quickly seen that it was not a states’ House. It quickly settled into a role as a house of review.
Since the 1950s it has been a House of proportional representation. It has senators elected on 10 per cent or so of the vote who could never get a seat in the House of Representatives, who none the less represent a significance body of public opinion. With the Democratic Labor Party and more lately Brian Harradine those senators represented a Catholic, moralist viewpoint. Now the Democrats represent a green, new-age viewpoint.
The question of what precise role the Senate should play in amending or block elements of the policy of the government that holds a majority in the House of Representatives is not new. It hounded Labor’s reformist Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s as much as it now threatens reformist John Hewson in the early 1990s. Any solid exposition of principle must be able to sit comfortably with both the situation Gough Whitlam found himself in and the situation that John Hewson, if he wins, will find himself in.
It seems that principle is that the Senate has a legitimate role as a house of review. It can suggest amendments and even insist on amendments that go to the way in which a policy is implemented, but should not deliberately frustrate the will of an elected government.
If the Coalition wins it is entitled to enact the GST, change Medicare and reform the labour market.
The electorate is well aware now of the sort of changes the Coalition has in mind. They have been plain to the most obdurate voter. It means a 15 per tax on consumption; it means an end to bulk-billing and a penalty of $800 for families on more than $50,000 who do not take out private insurance; it means voluntary unionism and a choice for individual workers on whether they want to represent themselves or want a union to represent them in negotiations for wages and conditions with an underlying requirement that present award conditions are a minimum.
The Coalition if elected is entitled to enact those principles. The Senate would be entitled to amend details, but not fundamentals. The mandate to govern is established and broken in the House of Representatives, not the Senate. Not since 1972 has an Opposition put its program for reform more clearly before an electorate.
If Dr Hewson wins and the Labor party block the spirit of his agenda in the Senate, the blame for the disruption and cost of a subsequent double dissolution would lay squarely with the Labor Party. If the people of Australia do not want labour reform, a GST and Medicare reform they will vote accordingly.
That said, one of the tragedies of this election is that Dr Hewson’s reform agenda is so stark. A softer approach on Medicare and perhaps a lower rate of GST would have seen a greater endorsement of his policy. As it is there is some merit in the argument that voters will be voting not üfor him, but against Mr Keating and Labor. Even so, if the Coalition wins a majority in the House of Representatives on Saturday it is entitled to put the broad thrust of its policy into law. Any attempts to frustrate that in the Senate will not only undermine the credibility of the Labor Party but bring into question the role of the Senate as a whole. Many will quite reasonably ask whether the Senate should be stripped of its blocking power altogether and have its powers reduced to delaying (say by a year). Alternatively, many could quite reasonably ask why a joint sitting of both Houses should not decide the fate of major Bills delayed by more than (say) six months without the costly expense of a double dissolution.
History has shown and this election will no doubt illustrate a fundamental destabilising weakness in the Australian political system. A Senate check against manic radicalism has its merit, but it should not frustrate the execution of policies put before, and accepted by, the electorate. The resolution of that fountain of friction in the Australian political system should be high on the agenda of all political parties as we look at constitutional reform in the nest seven years.