John Howard – that’s right, the self-styled most conservative leader in Australian politics – wants to wipe out more than a century of Senate checks and balances in the most dramatic shift in power from the people to the Prime Minister and Cabinet that Australia has ever seen.
The irony for Labor is exquisite. The conservative Parties have always defended the Senate and its powers, and used them to the limit when they blocked supply to the Labor Government in 1975.
It’s been Labor – the reforming Party, the party determined to progress the cause of the outsiders to power, the party determined to change the status quo – which has hated Senate power.
Now Howard wants to gut the Senate. His idea shows that he is now the policy and political system radical, and that progressives are reduced to fighting to defend what they’ve gained and are losing every day that Howard remains in power. Progressives have no choice but to defend to the death the Senate which once so frustrated them. Conservatives have no choice but to join them, as conservative legal academic Greg Craven did in the Australian this morning:
“One of the greatest contemporary problems of Australia’s constitutional system is that there are too few limits on government power. A popular prime minister with a supportive back bench is like an elephant in the jungle. What he likes, he takes, and what he dislikes he stamps to death … Ironically, such a proposal is deeply anti-conservative and anti-liberal.”
Howard’s idea also shows that he believes the neo-liberal, read corporatist model is now so entrenched that there is no need for a Senate to keep Labor on a leash. It’s the ultimate sign that he thinks he’s won, for once and for all, the battle of ideas and ideals raging in Australia since 1983, when Hawke and Keating began privatising, outsourcing, corporatising and deregulating. In other words, he believes his vision for Australia has nothing of substance to fear from Labor any more.
Politics is about power and power is about numbers and the consequences of having them. It is the power of consequential numbers that gives the Senate the clout to force debate on the merits of proposals, the power to compel government to justify what it’s doing. Government accommodates the Senate, participates in its inquiries and answers its questions only because the Senate has the power to block its legislation. There is no other reason. For proof, it is routine for the House of Representatives to pass complex legislation in a moment, on the promise that the Senate will looks at what it all means and seek community input. The government, in other words, outsources community consultation to the Senate.
Because of this, MPs within the government are empowered to dissent. Early last year, the government’s anti-terrorism bill proposed to crush political dissent by demonstrations and industrial pickete through an extraordinarily wide definition of “a terrorist act”, and to give the Attorney-General the power to ban any political organisation he wished. Through the Senate inquiry process, this disturbing, wholesale trahing of citizen’s rights and the trashing of democratic principles it entailed were exposed through detailed submissions from lawyers and human rights campaigners across the country.
Many Liberals – Senators and MPs – were convinced, to the extent that they defied the Prime Minister and forced significant changes.
Those dynamics would not have been possible if Howard’s constitutional changes were in place. Party discipline – ie the subjugation of the views of MPs elected by the people to the desires of the Cabinet – would have prevailed, and the government’s changes would have got through at a joint sitting after the bill was rejected twice.
Why? The power of numbers. With one constitutional change, a Prime Minister with the numbers in a joint sitting could roll over Senate scrutiny without qualm, refuse to answer the hard questions, and roll over internal dissenters with the charge of disloyalty.
Without the change, dissenters could argue that, given the Senate numbers, compromise was essential. The Senate’s power gives them – and us – power.
And without the power to reject legislation, the media would take no interest in Senate debates. Why bother, when after a couple of debates a joint sitting would force through exactly what the government wanted? Thus, the structural trigger for detailed public debate on contentious matters would be gone.
I’ve always been a supporter of the Senate, whether Labor or the Liberals are in power. I don’t trust either of them with unbridled power. Just as importantly, the Senate’s proportional system of election means the public’s diversity of views and priorities are more truly represented in the Parliament. It’s a safety valve. It is through the Senate that the great debates which divide our nation are argued and resolved, with the input of voices across the political spectrum.
Industries and lobby groups who’ve been forgotten in a big policy change or who haven’t got the clout to be heard by the big parties often get their views across by approaching Senators, particularly in minor parties. The rail industry, for example, lived in the Democrats offices during the GST debate, and thus made their point that the proposed big drops in diesel prices would advantage trucks as carriers of goods, and thus add to environmental damage. Meg Less reported at the time that Costello’s face went blank when she raised this issue – he hadn’t even realised that economic policy could affect the environment! So a Senate with power can force valid policy objections, and often more innovative policy responses, onto the table. Can you imagine Costello turning up, let alone listening to Lees, if he knew that a joint sitting would pass his legislation in any event?
Because of the power of numbers, the government is forced to justify what it’s doing with facts, not assertion, and to answer the criticisms of voices otherwise completely disempowered in the political system. It keeps the government is touch with, and accountable to, ALL the people, not just its donors and mates and pollsters.
Which brings me to the crucial point. John Howard has always argued that, alone among all the major democracies, Australia does not need a bill of rights. He justifies this on the basis that there are enough checks and balances in our system to protect the rights of citizens vis a vis the States without giving the Courts the power to uphold them against State trangressions.
Tearing away the Senate’s checks and balances would leave a gaping hole which only a bill of rights could fill. The Senate’s best continuous committee is its “scrutiny of bills committee”, which checks every bill that comes before it against a list of fundamental human and citizen rights and reports breaches – invariably in a bipartisan report – to the Senate. This committee is one of a myriad of ways in which the Senate acts as scrutineer of the government’s dealings with human and citizen’s rights, and is bedrock essential in a system with no protections of the citizen in its constitution. Without a Senate with real power, it would be open season for any government to transform our democracy and our rights within it without our permission.
Take electoral reform, the most fraught sort of all, as it can, unless carefully monitored, be used by a government to entrench itself in power by altering the rules to its advantage. For example, many in the government want voluntary voting because they believe that fewer Labor than Coalition voters would vote if voting was not compulsory. Under Howard’s system, this could be passed via a joint sitting without even the whiff of a mandate from the Australian people.
The fact that Howard is proposing this is a sign that he believes Liberal governments are likely to rule Australia in the medium term. No government would propose anything so radical unless it believed it had the time to put through such major changes to Australia that the opposition would be extremely hard pressed to reverse them.
Labor will flounder around trying to work out a position on this one – Paul Keating’s frustration with the the Senate saw him call Senators “unrepresentative swill”. Both major parties, in principle, want the least possible resistance to whatever they want to do, and both conveniently forget, while in government, that minor parties have no power unless the two major parties are at odds.
If Howard wants to castrate the Senate, he’d better propose a bill of rights to keep Australian citizens in the game. Better still, Labor could propose it. Nothing could be more guaranteed to kill off Howard’s power grab.
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I’d love your comments on Howard’s proposal. mkingston@smh.com.au