I've had several requests for copies of the Sharman address rebutting arguments put against the electoral basis of the Senate. Since I made a very brutally-abridged two-page version I'll sen that with this message in email text form. Anyone who would like to see the full article (much more persuasive than my summary) should let me know and please also let me know if you'd rather have as email text (40 kb) or as a Word 6 attachment. Dion Giles --------------------------------------- 1. Abridgement..... These points were made in a persuasive and carefully-argued public lecture by Professor Campbell Sharman, of the University of Western Australia in the Senate Occasional Lecture Series presented in the Senate on Friday 11 December 1998, under the title "The Senate and Good Government". The full script is available from the office of Senator Andrew Murray, Australian Democrats Senator for Western Australia, 111 Colin Street, West Perth, WA 6005, tel. (08) 9481 1455 Fax (08) 9481 1679 ---- The hostility of sections of the news media to the Senate and to the need for governments to compromise is puzzling to the point of being worrying. At base, the real question is whether the Senate is an important component of good government or an obstacle to it. All too often, comments about the Senate in the news media are framed in the context of a series of assertions. I have picked the six most common of these for examination. **The government is elected to govern? Governing is not the same as legislating. The whole point of parliamentary democracy is that governments are forced to submit new legislation to a representative assembly to gain consent for it. So, the reply to the statement that 'the government is elected to govern' is to ask whether this means that parliament should be abolished. **The government has a mandate for this policy? This is not a claim about the merits of the proposed law, but an attempt to forestall discussion. There are three aspects that have special relevance to the Senate. The first is that under the mandate theory parliament is to be excluded from the process of making laws if the executive claims a mandate. As the House of Representatives is a slave to the governing parties, parliament in this context means the Senate. The second aspect is that it presumes that each voter who voted for the Coalition parties endorsed the full sweep of the Coalition election platform and, in particular, all the details of its principal policies. And this is without the fact that the Coalition parties won only 40 per cent of the popular vote and that the same election that re-elected the government also elected a Senate which will be even further from partisan control by the government than the current Senate. The third aspect is that the claim of mandate is a psychological device to challenge the opponents of the government to a form of political chicken. **House of review? The next phrase is 'we should have a house of review not a house of obstruction'. The problem is, what is the use of review if it doesn't include the ability to insist on change? **Unrepresentative (swill)? This phrase is a direct attack on the legitimacy of the Senate The coalition parties won just under 40 per cent of the vote for the House of Representatives at the last election, but gained a fraction over 54 per cent of the seats. Even including those senators who began their terms in 1996, the composition of the new Senate gives the Coalition 46 per cent of the seats. The Senate is certainly more than representative enough to have its actions underpinned by a powerful sense of popular legitimacy. **Minor party senators have only a small fraction of the vote? The point has also been made that minor party and independent senators have much more limited support than do senators chosen for the large parties and that their election is heavily dependent on the transfer of preferences from other candidates, including those from the large parties. This ignores the fact that large party senators are dependent on the flow of preferences too. More than 24,000 Tasmanian voters gave Senator Harradine their first preference compared with fewer than 3,000 New South Wales voters for Senator Faulkner. However, the main point is that 25 per cent of the electorate voted for parties other than the largest two party groupings at the last Senate election. To undermine the legitimacy of the Senate is to deny a substantial portion of the Australian electorate the only effective voice they have in parliament. **Held to ransom by a few minor party senators? But minor party and independent senators have influence only if the two largest partisan blocks refuse to compromise. Unwillingness to compromise may be the kind of strategy that is induced by the present structure of the House of Representatives, but it is not the way to make the most of the circumstances to be found in the Senate. Holding to ransom in this context simply means holding the government to account for the detail of its legislation. **The broader issues There is a common theme running through all six aphorisms just discussed. They come down firmly on one side of a longstanding debate about two major difficulties that have beset democratic government as we know it. The first difficulty is where to draw the line between giving the government enough power to discharge the wishes of the community, but not so much power so that it will tyrannise the community. The second major problem raised by our system of representative democracy is: how important are majorities and where do they fit in a system that values the rights of individuals and minorities? The United States system of government goes out of its way to circumscribe the damage that majority factions can do to the community - some would say too far. Power is dispersed among many governmental institutions which must negotiate with each other and compromise if laws are to be passed and policy implemented. Parliamentary systems like ours give much greater play to majorities. Party politics has helped to dichotomise political life and, when coupled with a parliamentary system, has the power to divide every question into two parts, a majority and a minority. Compromise is seen as a sign of weakness. Unfortunately, this approach does not sit well with other components of our political system. The federal system and the tradition of strong upper houses has been labelled 'consensus democracy' by the American political Scientist Arend Lijphart in contrast to majoritarian democracy where power is concentrated in a single institution, the parliamentary executive, which can take action on its own in the name of the majority. The problem for Australia is that majoritarian and consensus democracy coexist in the same governmental system. This is the reason why a clash between the government and the Senate is more than a simple case of disagreeing over the details of legislation. All that the critics who attack the Senate's role have in their armoury is a bundle of cliches. Still, changes to the structure of government have been made for less cause, and for those who value good government, the price of maintaining the Senate's current role may be a more vigorous public defence. Let that, as the government would say, be our mandate. ---------------------------------------------------------------- This is the Neither public email list, open for the public and general discussion. To unsubscribe click here Mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=unsubscribe To subscribe click here Mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=subscribe For information on [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.neither.org/lists/public-list.htm For archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
