Senate is a threat to our future (Australia)

Herald Sun (Melbourne) ^ | 19th February 2015 | Andrew Bolt

[naturalman1975]

AUSTRALIA’s problem isn’t the Abbott Government. No, it’s the other one that’s pushing us to disaster.

Few voters understand that Australia effectively has two governments. One is Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s, which dominates in our House of Representatives and so gets to do the official governing. The other is actually Labor leader Bill Shorten’s, which rules in the Senate.

This second government is a loose coalition of Labor, Greens, Jacqui Lambie and Clive Palmer’s two senators that between them hold 38 of the 76 Senate seats and can block any law the Abbott Government tries to pass.

[naturalman1975]

As has been discussed here before, Australia's conservative Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and the Liberal/National Coalition government he leads is in deep trouble in terms of popularity. This article describes part of the reason why. The Senate has decided to behave in a highly obstructionist manner, blocking legislation, and a lot of Australians don't seem to understand that this is a major part of the reason the government is unable to accomplish certain things - especially in terms of fixing our economy.

Constitutionally, the Senate certainly has the right to block legislation [in simple terms, Australia's system can be considered similar to that of the US - we have a House of Representatives where people are elected to represent certain districts of (at least in rough terms) about the same number of people, and a Senate with an equal number of Senators for each state regardless of population, who are elected on a state wide basis - and legislation must pass both the House and the Senate to become law] but there are two significant reasons as to why the current situation is different than that faced by any previous Australian government.

The first is the unusually hostile political climate leading to the opposition behaving differently from any previous opposition. It has been always been accepted as a basic principle in Australian politics that the Senate will not block legislation that a government specifically campaigned on. That is, if the people elect a government fully understanding that it intends to enact certain legislation, the Senate will respect that the government has a mandate on those particular policies and will pass them through the Senate - they may negotiate on details, but not on the core ideas. Back in 1998, John Howard called an early election specifically so he could get a mandate from the people to introduce a Goods and Services Tax and after his government was reelected the Senate passed it, even though it could have blocked it, specifically because of the mandate from the people. The Labor opposition has now thrown that principle out of the window. They fought very hard to block the repeal of the mining tax, and they fought very hard to block the repeal of the carbon tax, even though the government had clearly campaigned on those issues. These things were eventually passed with the support of minor party Senators, but it took a lot longer than it should have and wasted a lot of time.

The second difference is in the make up of the Senate. Australia's voting system for the Senate is complex because we have preferential voting where you have to number each candidate in order of preference. This works well in House of Representative elections, where you typically only have to number five or six candidates and even in extreme cases, the number doesn't get that high - but in the Senate, especially in the most populous states, there can be 100 candidates on the Ballot Paper. For this reason, there are actually two ways to vote for the Senate - you can choose to vote 'above the line' or below the line. If you choose to vote above the line, you simply have to fill in one box, voting for the party you want - and your preferences are then distributed according to the way that party wants them distributed. Or you can vote below the line, and fill in every single box.

Until the most recent election, only a very small number of people voted below the line. But with the internet, websites were set up where people could enter their views on particular issues, and the computer would generate a list of all the candidates in order the person could then use to cast their vote. In theory, this doesn't sound like a bad thing - but the problem is, it's lead to a Senate very different like any we've had before. Because of the largest numbers of candidates in the largest and the way preferences flowed... well, I won't go into the intricacies, but it means we have a Senate like none we've ever had before - John Howard never had to deal with more than two 'not-aligned with a major party' Senators. Nor did Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard. But Tony Abbott has wound up with 8 of the 76 Senators not coming from the major parties - and they actually hold the balance of power. It's completely changed the dynamics. And one of those Senators comes from a party that won only .5% of the vote at the last election (Ricky Muir, of the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party, who ran just because he wanted to make a point about being allowed to drive his off road vehicle in national parks, and who only joined the party four months before the election, and was selected as their lead candidate in Victoria without even meeting the party leaders... to be fair to Senator Muir, he does seem to be taking his responsibilities seriously and trying to do his best to represent his constituents, but he never ever expected to be elected).