Govt lines up double dissolution bills (Australia)

news.com.au ^ | 13th July 2015

[naturalman1975]

THE federal government will give itself the option of calling a double-dissolution election with legislation cracking down on union corruption.

[naturalman1975]

The 'Double Dissolution' is a particular feature of the Australian constitution which was based largely on British constitutional law, but which adopted some ideas from the US Constitution - one of which was the idea of having a legislature with a House of Representatives, where each member represents a (very roughly) equally sized district from across the country, and a Senate where each state has equal representation - and that any new law needs to pass both the House and Senate. There are differences, as well, of course. Generally speaking the Australian House of Representatives is elected at once, but only half the Senate normally comes up for election at any time. The House of Representatives does not have a fixed term (although elections tend to be a little less than three years apart, and the maximum terms allowed is only a little over three years), but Senators normally serve a six year fixed term. Most of the time governments try to have a 'Half Senate Election' at the same time as each general election of the entire House, as it is cheaper to only run one large scale election.

A double dissolution is different. Because of the different structures of the House and the Senate, it is quite common for the basic electoral makeup of both to be different. A government must control the House of Representatives and the Prime Minister is almost always the leader of the party or coalition of parties with a majority in the House (constitutionally this doesn't have to be the case - but there have been only a few brief periods where this hasn't been true, normally following the death in office of a Prime Minister where the Deputy Prime Minister is appointed Prime Minister by the Governor General to hold the office of Prime Minister until the governing party can elect a new leader - which does not have to be the former Deputy Prime Minister), but the Prime Minister and his party often do not control the Senate. The double dissolution exists to head off the risk of a complete deadlock of government in such a case - where a Senate blocks all government legislation.

If a bill is blocked twice by the Senate, with three months between each blockage, a Prime Minister can ask the Governor General to completely dissolve both Houses of Parliament and call full elections of both the House and the Senate. After this full election, a joint sitting of both the House and Senate can be held to pass the law (or laws) that triggered the double dissolution (although without any further amendments). The Senate rarely provokes this situation because it puts all their jobs at risk, and reduces their political power, so the existence of the threat makes the Senate less likely to capriciously block legislation.

In our current government, the conservative Coalition controls the House, but not the Senate - getting a bill through the Senate requires the agreement of the Labor opposition OR the Greens OR a group of independents/single senators - while the Coalition doesn't have a majority in the Senate it does have more Senators than Labor and only needs five of the 18 'crossbenchers' (10 Greens, 8 singletons) for a majority - unfortunately Labor and the Greens often work together to block government legislation and if they do that, they only need to get three of the 8 singletons to help them - which means we do have a fairly obstructionist Senate right now.

So having double dissolution triggers available is something that the government wants - at the moment, it's unlikely they'd use them as the polls would suggest we'd wind up losing the subsequent election, but if the electoral mathematics shifts even a couple of points the other way...