Larvatus Prodeo

Discussion of issues around what Foucault called biopolitics, that is to say, issues where the State intervenes directly to act on citizens’ bodies, or to frame the conditions for their corporeal self-determination, invariably raises the spectre of the conscience vote in Parliament. Issues like abortion or euthanasia, we’re told, are of such moral import that our representatives must look deep into their hearts and souls before they vote on such matters. Unsurprisingly, this issue popped up on the Troppo thread on Terri Schiavo, where Brian Bahnisch wrote in comments:

No doubt pollies will be given a conscience vote, which seems to absolve them of representative duties, their consciences being more finely tuned than ours.

Andrew Bartlett then queried Brian’s contention, writing:

I don’t mind the last eight words, but I was curious about the suggestion that a conscience vote might absolve a representative duty. I don’t want to go too far off-topic, but I would have thought if anything a conscience gave more scope for being representative than the usual ‘toe the party line’ vote.

This interchange raises some interesting issues, which are rarely aired.

There are in effect, two theories of representation clashing here - one the classic Burkean formulation, where a representative owes his or her constituency their judgement. Associated with this is the pure type of liberal parliamentary theory, where truth is held to emerge from rational debate in Parliament. However, with the rise of mass parties in the Ninenteenth Century, and particularly mass parties of the Left, democracy has reduced parliament to more of a forum where representatives are cyphers for party platforms and ideologies.

This is, if you like, a clash between liberalism and democracy. Particularly in the House of Representatives, we cast our votes largely for the candidate whose party we would like to form government (or preference them) on the basis of that party’s ideological position, platform and a general assessment of their direction in government. It’s rare that we would determine our vote on the basis of a Member or candidate’s position on issues such as abortion, and indeed, the experience of Family First demonstrates that such issues are often seen as an unwarranted intrusion of the political into the private sphere. I don’t for instance, know what my local member Arch Bevis thinks about any of these issues with any certainty, and his position on euthanasia (for the sake of argument) didn’t cross my mind for a second when I was deciding whom to vote for. Flutey’s experience when his local MP took a leading role in abortion controversies is instructive here: Flutey thought - with reason - that the ALP generally had a position supporting reproductive rights and that’s the position he wanted his representative to take.

So I’d question the degree to which the conscience vote is compatible with the actual representation of electors’ wills. It seems quite clear that when questions relating to the decriminalisation of sex work or recreational drugs and support for reproductive rights and voluntary euthanasia regularly attract majorities in support of a progressive position far larger than any electoral majority, that our Parliamentarians appear to be more conservative than the electorate on questions biopolitical. Thus, I’d argue, our representatives owe us the basic democratic right of consulting our consciences rather than their own on these matters in the first instance.