Whether or not you think a “Borg is back” t shirt has the same appeal as a Kevin07 one, it’s pretty clear that Lawrence Springborg’s attempt to do a Kevin on Anna Bligh is all about style and very little about substance. Whether it’s the “United Conservative Party” non-starter of an idea, or his crusade on parliamentary standards, Springborg consistently talks process not policy. He has very little to say about the big issues of state politics - health, education, infrastructure, and surprisingly for a conservative leader, not much on Laura Norder.
So it is with the current push for four year terms in Queensland. As Griffith academic Paul Williams observed in the Courier-Mail yesterday, Springborg has muddied the waters of his alleged bipartisan support for a referendum with a number of quibbles about FOI and standing orders. If he persists with these demands, Bligh will just junk the referendum.
In any event, I’m not sure four year terms are all that desirable. The arguments in favour are usually couched in terms of governance and certainty. The first appears to assume good governance as a premise - but have a look at the crazy mess that is the New South Wales government and tell me why having to wait for an election until 2010 is a good thing for citizens of that state. It’s unlikely that Morris Iemma would do this, but Peter Beattie got himself out of a mess in 2001 when his government was beset by scandal by throwing a few MPs out of the Labor Party (including the Deputy Premier) and calling a snap election to renew his mandate and cleanse the Augean stables. In Queensland, the Borbidge/Sheldon government achieved little and was also scandal ridden. It appeared to be a relief to many of its members that electors were able to toss it out after two and a half years.
Similarly, the “certainty for business” argument appears to me to be anti-democratic, at least in principle. I’m not aware of any actual empirical evidence at state level of investment grinding to a halt because of an impending election. What really seems to be demanded is that policies favourable to business should be set in stone for as long as possible. Never mind the electors.
There are good reasons why all the parliamentary reform movements of the nineteenth century demanded shorter parliaments as well as things like secret ballots, payment for MPs and a broader franchise. But, all this aside, Springborg is on a hiding to nothing here. Either he backs down (bad for him), or he is seen as a wrecker (bad for him). And it’s part of a consistent pattern of being overly obsessed with process issues and style over substance.
I’ve been against 4 year terms ever since John Cain’s government disintegrated into the lamest duck in the state’s history. I dread to think what would have happened if Kirner had another year to screw things up more than she did.
When parties argue for four year terms, they really just want to get away with ambush policies in their first year keeping in mind they think the electorate’s memory is only 3 years long.
Four year terms would be a mess under either Labor or the Coalition in NSW, Mark. Both parties are unfit to govern in this state, I’d suggest, we just went ahead and chose the lesser of two evils. My main objection to 4 year terms is it gives too much power to the pollies, who you would usually be able to bet safely would misuse the power, regardless of political colour.Fixed 3 year terms would be okay, because the Premiers/PMs couldn’t decide to go to an election when it best suited them electorally.
I seem to recall that Ron Walker and several other prominent conservatives in the media were strongly in favor of four year terms when the Howard led Coalition was in power.
Curious how their eagerness has suddenly diminished
Mark, it’s not clear from your post whether you are against four year terms, which need not be fixed, or fixed terms, which can be of any length.
The annoying thing is that whilst fixed terms are an excellent idea (no democratic reason why one side should get to pick the date), we’re likely only to be offered them federally if linked with four year terms, which are clearly far too long.
In which case I’ll be voting for the status quo.
What about fixed four year terms or more for pollies on the take? That would be one referendum that you could bet the house on.
But governance isn’t like a sporting contest wherein the process is more important than the outcome.
The Westminster system privileges continuity. And one way in which continuity can be promoted is to allow the executive to choose its time for an election.
Four years maximum elapse of time allows a government to make tough and initially perhaps unpopular decisions without facing too soon the wrath of the voter.
(I’d prefer five years, as in Britain.)
If the voters are furious about what a government does under those circumstances, the voters can lobby hard to demand a vote of no confidence, which will cause a spill of the ministry and perhaps early elections under unfavourable conditions for the governing party.
This dynamic would actually serve to increase the power of backbenchers over their current condition a mere cyphers of the ministry.
In short, I’m in favour of longer terms definitely not fixed in length.
george w. bush.
no four year terms.
i rest my case.
If Mark was on the right side of the border, the argument would simply have been “Morris Iemma.”
I’d support fixed 4 or 5 year terms. Politicians often only look at the short term which leads to suboptimal long term planning. They’re simply not going to make decisions which will lead to long term gains with short term pain when they’re up for election every 3 years (or sooner).
I don’t care either way about Mark’s beating up on the Borg, but I fully agree that the arguments in favour of four year terms are pretty weak. I say that as someone who used to be in favour of longer terms, until I thought about it a bit more.
Particularly in Queensland, which lacks even the minimal protection and scrutiny of an Upper House, and with ever growing centralisation of power, very narrow media scrutiny and an ever growing army of spin doctors, I can’t see many benefits to the community in giving a government an extra year to do whatever they feel like before they have to try to justify their continuing existence.
In an era of the twenty-four hour (or even shorter) news cycle, the notion that governments need an extra year to be able to implement ‘tough decisions’ is dubious. I’ve also seen little evidence to back the argument that business uncertainty caused by shorter terms harms investment (and in as much as there is any truth, fixed terms would be just as much a solution as longer terms).
Unless we brought in some sort of Californian style recall mechanism - which would be rarely used but useful to have available in an emergency - and restored an Upper House to at least make Parliament slightly independent of the government, I don’t see enough justification for giving people even less of a say than they have now.
It’s not that governments need an extra year to make tough decisions, it’s that in the year leading up to an election, they make no decisions at all. With a four year term this means government paralysis only 25% of the time, compared with 33% of the time with three ywear terms.
Example: the health care agreement between the Commonwealth and the states was supposed to be renegotiated last year but because it was an election year the Howard government refused to even begin negotiations.
What Spiros said.
Three year or three month terms would not save us in NSW. The problem is that both major parties are equally incapable of governing and one happens to be the to the right of Attila the Hun. A directly elected premier might save us, because it’s doubtful if even the NSW Right and the NSW Liberals would be capable of nominating two such boobs as Iemma and whatsisname the ex-navy man in a direct eelction.
There is no defence against weak and silly governments, whether you have two-year or ten-year terms. It is possible for governments to ignore important issues for decades.
If politicians thought longterm plans would be electorally appealling, they’d make longer terms. If you set up a house of mirrors, where the political environment reflects the daily news cycle and vice versa, you can’t complain that you’re itching to do some longterm planning if only the media weren’t so damn short term.
On balance, I support 4 year terms. Cleary, three years are too short for good governance and too long for bad. The same applies to 4 year terms.
Perhaps the 2020 Conference will consider the possibilities of how modern communications might rethink the dated notion that Democracy means ticking boxes once every 3/4 years.
[color=red]Here’s hoping![/color]
The difference between four year fixed terms and un-fixed 3 year terms is much bigger than it sounds. A 3 year un-fixed term gives you elections more like every two and a half years on average when you consider early elections and the fact that governments rarely wait until the last minute to call an election.
The biggest problem with 4 year terms is that it destroys the oppositon. They become irrelevant for such a large part of the electoral cycle that its very hard to attract quality candidates. Espectially when you consider that political promotion within a party happens with respect to electoral cycles. Someone looking to become an opposition MP faces the prospect of 12 years with perhaps just two realistic chances within that time of becoming even just a government MP, let alone a minister. Its just not attractive to people with real talent. And what makes this really bad is that the government always comes from opposition. The NSW Libs are hopeless, but one day they will be the government. Then Labor NSW will be the opposition and after 12 years and probably only two competetive elections they’ll be as hopeless as the Libs are today and NSW wil be blessed with two second rate political parties.
Four year fixed terms. The weakness or otherwise of State parties is no excuse. The problem is the poor Government/Opposition, not the constitutional provision.
You would (hopefully) not always have a situation as is the case in NSW at the moment where both parties were disastrous. And NSW Labor is not a total write-off. There are competent politicians there who will not become ministers because of the
maaaaatesfaction system. Override the factions and you might get decent government.Unlike the Liberals, who consist of a scared leader who is marginally presentable. And no one else.
wpd,
[color=red]Here’s hoping![/color]
I tried that on PB and it didn’t work there either.
That’s BB code. HTML tags for colour don’t work either.
You have a very parsimonious range of text effects here. We Lefties are puritanical
WE’ve got four year terms in Victoria. Introduced in 2006 and seems to have worked out fine so far.
You’ve had decent governments in Victoria, Nabs. Recently.
Well not decent but effective.
But if they don’t sort out the public transport clusterfuck soon, then at the next election I’m voting…informal.
Time to bite the bullet - and make it unticketed (the trams and trains). Certainly be cheaper and less taxing on the grey matter of Nab’s mates at Dept of Infra.
By sort out you mean deprivatise it, rearrange the jurisdictional shitfest, stop trying to run it for profit and actually invest in new lines?
Under Brumby?
Fixed terms are the way to go; I can’t believe people aren’t jumping up and down about the conflict of interest arising from having the government choose when they’ll next face the people (and, yes, I recognise that there are time limits). People argue that fixed terms allow bad governments to stay in power but it’s very rare for an unpopular government to bring forward an election date and boot themselves out of office.
Being Queensland, we should aim to have something slightly strange about our fixed terms. 3.5 years between elections? 1000 days?
Of course, if a government is found to be acting illegally it’s possible for the Governor to sack them before the end of their term. Restarting the election cycle from there allows the new government a full term and the date changes. How often do you think a government gets sacked, though?
My preferred electoral system involves an Additional Member System of Proportional Representation so that we get localised representation but still allow a voice to the minority parties. AMS, done well, can ensure that all voices are heard. Compulsory preferential voting on the local ballot and a simple checkbox (radio button) on the party list ballot.
Three or four years, what’s the difference? Really… Fixed terms are just brilliant though, especially for us bureaucrats. We can plan ahead without fear of an election to just ruin everything.
I always liked Bracks, but the greatest thing he did was reforming the upper house and introducing fixed (four year) terms.
On the derail re public transport - I’m reluctantly voting Greens until they fix the system. Lots of other people think this way, and the ALP tracking polls will have to pick that up, I hope and expect some big wads of cash to be found sometime in a year or two. Unfortunately PPPs aren’t resonating in the public yet so that will be the financing method.
The AMS system would solve some of the problems seen in NSW and other states, but it’s a bit strange to adopt MMP, a system with significant flaws (closed lists, tension between list and electorate MPs, significant advantage to geographically concentrated groups like the Nationals and against geographically dispersed groups like the Greens, significant wasted votes because sub threshold parties get their votes thrown away to make the system work) when we’re already used to STV in multimember districts. Combining MMP with preferences merely makes a weak system hopeless. It’s a non-trivial fact that no MMP system in the world also uses preferences. MMP with preferences was used briefly in the ACT and proved itself a disaster.
Sorry to get a bit off-topic….
But speaking of reform of govt processes, can we have a thread to discuss the things that Sen Faulkner is ramming through at present in the area of political donations, electoral rolls, govt. advertising, etc.?
He’s effectively rolling back Howard’s worst excesses in this area - which will hopefully provide the kind of extra checks and strengths that Andrew Bartlett discussed above.
3 or 4 year terms - I can go with either - but it’s only one part of the jigsaw.
Alan, I don’t think the “perfect” electoral system is attainable. Every election will have some amount of wasted votes simply because candidates must lose. What is important is allowing people who support minor parties to have their votes count. In Queensland, voting Green/Democrat/Family First is almost guaranteed to have no impact beyond funding and “sending a message”. The message sent becomes stronger when it is accompanied by an MP.
AMS with the Single Transferable Vote means people can vote for who they want to represent them without having to choose a Prime Minister/Premier in the same decision. When there’s a large number of extra seats up for grabs, minor parties will flourish. A reasonable threshold (say, 2-5%) should be enough to see a number of minor parties get a candidate up when, if those voters lived in the same seat, they would get one elected under single member electorates.
There is a balance between list and electorate seats to be achieved; major parties may just throw their powerbrokers on to the list to ensure their election without having to campaign heavily in an electorate. Of course, this isn’t entirely a bad thing because it avoids having “parachute” candidates installed against the local branch’s wishes.
It’s a tricky business to get any PR system up and running for a lower house but it’s inherently much fairer than the de facto First Past the Post that we’ve got here in Quinceland.
I’m in favour of fixed three-year terms. I don’t think the government should have the power to choose when they want to hold the election, and four years is too long, in my opinion, without being made accountable to the voters.
Under MMP people are significantly less likely to have their votes count, either in assigning seats to parties or deciding who is to represent the party. STV in multimember gives them significantly greater control of of both questions. MMP solves the wasted vote problem by throwing away the votes of anyone whose party does not reach a certain threshold, typically 5%. I’ll repeat that, it throws away their votes. They become dead votes with as much impact on the election as dead parrots. That is not a happy characteristic for for a democracy proposal in the 21st century.
In an STV election every vote at least gets counted. MMP thresholds vary widely and there’s no obvious formula for setting it. I wonder how high JWH’s intellectual successor would choose to set the threshold? 5%? 6%? 10%? Bear in mind we’re not talking here about the total percentage of votes that get thrown away. Set it at 5% and put a couple of parties just under that threshold and you’ve disfranchised almost 10% of the electorate.
MMP typically relies on a close list, and even where the list is theoretically open, it is remarkably rare for the for a candidate to be defeated, or even moved down the list, by by personal votes. It’s really hard to understand why a country sued to STVPR would suddenly adopt MMP.
Just to clarify (re Spiros at 4), I support fixed terms, but I think four years is too long.
Professor Quiggin put a good case for fixed three year terms in October last year. The thing that’s strongly in favour of three year terms Federally is that they would not require a referendum.
Alan, I definitely think the STV is the way to go and we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater in any move to a PR system.
As for where to set the threshold? The threshold should be the point at which a party can gain one seat if the entirety of the count was used to allocate the extra seats.
Say in Queensland we allocate 45 seats to restore proportionality to the results of the 89 seats we currently have. That puts the theoretical threshold at 0.74%, something of which most parties are capable. If 0.74% of the state votes for a party, they can qualify for 0.74% of the seats. Any party with less and 0.74% of the statewide vote can pretty much said to have a lack of support. Parties who win seats but don’t gain the 0.74% threshold (such as One Nation) are still entitled to hold their seats, obviously.
This evidence-based threshold is far superior to the 2% or 5% which is common elsewhere. A party’s success in any PR system should only be limited by the number of seats on offer not by arbitrarily drawing a line at a number.
Incidentally, further to the issue of how thresholds can be manipulated:
Setting a threshold as low as .74 would have the lowest threshold on the planet, by a factor of at least 2. I’m not quite obsessed enough to run the mathematics, but but I suspect a threshold that low would result in serious disproportion as you dispersed too much of the vote across a wide range of parties. Of course you could cure that by allowing votes to be transferred, but then you’d be moving from MPP to STV so your argument would collapse. You’d also need both overhang seats to counterbalance the overrepresentation of small parties, and then balance seats to counter the overrepresentation of large parties that receive overhang seats
I’m not joking, Germany has both overhang and balance seats, both of which expand the parliament beyond its ‘official’ size. MMP sounds great, but as soon as you start analysing it falls apart. In any case what’s so great about a system that empowers parties at the expense of voters.
You’d be hard-pushed to find anyone in NSW that was eager to adopt MMP so that Iemma’s ability to control his MPs was expanded. Adopting MMP is not throwing out the baby with the bath-water, it’s drowning the baby first.
MPP relies on a first past the past vote and hence I hate it with a burning passion. I’m also wondering about how on earth minor parties’ over-representation can be a problem when the very notion of over-representation is that parties win more seats through the electorates than they’re entitled to through the list vote.
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater would be ditching STV to move to PR.
Also, minor party over-representation isn’t such a huge problem as far as I’m concerned due to the huge difference in the number of seats allocated.
Sam, MMP and AMS are the same system. The Blair government chose to call the MMP systems it adopted for Scottish. Welsh and MEP elections as a less European sounding name and came up with AMS. The Jenkins Report did recommend a combination of MMP and STV they called AV Plus, but that was never adopted. AV Plus and the mess used to elect the first two ACT legislative assemblies, are the only systems I’m aware of that have combined MMP with preferential voting. The Canbeera system was replaced with STV and AV Plus has never been tried.
I take Andrew Bartlett’s point and it is one of the reasons I don’t think this issue can be thought about in isolation from an upper house. My argument for fixed four-year parliamentary terms are underpinned by a need for an upper-house in QLD. We currently have a situation in this state where the government has amended the Criminal Code to basically allow ministers to lie with absolute impunity to parliamentary committees. It is far from an ideal situation we find ourselves in.
Mark, would your opinion change if QLD had an upper house?
I also agree that much of the third year is lost to a campaign machine so we see a two year term at the moment.
Alan, you’re right about the Jenkins report. I’d blogged about it previously but forgot about its findings and recommendations. Perhaps Qld could lead the world in electoral reform (omg) and implement AV+.
I’d have to say that Queensland would do much better if it was to implement Tasmanian style STV than an MMP model. Whether it’s MMP with preferences (like what you call AV+) or the basic MMP model, and I can’t see any part of Australia junking preference voting, it’s much more clunky and open to manipulation than multi-member electorates.