The new Senate won’t formally sit until 26 August, but scrutiny of the Greens Senators, Family First’s Stephen Fielding and South Australian Independent Nick Xenophon has already been ramped up, since they all now collectively hold the balance of power. Props to my CPD colleague Ben Eltham for interviewing Xenophon and thus introducing him and some of his policy positions to those of us who aren’t familiar with South Australian politics.
While the Greens’ policy positions are well known, or if they’re not, they’re reasonably accessible, and thus transparent for those who take the time to look, Xenophon’s disclaimer of any left/right ideological commitment and indeed the relatively narrow range of issues on which Fielding has taken a prominent stand raises an important question. Unfortunately, we’ve lost our most prominent blogging Senator - from the Senate, that is, not from blogging. One of the Democrats’ more laudable stances was accountability to their membership (although aspects of that commitment - particularly the low threshold for a leadership challenge - were also probably a large contributor to their downfall), and Andrew Bartlett carried this level of accountability to a broader public through blogging the work of the Senate, which also allowed for public input into his legislative and policy decisions.
Because mainstream media coverage of the Senate is woeful at best, we at LP will definitely be shining what light we can on what goes on in the Upper House, and I also hope that enables some citizen input into its deliberations, even if indirectly. But I also hope that GreensBlog will be able to provide a focus on fostering a deliberative and open ilnterface between the Senate and citizens, and maybe Xenophon should consider starting a blog? After all, his responsibility as a balance of power Senator goes beyond his duty to his South Australian constituents. While there are obviously political ramifications to the fact that the Senate is no longer controlled by any one political party, it’s also an important opportunity to build on the work that has already been done - largely by activists not parliamentarians and governments - into opening up the nation’s Parliament.
Update: OpenAustralia has been blogging about who’s been blogging about OpenAustralia.
Well said, Mark. An OpenSenate project would certainly be of great value but the Greensblog is a pretty good source for news regarding happenings in the chamber. Christine Milne and her staffer Tim Hollo have done a good job covering things like Estimates Committee meetings and a brief look at Scott Ludlam’s website shows he is at least familiar with the concept of blogging.
It’ll indeed be sad to not have Andrew Bartlett giving us the skinny on the Senate’s proceedings from a first hand perspective. I don’t doubt that he’ll be keeping an eye on the new Senate and informing us of the behaviour of the groups which hold the balance of power.
It will also be interesting to see how Xenophon does over the next six years. He says he’s neither left nor right and has stressed that he’s “not a politician”. What I’m interested to know is whether he will act as a bridge between left and right as the Democrats seemed to be or whether he’ll be milking his role for all he can a la Brian Harradine.
“What I’m interested to know is whether he will act as a bridge between left and right as the Democrats seemed to be or whether he’ll be milking his role for all he can a la Brian Harradine.”
The bloke has enough intelligence, to continue Sams’ cow product theme, to know where his ‘bread is buttered’ and think of South Australia First.
A not unreasonable thing to do in the State Representative House where parties and “left or right” are the newish concepts on the Senate block.
I recall some advice from [i]The Prince[/i] that one should never pretend to have taken no side, all it does is earn enmity from all sides. And that people who say they are above the fray can’t be trusted, and may in fact be more devious than the honestly partisan.
Huh. That’s what I get for hanging out on BBCode-enabled forums all day.
I would like to see openaustralia.org extend their coverage to the senate.
joe2, I’m not sure parties are the new kids on the Senate block - rather at Federation:
(a) the party system hadn’t reached any sort of settled form and national government was very limited constitutionally in the scope of its action - basically until the 1922 Engineers’ Case when the High Court began to take a more expansive view of commonwealth power;
(b) the second phase of the Senate was rigid control by the same party as held power in the HoR or the opposition by lopsided majorities due to the size of the Senate and the electoral system.
If we really need advocates for state interests, we have them in the Premiers, because a lot of the substance of decisions affecting the states are made outside the parliamentary era and by negotiation between the commonwealth and states and territories.
Don’t forget Barnaby Joyce claims to put Queensland interests first. Is there really a Queensland or a South Australian point of view on, say, fiscal policy or defence policy? If the Harradine path is followed, what SA will get is useless porkbarrelling in exchange for one individuals’ subjective preferences having representation far bigger than that person’s vote on the national stage would warrant.
Peter at 5, it would make a lot of sense. Backbenchers in the House of Commons express much more of their personal view in debates, and even vote on occasions or regularly across party lines than the very rigid discipline we see in the Australian House of Representatives. It’s been modeled on the UK TheyWorkForYou.com site, but in our context it would add a lot more value if it scrutinised the Senate.
Penguin edition p72. Now what does it say about me that I have this immediately to hand?
Can’t remember if I originally got the link from an LP post, but I really like the Lords of the Blog - although our senators could take it as a model, we don’t have many intelligent senators, and of course one is much more attracted to read posts from authors with names such as Lord Norton and Baroness Young.
It is a great name! And check out the number of blogging MPs on the blogroll.
One of my regrets is that I never really get warmed up into the blogging thing while still in a balance of power role. Detailing some of the processes and rationales as it unfolded could have been helpful. Mind you, I did try that in a sense with the stem cell vote - being an all party conscience vote it opened up the possibilities more - and while I found some of the comments useful, it didn’t garner as much interest and input as I thought it might. Which is a pity really, as the longer I examined the issue, the less sure I became.
Balancing between the necessity of clearly putting one’s position versus posing the questions and being publicly open to persuasion is always going to be rather tricky, but I do think there is still a lot of untapped potential for smaller parties to not only use the web to inform in a more unvarnished way, but to enable genuine input.
And whilst I don’t want to sidetrack the thread onto the Democrats, I feel I should respond to this:
This line of argument is used quite often, but the evidence for it isn’t very strong. I think it puts way too much blame on the party’s members and absolves the Senators of too much. It was the party’s Senators’ decisions and actions that lost public support, not the memberships’. Indeed, the main time this provision of membership generated leadership ballots caused a change of leadership was when it led to Natasha Stott Despoja becoming leader in April 2001 - an event which almost certainly saved the party a number of seats at the 2001 election 6 months later. It was when the member endorsement of her leadership was in effect reversed by a majority of Senators in 2002 and Stott Despoja forced out of the leadership that the party’s outlook became terminal.
(Having said that, I still don’t advocate such a recall type provision - or at least unless it has a much higher threshold.)
Andrew, yes, but the actions of (some) Senators in utilising that provision is surely a consequence of the provision not really having been thought through. It also probably raises some issues about the tensions between being a delegate and a representative, and between being a balance of power party and being a “player”.
Just on the point about your blogging the last time you were in a balance of power situation - the Australian blogosphere was (from the point of view of public awareness) more or less invisible at the start of the last parliamentary term. Even if our visibility isn’t what we might like, the concept of blogging is now much better known, and all the trends which encourage a participatory culture are continuing and gathering strength. That’s why I think both scrutiny of the new Senate and perhaps also some of the new (and newly empowered) Senators taking an active role regarding open deliberation might be an idea whose time has come.
Definitely agree with that - although there will always be limits on how open MPs themselves can be without leaving themselves to open to political attack. Which is why it would be a good thing for other blogs to focus more on too (and sites like Open Australia too). The Senate is an area the press gallery mostly ignore, and there is a lot of space for more in-depth examination.
Major balance of power decisions usually don’t come along too often (which is the only time most of the media pay attention) but there are heaps of small but informative votes on a myriad of issues, as well as many Committee inquiries and the like which give a much feeler indication of the approach and effectiveness of various individuals and groups. Now that the Senate once again has more scope to do some genuine examination of issues and legislation, there should be plenty of areas to comment on, beyond the occasional power play and publicity posturing.
At a very basic level, Andrew, it’s good to see that there are now rss feeds for matters relating to Senate committee deliberations and inquiries and reports. What the British stuff (and TheyWorkForYou isn’t the only example - also the Public Whip for example) relies on is datastripping - taking public information and recasting it in more citizen and comment friendly form, whether or not teh authorities like it. It’d be really good if someone with the requisite technical skills could work out how to do that with Senate stuff. One of the talks I went to at the CCi conference that was most interesting was from Richard Allan - who’s a former MP now working on an open government project - and I was really interested to see how much further ahead public initiated feedback and scrutiny projects were in the UK compared to here.
He has a blog, of course:
http://www.richardallan.org.uk/
“One of my regrets is that I never really get warmed up into the blogging thing while still in a balance of power role.”
Fuckin’ A! While I can’t say I agreed with all your political views Senator Andy, you were the first intelligent, responsible and genuinely committed to what Parliament really means pollie to use blogging as a real and effective tool for comprehension and feedback about what our employees in Canberra get up to.
I see no reason why people across the political spectrum shouldn’t contribute to the Andrew Bartlett Pollie Blog Foundation - which would provide an annual server hosting fee and technical advice to an up and coming young backbencher/freshman senator from any party that shows a genuine commitment to making the whole business of parliament more transparent and truly interactive and representative.
Australia’s not gonna get a C-Span in hurry. And why should we? Every parliamentarian worth their salt should be providing live webcam feeds from their laptops during everything from question time to committee hearings. Well maybe I exaggerate slightly.
But if ever a now technically disinterested but well experienced and committed person is gonna nudge, heckle, inspire and facilitate parlimentarians into getting with the online times, it’s you Andrew.
Go for an ARC grant coupled with a private sector funds drive. Even people completely opposed to your political views would agree that a web cam infested Parliament full of blog literate pollies would be a definite improvement on the Press Gallery as info gatekeepers or wading through Hansard.
Xenophon’s views are closely alligned with Family First. That’s been reported on here in Adelaide before.
Baroness Young is a serious writer and a genuinely quirky intellect. She’s well worth listening to.
Thanks for the great post, Mark, and for including reference to Greensblog. We certainly have every intention of using it as you suggest, and I hope we have already begun to do so (as Sam, at least, thinks we have).
Re OpenAustralia, I have their commitment that they plan to include the Senate as they get the resources - so give them your support and it’ll happen!
Re Senate numbers, I’d just encourage everyone to remember Barnaby Joyce, Marise Payne, Bill Heffernan and any other somewhat maverick Coalition MPs. I’d be very surprised if we didn’t find more crossing of the floor from that side in the coming years than we saw from Labor in the last 12. And will the Nats as a group start to find their voice separate from the Libs?
Finally, Andrew Bartlett, inspiration to so many, including the two Tims behind Greensblog, please keep it up and shine the light on the Senate (and elsewhere) through your ongoing work.
Thanks Tim - will see how it goes.
All definitely worth watching for (and encouraging), although I’d be surprised if its overly widespread. Even if it only happens once, it will be more than Labor ever manage given their ruthless caucus solidarity rules (which I think provide a massive cop out for individuals, but that’s another matter). As poor old LIna Kirk’s case shows, these guys even think its OK to bury people when they vote the ‘wrong’ way on a conscience vote!
Barnaby is always a possibility, but I’d be surprised if Heffernan actually crosses the floor - he operates more by backroom pressure and public complaint, but I don’t think he’s ever gone so far as to break ranks. In a much much quieter and more measuered way, Marisa Payne is the same. Despite many possibile opportunities, she never has to date, but used the potential of being able to do so to great effect, esp on a refugee Bill.
But there’s a few others there who might do so in the right circumstances - Sue Boyce would have just a week or two ago on the attempt by the Lib leadership to bury the same sex super discrimination Bill, again showing even the genuine threat of being able to cross the floor can help to mitigate major bastardry.
If the Lib-Nat merger in Qld proceeds, as now appears likely, it will put a curious new twist on the potential for the Nats to find a ‘different voice’ to the Libs. I suspect the wheat single desk may have been the last hurrah for major differentiating, although maybe Gippsland has given them a bit more of a taste for such things.
The problems the Greens will have with ‘balance of power’ is that they are not really a balance of power pary at all - they are idealogues. IMHO, the Democrats lost their way under Stott Despoja because the party moved too far to the left. They then lost relevance after the Coalition controlled the Senate. Hard to be the party of balance-of-power when there is no balance-of-power.
Now we’re back in BOP mode again - but can the Greens actually play that role? Difficult to see - they don’t seem to be a party that will compromise deeply held idealogical positions. The point about BOP is that you are not setting policy - you are moderating the worst excesses of the government of the day. Your mandate, by definition, means that you need to be able to compromise.
The Democrats under Kernott and Lees did that very well. Stott Despoja was too ‘Green-like’.
Andrew @ 21 (not Bartlett), that is a very narrow understanding of balance of power and one which fails to recognise the huge opportunities is presents.
Balance of power, fundamentally means nothing more and nothing less than a situation where no one party or bloc holds a majority. What each party or bloc then does with this situation will shape how it works.
In its best incarnations it has been used both to temper the worst excesses of the government of the day (the Democrats were the champions of this kind of work) and also to innovate, drive cross-party thinking and achieve some very major reforms. In the latter camp, I’m thinking particularly of my boss Christine Milne’s use of balance of power in Tasmania in the ’90s to achieve gay law reform, gun law reform, an apology to indigenous Tasmanians and much more. It was Christine’s cross-party negotiations which brought those issues to the table and successfully got tri-partite support or at least conscience votes.
There is no rule to say that you cannot set policy with balance of power. In a very real way, tempering government policy is setting policy in its own right, and so it should be.
Those predicting disaster - wait and see. No-one knows what will happen for sure, but everyone involved is determined to make the best of it.
A final point I meant to mention before, relating more to Mark’s original post, is that our two new Senators - Scott Ludlam and Sarah Hanson-Young - are both young and highly computer literate. Scott is already a keen user of Greensblog and I’m expecting you will see much more from both of them on the blog than you have thus far of the sitting Senators themselves.
Point of order, Mr Speaker. The Mother Parliament publishes its hansard online in an XML format. XML is, amongst other things, designed to be automatically transformable into different formats.
The Australian Parliament does not do this; OpenAustralia are the ones stuck with screen-scraping.
Jacques, TheyWorkForYou has been around since 2000. When they started off, they had to do datascraping. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
I don’t really want to take on a role of Democrats’ legacy defender, but I do think its worth looking at some of the history to ensure lessons learnt for the future are the right ones. There is regular punditry postulation of a perception of some leftward shift by the Dems - although when it allegedly happened seems to be very fluid - but there’s not a lot of examples put forward to demonstrate it actually happened. I appreciate that in politics perception often is the same as reality, but the post-election voter surveys assessing their perceptions of where the parties stand on the left-right specturm don’t show much of a shift over time.
There was just as much negotiating under Stott Despoja and subsequent leaders as there was previously, and there was a consistent pre and post Lees position on key BofP issues like IR, with no splits amongst the Senators. I don’t particularly care how Left or otherwise people want to paint the Democrats as being, but the notion that there was a significant leftward lunge in the last decade or two isn’t matched by the evidence. What did undoubtedly happen was a major shift to the right, esp by the Coalition - thus dragging Labor with them to an extent.
But these sorts of assertions will always be made in a BofP scenario - you are make an agreement and get labelled a sell out who compromises on your principles, or you don’t support something and get told you a bunch of intransigent extremists creating a hostile Senate. Its perhaps best to look at the final statements by other party leaders (and most of the previously hostile media) when the Democrats were finally exiting, admitting that despite all the rhetoric to the contrary over the years, on the whole they performed their Senate role responsibiliy and effectively.
One benefit the Greens will have is that they won’t have another competitor party alongside them in the Senate ready to attack them whenever they do make an agreement, which is the situation the Democrats were in for the last decade or so. While there is always a need to consider how your core supporter bases will respond to any deal, it will be easier to handle that without a competitor looking to target some of that same base.
In any case, as Tim sort of alludes to, balance of power is about a lot more than just having the swing vote on an issue. As the last few years showed, even with a major party controlling the Senate, there was still scope to use the position of influence that comes with having a voice and a credible argument in the Senate to get some significant outcomes. Its just that this type of work doesn’t usually get as much media attention.
Update: OpenAustralia has been blogging about who’s been blogging about OpenAustralia.