Is Australia mature enough to be a democracy?

Dr Adrian Liston
The Australian National University
and the University of Washington

Under the system we inherited from the British, Australia is a pseudo-democracy. It was a compromise of the time, where the elites had a fondness for the ideals of democracy, but were still rather worried about what would happen if everyone was involved in the process...

Under the system we inherited from the British, Australia is a pseudo-democracy. It was a compromise of the time, where the elites had a fondness for the ideals of democracy, but were still rather worried about what would happen if everyone was involved in the process. Either the elites were worried about nothing or people on mass can act wiser that they were given credit for, because the system worked out fairly well. Australia was commendable in pioneering democracy for women,albeit shamefully slow in recognising equality for indigenous Australians. Unfortunately, our fore-bearers were much more thorough in their efforts to restrict governance to the elites than simply restricting the vote, and political parties have worked since Federation to consolidate their power. So even though we have one of the world's most equal voting methods, the power structures in the heart of the system still manage to give us an undemocratic outcome.

Pseudo-democratic government

We can ignore for the moment the unelected Queen of England and her unelected representative in Australia with the ability to dissolve government. Except for our one notable exception, that undemocratic institution has not overly intruded on our almost-Republic government. The real problem is in the office of Prime Minister as the head of government and our notion of "winner takes all". Consider what it means to be elected Prime Minister - 50% +1 of our lower house representatives vote for him (hopefully in the future it will be necessary to use a gender neutral pronoun), and each of those representatives were elected by 50% +1 votes in each electorate.

There are two problems with this - firstly, only the fraction of voters who live in the Prime Minister's electorate actually got to vote for or against him. Typically we know who will be in power if we elect one party, but not always - internal politics gave us PaulKeating after the public elected Bob Hawke . So this makes our elections proxy-Prime Ministerial elections - why bother to even read up about your local candidate? All you need to know is who they are going to appoint Prime Minister and what their parties' policies are. Candidates crossing the floor are so rare now that one has to wonder if there is even any point in electing representatives - effectively we are giving our entire vote to either the Prime Minister or the Opposition Leader, and a monkey could be trained to always vote with their leader. 

The second problem is that Australian elections are usually very tight, so only a bare majority voted for the government in power (after preferences), or in some cases a minority distributed in the right (or wrong?) places, such as John Howard's 49% victory in 1998 (little known fact, Abraham Lincoln became American President with only 39.9% of the vote thanks to distribution). Since all the votes in the lower house are 50% +1, any party that can elect the Prime Minister can push any legislation through the lower house without even talking to the opposition. So we are left with the spectre of the entire government flipping over every few elections based on the few percent of swing voters. Rather than governing towards the ideals of as many Australians as possible, each government instead tries to reward their party core and chase down those swing voters.

The Cabinet - the least democratic institution in Parliament House

Government gets even less democratic when we look at the most powerful politicians - the Ministers of the Cabinet. Here we cannot blame the founders, because Cabinet is not even mentioned in the Constitution, rather it is a dirty little secret developed by politicians to keep all the real power in a small tight group rather than distributing it to those who were elected. In effect, the Ministers end up with sweeping powers in their portfolio and do not require any democratic vote for most of their actions. And yet these are positions which are completely unelected by any representative system. Under the Liberals they are chosen at the whim of the Prime Minister, under Labor they were chosen by the Labor parliamentary party but Kevin Rudd has removed even this degree of democracy from the choice. This allows the Prime Minister to shuffle, fire and hire by political whim or wind. We may know who is running a department before the election, but that can change in the blink of an eye if they don't please the Prime Minister.

The problem with Parties 

All of these issues consolidate power with the political parties. They rally around a leader who then picks the hand-full of elites who actually run the country. The party will chose who their nominee is by apre -selection that the general public cannot participate in. Where multiple candidates are required they chose the order that nominees are listed on the ballot, to ensure that the party favourite takes the party position. And if that isn't enough to ensure a self-perpetuating elite, the parties then strong-arm individual representatives into always voting along party lines and never making their own judgements. Nearly every piece of legislation then proposed by the Prime Minister will make it through Parliament due to strict party discipline. No wonder few of us bother to find out what our individual representative believes in - it really doesn't matter, all that matters is what party they belong to.

Solutions

We have certainly done well enough by this system, but that does not change the fact that the majority of our government is run by people unelected to those positions. The effort to become a more democratic nation is worthwhile both as a moral objective and as a practical one - who hasn't been left shaking their head at incompetent, self-serving or corrupt government behaviour at some point? Are we mature enough as a society to become a true democracy? Multiple solutions to the situation are all available under current political science theories, all they take is for us to identify the key problems ("winner takes all" power, an unelected cabinet, and the party stranglehold) and then force our government to correct them.

Winner takes all. Possibly the easiest to deal with, the Federal Australian government could simply switch over to multi-member districts. If an electorate is 40% Labor, 20% Green and 40% Liberal, then it should be represented by two Labor, one Green and two Liberal members, rather than a solitary Labor member on preferences. This also shifts the value away from a few key marginal seats that get all the pork, creating competitive seats in every electorate. After the elections we can make the different parties talk by dividing up parliamentary control time according to the percentage of the primary vote achieved. For example, after the 2004 election we could have given Liberal control of procedures for 40% of the time, Labor for 40%, Nationals and Greens for 5% each, and minor parties the rest of the 5%. Procedural control wouldn't let a party pass legislation undemocratically, but it would test their political will and allow all representatives to vote on legislation other than that wished by the Prime Minister. One can imagine this time being make-or-break for minor parties - do the Nationals and Greens waste their time proposing doomed legislation, or can they craft legislation sensible enough that the big parties will go along with it? The big parties too will be tested - no longer can they control the agenda and force issues onto the back shelf, if the opposition party or a minor party raises a popular issue the big parties will either have to vote yea or nay, and make their position public.

An unelected cabinet. When put like that, the solution seems obvious. Elect the cabinet. Let parties and independents put up nominations for Ministers of each portfolio, and let Australia vote nationwide for each post. Is there anything wrong with us thinking for ourselves enough to want, for example, Bob Brown (Greens) as Environment Minister,Petro Georgiou (Liberals) as Attorney-General, Julia Gillard (Labor) for Health and Tim Fischer (Nationals) for Agriculture? The Ministers will still have to follow the legislation put in place by parliament (which, I believe, would suddenly contain more safeguards once the job of putting it in practise doesn't automatically go to your party). The job of Prime Minister will get a little bit more complicated, reaching compromises between different parties, but it will better reflect what Australians want as a society. Best of all, parties will have to come up with comprehensive policies in every portfolio if they want to be elected - no more will it be a personality competition between two men.

Breaking the Party stranglehold. This is always going to be the most resisted by the parties, and therefore the one we'll have to push hardest to get. Yet even here, just a few choice changes could dramatically improve the situation. First of all, stoppre -selections. Let any local party member that manages to gather a threshold of local party votes get onto the ballot. Don't let the party pick the order they are listed either - use a Robson Rotation so donkey votes cancel each other out. That way if we chose to vote for a party, we can chose who best represents our vision of the party, rather than leaving it up to an internal factional war. Secondly, we need to prevent parties from dictating the voting pattern of their members. A representative democracy is meant to have a person represent their electorate, not a party, and that person should vote according to their conscience, not the party-room. If their electorate doesn't like these personal choices, easy, the next election they can pick a new person to represent them, especially once we removepre -selections to give voters real choices. Most importantly, with every representative being free to cross the floor, good ideas by opposition parties can become law if they convince just a few members to vote for them, likewise bad ideas by the ruling party can be blocked even if they are the Prime Minister's pet.

Oh, and while we are at it - why don't we vote for the presidential figurehead too - wouldn't it be great to live in a democratic republic?

Comments (32)

3. Democracy, the "Demos" & representativ Written by This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , on 30-10-2007 09:07 JJ asked me to post this response here    Define "Democracy". To do that, one has to define "demos".    Two score and sixteen years ago, "Demos" was defined (in my Grade 3 history book - Gr 3 was then 5th year of schooling) as: "Any Australian citizen over the age of 21, who is not insane or in prison, has the right to vote" ... followed by statements about "secret ballot" (an Oz first) and "compulsory". Note that the Oz "Demos" has since changed.    In all of the old democracies, Athenian, Roman, pre-Reform Bill English and Australian (when I was in primary school) the Demos had defined rights and responsibilities. Australian followed the English model in which rights were balanced by compulsory voting, and for males, militia training ("Nahso") and jury service.    With "Demos" defined (you can see from the one example given, both the right to vote, and the defined nature of civic responsibilities, have changed in my lifetime) the next question is "What structure?"; a question that has troubled democrats since the Roman Decumviri were (reputedly) sent to Periclean Athens to study their democratic model. They were seriously underwhelmed & unimpressed, with good reason. "Shambles" is probably an apt description and "decision" probably what Athenian democracy was least capable of reaching. The Decumviri went home and they & their successors tweaked the Roman representative model which, further tweaked by Normans, generations of Englishmen [sic] various Reform Bills & changes to what people of what sex and age made up the "Demos", is pretty much what we have today.    In Australia, the elective bi-cameral system, with property qualifications for Legislative Councils and "Demos" defined as male aged 21 and above, was adopted by states. The federal parliament substituted a popularly elected "States House", the Senate (which rapildy became party political), for the Legislative Councils. "Demos" was changed to include women, although they did not have to meet the men's responsibilities (militia, jury service), then the age dropped to 18. Queensland's Legislative Council voted itself out of existence (? in the 1920s?? 30s?). Only very recently has the last Legislative Council relinquished special property or electoral qualifications.    Is there a better structure which is more "representative" of voters? The Republic aside; modern Oz versions of the Decumviri still face the same dilemma: Is there a better system that doesn't end up in a shambles (ironically, "like Italy")? Both houses elected on the Senate system? Some variation of Tasmania's Hare-Clark system? "National Cabinets" with proportional representation?    It is has, in my "politically aware" lifetime, almost never been a major issue, except when one party has been through years of an entrenched government they believe is not representative of them, or they live in a "blue ribbon" seat. Quite frankly, in a lifetime of political arguments, esp in a union / university setting, I can't remember any other major issues than voting age during the anti-Vietnam War era and the Republic.    The main reason is, I think, that, until Howard, especially Howard Rampant with a Senate majority, all governments have been more or less representative of the nation as a whole, with "More or less" being outside the core of agreed Social / Political Justice values plus, divisions over wars, immigration, tariffs etc . Australia was a representative liberal democracy. In some periods, Libs were seen as better; in some (especially in war time) Labor. On the whole, we don't change governments often. I'd say "Happy" but "happy with the government" is in somewhat the same category as "Happy farmer."      .    Last edited by DeeCee (Yesterday 15:24:2 Report

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