A Cracking Parliament

Well, at last we know. We've got a minority Labor government in our first hung parliament in Canberra for 70 years. And haven't the conservative side of politics taken it well? The new government has as much legitimacy, according to Senator George Brandis (Liberal-National, QLD) as the Pakistani cricket team. There is outrage that it has come to this. Isn't it obvious, the right-wingers moan, that the people didn't want a Labor government?

Commentators like Bolt and Harcher have seized on Tony Windsor's comments to say that we have been forced to endure a government which the Australian people don't want. Windsor said that one of the reasons he backed Labor was that he thought they were less likely to rush back to the polls. If he'd backed Abbott, Windsor thought, he'd be likely to call an early election because he believed he might win. But what does this amount to? A subversion of democracy? Hardly.

What it amounts to is that many of the people who are paid vast sums to write about Australian politics haven't a clue about the fundamentals of parliamentary democracy. But in the spirit of fair play and the free exchange of information I will help them out.

Firstly, our system of government is called responsible government. This means that the executive is at all times (in theory) responsible to the parliament. It follows that we have elections not for an executive government but for a parliament. Governments are formed not through elections but in the parliament. A government that loses the confidence of the lower house of parliament must resign. If another party or group of parties can form a government that does have the confidence of the lower house then that government can be sworn in and can remain in office for as long as it keeps the confidence of the house or until the parliamentary term runs out.

This is not actually top secret information. I learned it at school and all the books are still available in the local library. But it seems some professional political writers have never read them.

So we had an election for the Australian parliament and no one party won a majority in the lower house. It followed that until this was sorted out the caretaker phase of the Gillard government would continue. And now after two and a half weeks we learn that with the support of the Green and three independents Labor will have a majority of two in the house of reps. This is twice the size of Robert Menzies' majority in 1961 and I've never heard a conservative commentator describe this second last government of his as illegitimate.

Funny I should mention 1961 because this was the second time in seven years that Labor beat the Coalition in the two-party preferred vote (2PP) and yet failed to win enough seats to win office. It would happen again to Labor in 1969 (the Don's Party election) and again in 1998. It also happened to the Coalition in 1990. That's just the way it goes with our electoral system. It isn't perfect and the number of seats a party wins in the lower house does not reflect accurately the number of votes it has won.

If we had a proportional representation system like we do in the Senate or as they have in Tasmania then it would be different. But in that case the Greens and Labor in this last election would have won 75 seats between them. I don't see any pro-Coalition commentators supporting this idea.

Yet there has been no shortage of such commentators arguing that the Coalition has won the two-party preferred vote this time and that this accords it some right to govern. Apart from the fact that they haven't and it doesn't. The two-party preferred count is continuing to this day and today Labor is winning and will probably finish in front by a whisker. But whether they or the Coalition win the count is irrelevant in constitutional terms.

What we are left with will be, as Rob Oakeshot called it, "a cracking parliament." The government cannot do whatever it likes whenever it likes and this is a great thing. For the life of this parliament ideas will have to be debated on their merits and I actually think this parliament will do more and get more done than a majority Labor government would have achieved. Let's face it, Labor had a majority last time and went to sleep even on "the greatest moral challenge of our time." I don't see Bandt, Wilkie, Windsor and Oakeshot letting it get away with such lethargy this time.

Oh, and another thing. We are told that Oakeshot and Windsor have "betrayed" their conservative electorates by supporting a Labor government. Apart from the emptiness of the terms "right" and "left" in this day and age, has it occurred to anyone who spouts this crap that the voters of Lyne and New England had a choice, as we all did, as to who they voted for. If they'd wanted a Liberal or a National member of parliament they could have voted for one. Hell, they could even vote Labor or Green if they wanted to. But they didn't. They voted for an Independent. Yes, a bloke who didn't belong to a political party. A man who would make up his own mind! God forbid.

Let me give the final word to the father of modern conservative thought, Edmund Burke who opposed the idea that a member of parliament was a mere delegate whose actions must always reflect the will of the voters:

But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion

The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. Volume I (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), pp. 446-8.