It's the major parties' fault

I think one problem with the Senate is that its structure is such that a government achieving more than 50 percent of the vote in the Senate, is not guaranteed a majority in the Senate. It needs to achieve (I think) something like 54%. It would be a fair argument to say that if the voters supported the government in the Senate to the extent that it had received more than half the popular (primary) vote, then the government should enjoy a majority in the Senate. The thing is, that difficulty hasn’t arisen in the last twenty years. We shouldn’t forget that the public almost never gives a majority of the primary vote to one party in either House.

Senator Coonan’s view is that the Senate is now "dysfunctional". Her solution to this dysfunctionality seems to be to eliminate representation of minority opinion within the Senate. Is this really acceptable?

Shouldn’t we instead insist that our politicians take a less combative approach? If they don’t have the numbers, shouldn’t they try to negotiate rather than to disenfranchise?

It seems to me that we need to think a bit harder, and be a bit bolder in the solutions we suggest. For years now, constitutional debate has been subsumed by the banality of whether we should reform the constitution to allow for a republic in which virtually nothing changes except the pictures in the RSL’s and Scout dens, and the flags flown outside our myriad parliaments and other legislative assemblies.

Perhaps we should be thinking about how the country might be better governed, or whether our citizens’ rights are properly protected instead.