Should we have by-elections?

There are arguments both ways. In favour of a change is that it would save a lot of money and effort. It would also stop pork barrelling. Pork barrelling is bad enough at a general election. At least it is diffused among quite a few marginal seats. But when only one seat is up for grabs, the political leaders’ largesse knows no bounds.

However, it may be that allowing the party to nominate a new Member without facing an election makes the process too easy for someone to leave without completing their terms.

History bears this out. The Constitution was changed in 1977 to allow for party replacement for the whole of the remainder of the six-year term. Previously, the State Government could replace a dead or resigning senator until the next half-Senate election when there would be a by-election if the term of the replaced senator would have otherwise continued for a further three years.

Since then, there have been about 50 senate vacancies as against only 40 in the House of Representatives, and the Senate is only half the size of the House.

So fear of a by-election might put a slight brake on Members leaving. That was certainly the case in the Howard years. Only one Coalition Representative was allowed to resign in the Howard years, against 16 senators.

But you have to put against that the lame-duck problem.

Do we want to force people to stay in Parliament beyond their use-by date? It is hardly fair to the voters. MPs do more than just make up the numbers to form a government. They also attend to a lot of representation work - helping people (even those who did not vote for them) in tussles with bureaucracy or fights for improved services.

Maybe Howard shot himself in the foot by putting the lid on by-elections because the team had to “carry” the forced-to-stay-put MP; there was less new blood; and the electorate missed a chance to let off steam.

You may argue that having the party choose the new Member is not democratic, but in fact that is what happens nearly all the time.

Since Kim Beazley senior (against whom our new Chief Justice Robert French, then in his early 20s, ran against one election) ran successfully in the by-election caused by the death of Prime Minister John Curtin in 1945 we have had 87 by-elections.

In only eight of them did the seat change from one major party to the other. The seat changed to independent or minor or between Coalition parties on the five other occasions when a by-election saw a seat change hands.

So in 74 out of 87 by-elections since World War II the major political party picked the new Member anyway.

We may as well formalise it and adopt the Senate system in the House of Representatives as well. Admittedly, it would require a change to the Constitution - and one would hope in a clause much shorter than the 843 words it took to spell out the Senate system in 1977.

The case for having party replacement in the House of Representatives is probably stronger than the case for the Senate. In the House the new Member gets the balance of only a three-year term, not a six-year term as in the Senate. So it is less “undemocratic” because the replacing Member faces an election pretty quickly anyway.