A Queensland Senate is needed to stop corruption

Queensland's unicameral system encourages incumbency because it insulates the government from the kinds of fundamental challenges to its authority that an upper house makes possible.

Oppositions are virtually powerless in lower houses.

Governments use their majorities to determine the parliamentary agenda, sitting days and the workings of the committee system. Anything the opposition initiates is liable to be defeated as a matter of course.

In upper houses, by contrast, oppositions and minor parties typically have greater capacity to inquire, to examine and to scrutinise the government's performance.

Upper houses determine their own agendas, organise their own committee systems and decide when a parliamentary inquiry or more public consultation is required.

In upper houses oppositions are given the opportunity to show not only that the government deserves to be thrown out but that the opposition itself has the capacity to govern.

Oppositions in Queensland have characteristically found it very difficult to oust an incumbent government. Queensland is also the only Australian state to lack an upper house. It is not difficult to connect the dots.

Long periods of incumbency in Queensland have provided fertile ground for corruption because they have endowed governments with profound political advantage and have so limited the impact of oppositions that government members feel invulnerable to attack and become careless about accountability.

Government becomes an extension of the party machine. The governing party makes all the decisions, attracts the interests of lobbyists and business and takes all the credit. Incumbent ministers have the resources to dominate the political agenda, to control the direction of public funds and to manage the release of information to maximise political advantage.

It is crunch time in Queensland for some real democratic institutional reform. The mistake made by the Fitzgerald report was to leave the implementation of its proposals to governments to resolve. They did, with piecemeal reforms which dealt with the effects, but not the underlying causes, of corruption.

Both sides of politics baulked at fundamental reform which would bring to an end the "winner takes all" mentality in Queensland. They did nothing to challenge the underlying problem of executive government domination by re-introducing a democratically elected upper house.

Well, Fitzgerald has spoken again. Queensland is not working.

The Liberal National Party opposition at its recent conference overwhelmingly resolved to restore the upper house in Queensland. Let the Opposition Leader now state whether a future LNP government has got the courage to implement this reform.