Fixed terms, unintended consequences

John Della Bosca has had a fall and now The Sydney Morning Herald has made a call: Nathan Rees should visit the Governor and just go to the polls.

Many hanker for an early election. However, the presence of a fixed four-year terms acts as a barrier.

The concept was introduced into New South Wales following an agreement between Nick Greiner and the independent members of Legislative Assembly following the 1991 election that produced a hung parliament. The rationale is explained by Clover Moore, one of the independents who negotiated the agreement, where she says on her website:

My work to reform Parliament led to the current four year fixed terms of State Government, reducing the number of elections and the political manipulation of their timing.

The then government acknowledged the idea was one of a number of:

… changes to the framework of Government in New South Wales to respect a strong Parliament and to ensure the accountability of Executive Government to the Parliament are necessary.

The fixed term concept is now washing through the other Australian jurisdictions. It strikes me the idea works from a wrong premise.

It presumes Australian Parliaments are strong. They are in fact quite weak. Party discipline is so strong that independent action by MPs is almost unheard of. What the Executive wants, the Executive gets.

For all intents and purposes, under NSW law a successful no confidence motion is necessary to bring about an election. Short of a schism in the ALP, if the NSW Government really decided to bring an election some government members would have to tactically abstain from the vote. This could be called the “Bundestag solution”. Germany has the same sort of fixed term provisions as NSW.

In 2005, members of the German government abstained from voting in a confidence motion so that an election could be called following increased dissatisfaction with, and instability within, a coalition of the Social Democrats and the Greens. However, query whether that would look fair dinkum to either the electorate or (for that matter) the Governor. After all, the intention of fixed four-year terms is to reduce the number of elections and the political manipulation of their timing.

And so, it would appear the NSW Government will be with us until 2011.

Fixed four-year terms for a parliament weakened by rigid party discipline is poor public policy. I do not believe in fixed terms. There are some occasions where the capacity to call an election is desirable. For instance there could an issue that is so big that it is proper to call an election to decide on whether the policy is a good idea - a “back me or sack me” election.

Alternatively, there could be civil unrest of some nature (like a series of strikes) such that it is appropriate to call a “who runs the country” election.

However, you can’t really identify whether an issue is one of these sorts of issues in advance. Everything turns on the political context of the day.

That is not to deny that there is a legitimate expectation that a government will usually run to term, or that there will be parliamentary leaders who will go to the electorate for cynical political reasons. However, I think the electorate is smarter than many in the political classes think. Anything that is particularly cynical will be punished. The last Western Australian election is probably case in point.

And in any regard, I don’t think that an exercise in democracy is a bad idea at any time. I also think that four years is too long between elections.

It is probably right that four years is the common period for a parliament or elected official. However, demand in many of these jurisdictions there is a capacity to easily call elections should circumstances arise.

In other circumstances, the electoral system is designed to ensure that the system’s overall electoral mandate remains fresh. For example, Barack Obama is President of the United States for four years. However, the House of Representatives is elected for two years. One-third of the Senate is elected at the same time as the House of Representatives.

It, therefore, means that whatever Obama does will receive an electoral test every two years, not every four. Any policy overreach can be punished; proper policy rewarded.

If there is to be fixed terms, then a fixed three-year term is probably appropriate. However, I have always supported the erstwhile Australian system of unfixed three-year terms.

I have never accepted the argument that four-year terms are necessary because it would be too hard for politicians to implement contentious yet necessary policy reforms because of fear of electoral consequences.

The microeconomic reforms generally described as national competition policy (and now the National Reform Agenda) have led to significant changes to the structure of Australian society - all achieved by governments of different persuasions within a political system with unfixed three-year terms.

No one would want to have a political environment such as that currently operating in NSW. Yet that is the unintended consequence of a policy design thought to be a good idea by participants in a hung parliament of nearly 20 years ago. The policy experiment has failed. It must be reformed. We should go back to the future with unfixed three-year elections.