Watch out: here comes another 'reform'
We've had years of economic "reform" — deregulation and privatisation to benefit big business at the expense of the rest of us. We've had workplace "reform" — restrictions on workers' rights to organise and to extend solidarity. The government and business are now trying to push taxation "reform" — a GST — so that ordinary people can pay an even larger share of the taxes that big business and the wealthy ought to pay but don't.
And now politicians and the media have started pushing parliamentary or electoral "reform". It is just as reactionary a project as the earlier "reforms". The aim is to reduce even further the already limited control voters have over politicians, to deny any parliamentary voice to smaller parties and to ensure that parliaments are an unbreakable Coalition-Labor duopoly.
Entrenching the duopoly has already begun in Tasmania, where Labor and Liberals combined to rush through a reduction in the number of MPs, in the hope of sharply reducing the chances of a candidate from the Greens or any other smaller party being elected.
In federal politics, the main focus of the "reformers" is the Senate. The constant complaint here is that a "minority" holds the balance of power in the Senate and frustrates the government's program.
Thus Greg Sheridan, the Australian's foreign editor, wrote on June 30: "The voting system for the Senate means no government — Labor or Coalition — can implement its program". Andrew Robb, former federal director of the Liberal Party, wailed in his July 28 Bulletin column: "It is absurd that the Howard government should receive a near-record result in 1996 ... only to be confronted by a hostile and calculating Senate which has proceeded for two-and-a-half years in blocking, delaying and watering down decision after decision."
In reality, the complainants' problem is not the voting system, but voters who don't vote the way the "reformers" think they should. The government has a minority of senators because it received a minority of votes in the last election. In fact, because only half the Senate was elected in 1996, the government's representation is slightly better than its vote: it received 45.6% of the Senate votes cast and has 48.7% of the senators.
What is absurd — and undemocratic — is that the Coalition received less than half of House of Representatives first-preference votes (46.8%) in March 1996, but ended up with almost two-thirds of the seats. It would be a real democratic reform to change the voting system for the House of Representatives so that parties were represented in proportion to their vote.
But democracy is the last concern of the parliamentary "reformers". Their intention is to ensure that whichever half of the duopoly holds government can impose its policies regardless of how little support those policies have.
Thus former Liberal leader John Hewson, writing in the Financial Review, calls for reducing the number of senators. As in Tasmania, the effect would be to increase the likelihood of the duopoly gaining representation without having to increase their voter support. (In a half-Senate election for six senators, the duopoly can take all seats with 85.7% of the vote; in an election for five senators, they can take all seats with 83.3%.)
Other equally anti-democratic proposals are being canvassed. Greg Sheridan, for example, proposes less frequent elections. His argument is unusually forthright: fewer elections would increase public respect for politicians, because the politicians wouldn't have to lie to the voters as often!
In some cases, the electoral "reformers" are trying to give their schemes a progressive tinge by presenting them as a way of preventing One Nation from gaining the balance of power in the Senate. No-one should be fooled. It is largely the effects of the earlier, equally reactionary "reforms" that have boosted One Nation's vote. Anti-democratic manoeuvres will aid Hansonism, not defeat it.