Bob And The Swill Have Done Swell

Alan Ramsey - Sydney Morning Herald

John Nethercote wrote about parliament and the bureaucracy for almost 30 years.. But it was a research paper he did on Paul Keating and the Senate in March 1994 that I never forgot. His paper was entitled Representing People, Not Merely Majorities: An analysis of Prime Ministerial Views on the Senate and it took apart, very clinically, the then prime minister's wholly dismissive attitude to the Senate, caricatured so famously as "unrepresentative swill".

Wrote Nethercote, in part: "[Keating's views] are, individually and in totality, misleading and erroneous when not simply wrong. They are the product of an approach to government and politics which confuses majority rule with democracy and which yearns for imperial rather than parliamentary government, for government by edict rather than by legislation, for a polity in which politicians are masters of the people rather than servants ...

"It is in bonapartist regimes, and other more repressive forms of government, that the ruler, once elected, seeks to govern without those features of government, legislation and administration which makes a system responsible. In such authoritarian regimes, rule is by edict. The governors are the masters rather than the servants of the governed.

"It is true that securing passage of legislation and other measures through Australia's Parliament may, in present circumstances, require leadership of a stature greater than has been available for years. Hectic rhetoric riding on the back of a rigid majority in the House of Representatives may no longer be sufficient. A full range of parliamentary skills, including capacity for debate and negotiation on the merits, is now called for. This was not beyond the wit or range of Australian leaders in the past. Prime Minister John Curtin, after all, led the country at war for two years without a majority in the House of Representatives and in the face of a hostile majority in the Senate."

One size fits all. Nethercote could well have been writing about another prime minister we know well. Are you there, John Howard?

Keating had been in the Parliament 23 years, government for nine years and the prime ministership for two when he brutalised the Senate as pig fodder in November, 1992. Howard has been in Parliament the better part of 29 years, in government almost 12 years (in two stints) and the prime ministership almost seven. What it is that makes dominant political figures in the House so disdainful of the Senate? Simply the arrogance of accumulated years? Not at all.

Howard and his Government now display all the same napoleonic intolerance of the Senate that Keating did, minus the vitriol. And for the same reason: the executive's frustration at its lack of a controlling Senate majority. But instead of outright abuse, what we now get is much sanctimonious noise about mandates and the will of the people and other such self-serving bilge whenever the Government's Senate minority fails to browbeat, bludgeon or buy off a hostile Senate majority of Labor, Democrats, Greens and independents.

While Howard could manipulate the disgraced Labor turncoat Malcolm Colston and barter with the Tasmanian independent Brian Harradine, it "controlled" a bare Senate majority of sorts for two years. But that luxury vanished when Colston was evicted to Brisbane, one step ahead of prosecution for fraud, on June 30, 1999.

Life has been so much harder for the Government ever since. Proportional representation was never meant to be easy. Imperial edict has been replaced by the absolutism of Senate debate, negotiation and consensus. The failure of any one party or group to hold the Senate's balance of power since last year's election only reinforces the reality the Government is "hostage" to genuine parliamentary democracy.

Which is why, in my view, as another year ends amid considerable uncertainty - political, economic, party leadership and domestic and international security - the 2002 Senate deserves, in the broad national interest, the accolade of "politician" of the year, if ever an institution could be so regarded.

The fact the Democrats now share the balance of power has altered the dynamics of the Senate hugely. There are now 13 votes in the 76-member Senate not controlled by the major parties. Now Bob Brown's two Green votes can be every bit as significant as the Democrats' diminished seven votes and the gaggle of Independents' collective four votes. Parliament must be the better for it. So, too, the ideal of true parliamentary democracy. Parliament as a whole has genuine representative responsibility. It is no longer an instrument of executive whim or presidential fiat exercised by the weight of numbers.

The defeated ASIO powers debate makes the point. So, too, the pointless prattling all year by the Government of its supposed "timetable" for selling the remaining 51 per cent public ownership of Telstra. The bizarre unreality persisted ad nauseam. The fact the Government needed an extra four Senate votes it never had seemed to go utterly ignored. Only in recent weeks has cabinet gone through the nonsense of announcing "postponement" of the "planned" Telstra sale "for the foreseeable future" because of the stock's "low share price".

High farce indeed.

Among individual politicians, nobody, in my view, made more electoral and parliamentary impact this year or increased his or her political standing more dramatically than two senators - Labor's Senate leader, John Faulkner, and the Greens' national leader, Bob Brown. And one MHR, Labor's Mark Latham, you can rest assured, will be Labor leader one day. It's merely a matter of when.

Latham publicly jumped all over suggestions that Simon Crean's leadership is dead but won't lie down. Yet some of us feel his loyalty is more akin to the old Keating dictum that the first Labor leader he tears down is the leader he replaces. And, for now, that isn't going to happen. Latham doesn't have the broad internal support to tear down anyone. Not yet. But don't make the mistake of thinking Latham isn't interested in succeeding Crean. Far from it. It's just that, for various reasons, he'd prefer to do so after Crean were to lose the next election, due in two years.. No Labor MHR now has more parliamentary presence or greater political clout in the daily theatre of bearpit politics.

Nobody. And Latham, with his uncompromising language and debating skills, in the very mould of Keating himself, is the one Labor MP every Government minister has seemed loath to confront in parliamentary debate. Yet whatever parliamentary gain from time to time Labor has achieved this year owes most to Labor's Senate performance.

That in turn has depended on John Faulkner's Senate leadership. The Senate has been in the ascendancy over the House all year as the true parliamentary battleground, simply because the Government is in a minority in the upper house. It was always a Coalition struggle, with every sitting day a marathon. And every political test of any notoriety, from the children overboard inquiry, which Faulkner all but dictated, to Helen Coonan's absurd ministerial gaucheries over her family real estate, to the redrawing of the Government's aborted ASIO powers bill, revolved around Faulkner's handling as Opposition Senate leader. He now has more broad rank and file standing within the ALP than probably any of his colleagues and more political authority than all but a handful.

And then there is St Bob, the Greens' political holy man.

Brown had an extraordinary year, even if he did tend to sugarcoat his party's
electoral gains. The Greens did not do nearly as well in the recent Victorian state election as they hoped, despite their significance in delivering 250,000 preferences to ensure Labor's absolute landslide buried the Coalition. But federally, with two Green senators now and the election of the first minor party MHR ever - something neither the Democrats nor the DLP could ever achieve - Brown's year soared in the elevation of his public profile and his standing across the community as a national political leader of conviction and principle.

Any double dissolution election late next year, whoever was prime minister, should the Government ignore public sentiment and involve itself in George junior's obsession with making war on Iraq, could be a national referendum of the most profound political risk. We shall see.