From coalition government to parliamentary privilege.

• Author: Hicks, Bruce M.
• Position: Lessons in Democracy from Australia - Report

This paper examines Australian developments with respect to the Westminster-model of responsible parliamentary government. Australia has adopted preferential voting and compulsory voting; and it has a long history of governments that are coalitions or that negotiate support from smaller parties and independents, or both. Australia began making its previously "secret" cabinet handbook available to the public in 1982, and followed this up with release of the Executive Council Handbook and "caretaker conventions" to prevent a government from making major commitments during an election. And recently it has reduced parliamentary privileges and codified them in statute. Each offers lessons for Canada. To that end, this paper traces the Australian developments and practices beginning with its electoral system and compulsory voting, government formation (including changing governments mid-term), popular understanding of the powers of the Governor General, the unclassified cabinet and executive council handbooks, caretaker conventions and parliamentary privileges. There are lessons on each for other Commonwealth countries to learn, as several countries including the United Kingdom have begun to realize.

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The British gave a number of countries a system of parliamentary government. (1) This became known as the Westminster-model, after the Royal Palace in London where the British Parliament has been ensconced since the 13th century.

The British constitution is an unwritten document, though portions of it have been codified by quasi-constitutional statutes. The most important rules, however, are unwritten and governed by convention, which are constitutional rules all parties have agreed to be bound by pursuant to precedent. (2)

Australia, like Canada, is in a slightly different situation than the U.K. as it has a written constitution. But this constitution simply identifies the formal structures of government, such as vesting the executive powers of government in the Queen and allowing these to be exercised by the Governor General in Her stead (s.61) and vesting legislative power in a 'Parliament' composed of the Queen, a 'House of Representatives' and a 'Senate' (s.1). Apart from their Senate being an elected body, the structures of this Westminster-modeled government are identical to Canada; and, like Canada's, a reading of the Constitution would make it seem that the Queen and Her Governor have all the power.

It is the unwritten constitutional conventions surrounding the Queen's powers that graft democratic elements onto an archaic monarchical system of government. It is through conventions that the British Parliament was slowly transformed from a group of representatives who assembled to petition at the foot of the Throne into a body in which the wielders of state power must reside and to which they must remain accountable. In colonies like Canada and Australia, the same developmental trajectory occurred as these conventions were transferred, transforming representative government into responsible government.

When it comes to these conventions, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the Queen's other dominions overseas should have identical constitutional rules. (3) Yet the example of Australia shows that these rules are being operationalized differently than in Canada. The explanation for these differences is due in part to Australia's electoral system. But these differences are being increasingly seen in other dominions, including the United Kingdom itself, so historical, temporal and cultural factors provide greater explanation for comparative variation between countries of the Commonwealth than any differences in institutional rules. (4)

The foundational principle behind the Westminster-model is that people elect a representative and send him or her to the capital. This MP's first task is to meet with colleagues and act as an electoral college to choose a government and then to hold that government to account on a daily basis. This is the way the Westminster-model is understood in Australia and most other dominions. It is not the way it is understood in Canada.

This is not to say that Canadian PMs have been violating our shared constitutional conventions; rather that ambiguity has allowed Canadian PMs to follow the letter of the constitution without following the spirit. (5)

Canada can therefore learn some lessons about democracy from Australia.

Electoral System

The Australian story begins in 1918 with its electoral system. In the federal electoral district of Swan, a by-election was held which saw the vote on the right of the political spectrum split between the Farmers and Settlers Party (31.4.%) and the governing Nationalist Party (29.6%), permitting the Labor candidate to win with only 34.5% of the vote under the single member plurality electoral system still used to this day in Canada.

The fact that the three political parties so evenly split the vote suggested to the Australian public that there was an inherent defect in SMP, or what is often referred to in Canada as first-past-the-post. All three parties could claim to have the support of roughly 1/3 of the constituents in this riding, but when ideology was taken into consideration, 2/3rds of the voters clearly opposed the views of their newly elected Labor representative.

While one by-election may not normally be expected to encourage a country to reexamine its electoral system, this riding was symbolic. It had been held by the Nationalist former premier of Western Australia, Sir John Forrest, since Australia's "confederation' in 1901. It was also understood to be an indicator of what was likely to occur on a larger scale in the next and subsequent elections.

Fearful that the urban-rural split among right-of-centre voters would see the Labor Party win a sufficient number of ridings across Australia to form a majority government without receiving the support of the majority of the population, the Nationalist Prime Minister of Australia, Billy Hughes, asked the Parliament to change the electoral system to preferential voting.

Also known as the alternative vote, instant-runoff voting or transferable voting, the ballot asks electors to rank the candidates in order of preference: 1,2,3 ... The ballots are counted and, if no candidate has received over 50% then the lowest ranked candidate is eliminated and his votes are distributed to his electors' second choices, and then the next lowest to her electors' second choices and so on, until the candidate who has the support of the majority of voters is identified.

The Farmers and Settlers Party had been a state (or provincial) agrarian party that emerged in New South Wales, with the Victorian Farmers Union and the Country Party of Western Australia gaining ground in those respective states.

In the federal election of 1919, under the new preferential balloting, the Nationalist Party was forced to cede 11 seats to these state-based agrarian parties, but not to Labor as it would have under SMP. The Nationalist Party won 37 of the seats in the lower chamber, compared to 25 Labor; and with one of the two independents agreeing to support the government, Hughes was able to hold onto power. The following year the 11 agrarian MPs united under the banner of the Country Party of Australia.

In the 1922 election, the Labor Party won the most seats, with 29 of the 75 seats in the lower chamber. The Nationalist Party came second with 26, the Country Party 14, five Liberals and one independent. The leadership of the Nationalist and Country parties entered into negotiations to form a coalition government, and one of the prices extracted by the Country Party was the resignation of Billy Hughes as PM. (6) The new leader of the Nationalist Party, Stanley Bruce, then finalized the coalition agreement with the leader of the Country Party, Earle Page, who asked for and received five of a total of 11 Cabinet posts for him and his members, including the post of treasurer. The order of precedence was amended so Page would be PM in Bruce's absence (making him the first de facto Deputy Prime Minister of Australia) and the government became known as the Bruce-Page Ministry.

While the Australian political parties have since evolved in name and format, a coalition government between the leading non-Labor parties has been an alternative government to a Labor government since 1922. Only once, in 1931, did a non-Labor party (the United Australia Party) have sufficient seats to form a government without negotiating a coalition, but they returned to a partnership with the Country Party after the following election. (7)

Today the two main political parties in opposition to Labor, and in semi-permanent coalition, are the Liberal Party and the National Party. An election flyer aimed at supporters of the National Party might indicate that the Liberal party is the second choice. Liberal party flyers might make the inverse recommendation.

This is strategic voting without forcing electors to do the vote calculus of determining which candidate is ahead in their riding so as to stop the candidate/ party they don't want to win, something we know is very difficult for voters to do under Canada's SMP. (8) In Australia, the electoral system, ensures that one of the non-Labor parties is competitive in each riding; provides the opportunity for political parties to throw their support to the party closest to them in terms of ideology and policy if their candidate is eliminated; and enables independents and regionally popular small parties to win seats. (9)

SMP has been entirely eliminated for legislative elections in Australia. Most of the lower chambers at the state-level have transitioned to preferential voting, with the exception of Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory where a form of single transferable voting has been adopted due to the multi-member constituencies. (10)

Compulsory Voting

At the same time as Australia was...