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Papers on Parliament No. 67

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Papers on Parliament No. 67 Papers on Parliament Lectures in the Senate Occasional Lecture Series, and other papers Number 67 May 2017 Published and printed by the Department of the Senate Parliament House, Canberra ISSN 1031–976X (online ISSN 2206–3579) Published by the Department of the Senate, 2017 ISSN 1031–976X (online ISSN 2206–3579) Papers on Parliament is edited and managed by the Research Section, Department of the Senate. Edited by Michael Sloane All editorial inquiries should be made to: Assistant Director of Research Research Section Department of the Senate PO Box 6100 Parliament House CANBERRA ACT 2600 Telephone: (02) 6277 3164 Email: [email protected] To order copies of Papers on Parliament On publication, new issues of Papers on Parliament are sent free of charge to subscribers on our mailing list. If you wish to be included on that mailing list, please contact the Research Section of the Department of the Senate at: Telephone: (02) 6277 3074 Email: [email protected] Printed copies of previous issues of Papers on Parliament may be provided on request if they are available. Past issues are available online at: http://www.aph.gov.au/pops Contents The Australian Prime Ministership: Origins and Evolution 1 Paul Strangio Party Reform: Where are Australia’s Political Parties Headed in the Future? 19 Anika Gauja Conscription, Conscience and Parliament 43 Tom Frame Parliament, the Executive and Vice-Regal Reserve Powers: Heading Off Crises in a Closely Tied Parliament 61 Anne Twomey Populism and Discontent: Comparing the United States and Australia 81 Simon Jackman The Concept of ‘The Same in Substance’: What Does the Perrett Judgment Mean for Parliamentary Scrutiny? 99 Ivan Powell Scrutiny Committees: A Vehicle for Safeguarding Federalism and the Constitutional Rights of Parliament 119 Glenn Ryall and Jessica Strout iii Contributors Paul Strangio is an Associate Professor of Politics in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University. He has authored and edited numerous books on Australian political history, among them: Keeper of the Faith: A Biography of Jim Cairns (MUP, 2002); Neither Power Nor Glory: 100 Years of Political Labor in Victoria, 1856–1956 (MUP, 2012); and, with Paul ‘t Hart and James Walter, Settling the Office: The Australian Prime Ministership from Federation to Reconstruction (MUP, 2016). Anika Gauja is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. She researches in the areas of comparative politics, membership and party organisation. She is the author of Party Reform: The Causes, Challenges and Consequences of Organisational Change (Oxford University Press, 2017), and co-editor of Party Members and Activists (Routledge, 2015) and Party Rules? Dilemmas of Party Regulation in Australia (ANU Press, 2016). Tom Frame Tom Frame is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Canberra and Director of the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society. He was the Anglican Bishop to the Australian Defence Force (2001) and then Director of St Mark’s National Theological Centre (2007). He is the author or editor of many books, including most recently Moral Injury: Unseen Wounds in an Age of Barbarism (UNSW Press, 2015) and Anzac Day: Then and Now (UNSW Press, 2016). Anne Twomey is a Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Sydney. She has previously worked for the High Court of Australia, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Research Service, the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee and the Cabinet Office of New South Wales. She is exploring the intersection between the parliament and the executive in her forthcoming book on the reserve powers. Simon Jackman is CEO of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. From 1996 to 2016 he was a professor of political science and statistics at Stanford University. His teaching and research focuses on public opinion, election campaigns, political participation and electoral systems, with a particular emphasis on American and Australian politics. He is the author of Bayesian Analysis for the Social Sciences (Wiley, 2009) as well as numerous articles in leading political science journals. Ivan Powell is the Director of Legislation and Documents in the Table Office of the Department of the Senate. He was previously Secretary to the Senate Standing Committee on Regulations and Ordinances. Glenn Ryall is a Principal Research Officer for the Senate Standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Bills. Jessica Strout is a Principal Research Officer for the Senate Standing Committee on Regulations and Ordinances. iv The Australian Prime Ministership: Paul Strangio ∗ Origins and Evolution The Australian prime ministership has seldom seemed so confounding as in recent years. We have seen a higher rate of turnover in the office than at any time since the first decade of the Commonwealth. Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott each confidently entered the office only to be broken by it in swift succession and now, in less than 12 months, the buoyant hopes that accompanied the ascension of Malcolm Turnbull have dissipated. Yet despite the tribulations of recent incumbents, there is little question that the prime ministership is still the main prize in Australian politics. It is also the most closely observed office in the land; indeed, relentlessly so. Political scientists use the term ‘personalisation’ to describe the modern phenomenon of leader-centred politics.1 They postulate that as the hold the established parties exercise over voters has waned leaders are taking their place. Leaders are ‘standing in’ for the party and are increasingly important in providing the cues for the public to interpret and make decisions about politics. Whether this phenomenon is as pronounced in Australia as it is in some other comparable democracies is arguable, but there is little question that in our intensely mediatised age leaders are more prominent than ever before. This is a paradox of the contemporary prime ministership: never has it loomed so omnipotent in the nation’s life and yet been so apparently brittle in the experience of incumbents. What do we know, however, about the origins of this office that bulks so large in the nation’s collective political psyche? What expectations did the founders of the Commonwealth have for the prime ministership when they designed the Constitution in the final decade of the 19th century? Were those expectations principally grounded in Westminster precedent or were they influenced by their own experiences of executive government in the Australian colonies? And how did the office grow into a position of national leadership from its rudimentary beginnings at Federation in 1901, and which office holders contributed most to that development and how? It is to these questions that we address ourselves today. ∗ This paper was presented as a lecture in the Senate Occasional Lecture Series at Parliament House, Canberra, on 2 September 2016. 1 See, for example, Ian McAllister, The Australian Voter: 50 Years of Change, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2011, pp. 241–6. 1 Pre-history Answering the first question is easy enough. Australians apparently know little about the genesis and initial development of the prime ministership or its early occupants. One clue to this ignorance is that when polls have been conducted asking members of the public to rate former prime ministers the results have been skewed to contemporary holders with meagre recognition of leaders predating Bob Hawke, especially among younger cohorts.2 This unfamiliarity with the nation’s political origins and founders was emphatically demonstrated by surveys on that subject carried out a decade and a half ago during the centenary of Federation. The results so disconcerted authorities that they commissioned advertisements embarrassing citizens by asking, ‘What kind of country would forget the name of its first prime minister?’3 The surveys showed that Australians were more acquainted with the names of America’s founding fathers than those who had forged their own nation. Arguably, scholars have to accept some responsibility for the impoverished state of public knowledge. While we have many accomplished biographies of prime ministers and excellent accounts of the making of the Commonwealth, we have lacked a study that charts the development of the prime ministership. Filling this lacuna is the objective of the study my colleagues, professors James Walter and Paul ‘t Hart, and I are undertaking. We are halfway through this epic task with the first volume, which chronicles the office’s evolution up to the mid-20th century, published early this year.4 One of the first questions we needed to resolve in writing that volume was where to begin. Should the account commence in 1901 or should it include some pre- history of the prime ministership? As the historian among us, I was charged with writing the early chapters and I decided an appropriate starting place for my research was the Federal Conventions of the 1890s. Surely, I figured, the delegates to those august gatherings had given consideration to the prime ministership and articulated their expectations of the office. I was disappointed. Poring through hundreds of pages of proceedings of the conventions, I discovered the delegates barely mentioned the office. What did catch my eye, however, is that among the delegates were several prime ministers! For example, when on St Patrick’s Day 1898 the final session of the 1897–98 Federal 2 Essential Report, ‘Australia’s Best Prime Minister’, 30 January 2012, http://www.essentialvision.com.au/tag/john-curtin. 3 Kate Krinks, ‘Creating the Active Citizen? Recent Developments in Civics Education’, Research Paper no. 15 1988–99, Parliament of Australia, Canberra, March 1999. See also Anna Clark, History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2008, pp. 22–3; and Civics Expert Group, Whereas the People … Civics and Citizenship Education: Report of the Civics Expert Group, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1994.
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