Legislative Council
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LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT LC Members Ante-Room, Parliament House, Sydney Monday, 12 November 2018 The discussion commenced at 11.00 a.m. PRESENT Dr David Clune Mr Steven Reynolds Mr John Della Bosca Monday, 12 November 2018 Legislative Council Page 1 Dr CLUNE: Can you tell us how you became a member of the Legislative Council? Mr DELLA BOSCA: Well, I had been the Secretary of the ALP, New South Wales Branch, for a decade. In my last couple of years in that role I had not actually seen any reason not to continue on with it indefinitely but in the lead-up to the 1999 election the then Premier and the then Treasurer were fairly adamant in proposing to me that I should go into the Legislative Council and I should run at that election. I was drafted because I actually had not thought much about it at the time. For all sorts of internal and external reasons, I decided that it was a good idea after all. Dr CLUNE: How did you find the Legislative Council when you first came in? Mr DELLA BOSCA: I think I am one of the few people who was sworn in as a member, sworn in as the Minister and had my first question time as a Minister all on the same day. So it was a fairly hectic kind of process. I suppose I arrived in a Chamber that was a little bit different to what I expected. I knew about the Legislative Council and obviously I had known a lot about what happened there and a lot of the personalities over the years but there was a fairly good-humoured kind of atmosphere between the crossbenches, the Government and the Opposition. It occasionally got a bit testy but basically it was good-humoured compared to the other place and compared to the traditions down there. I think it is fair to say that it was a place dominated by a couple of personalities in terms of the day-to-day affairs of the Chamber. Dr CLUNE: When you became Leader of the Government, what was your approach to your role and what were the principles that guided you? Mr DELLA BOSCA: My approach to the role was that there were two obligations: There was the obligation to the Government to pass its legislation and there was the obligation to the Parliament to make sure that the Parliamentary process was observed. I think during the time under Michael Egan's leadership it was no different. We did not really pursue anything very tricky in the way we went about the business of legislation. We obviously operated closely within the standing orders but our approach was very much that our first duty was to the Parliament but a prime duty was also to get legislation through the Chamber. They were two principles: that you had to keep the place orderly and you had to get your legislation passed. Obviously in a constitutional sense, the Cabinet decided on the legislation to be proposed but that was often as a result of a particular Minister's desire to push upon the Cabinet that particular legislation. You had to do your best to honour that and get it through with minimal amendments or with amendments that still gave general effect to the legislation. Dr CLUNE: What is your view of the rise to prominence of the crossbench? How did it change the nature of the Council? Mr DELLA BOSCA: During my time as Mike Egan’s deputy and my own time as Leader I think the idea of having a lot of different crossbenchers actually made it easier, even though in theory they were a block on the Government's program. Generally speaking, because there were so many of them, it was easier to negotiate proposals about amendments or not amending the legislation as proposed. You would think that the more crossbenchers there were, the more difficult it would be, but I think the more crossbenchers there are, in some ways it makes it easier. Dr CLUNE: Did you have regular meetings with the crossbenchers? Mr DELLA BOSCA: I delegated that to Tony Kelly. He did most of that. I went to the meetings when there was a big issue that needed the two of us to talk to them. We had very regular meetings. Ian Macdonald used to do a fair bit of it also. Dr CLUNE: It is interesting that the Senate does not seem to have worked anywhere near as well under crossbench control as the Legislative Council. Why do you think that would be? Mr DELLA BOSCA: Perhaps it is the scope of Commonwealth legislation, for example, the budget. Perhaps we have had more experience in NSW. It is part of what you have to do here. Either Opposition leadership or Government leadership, you have to assume that you are dealing with a substantial crossbench and an ideologically various crossbench as well, not a single one. Dr CLUNE: Do you think that better scrutiny of the Government has resulted from the crossbenchers having the balance of power? Mr DELLA BOSCA: My partisan prejudices would attract me to saying, "Oh, of course not. It would have been fine without them". But I think the reality is that the more sunlight there is on legislation, the better it gets, that is the general rule. There are probably some frustrations for Ministers wanting to achieve particular outcomes that are not shared by enough crossbenchers to get them through in the exact form they wanted, but I think the general idea that the Executive can be second-guessed by a Parliament is a good idea. It was the original ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Monday, 12 November 2018 Legislative Council Page 2 idea behind Westminster government. But parties have become very disciplined and very mechanical in their processes and when you apply that to government, you end up with a risk that legislation will just keep on churning through. A crossbench that is prepared to ask questions is going to be an additional filter on government over and above what party rooms can do. Dr CLUNE: Do you think the right balance has been struck between the Government's right to legislate and the Parliament's right to scrutinise? Mr DELLA BOSCA: I can only speak about the time I was here and I think it was during our time, yes. There were days when we were pretty frustrated with the crossbench, of course, and probably there were many days that they were very frustrated with us, but I think on the whole it achieved exactly that outcome. Mr REYNOLDS: Was there any legislation you just could not get through because of crossbench opposition? Mr DELLA BOSCA: I do not think there was. There might have been punches pulled way back at the Cabinet level where a politically savvy Premier like Carr would say, "It's pointless to even proceed with this because we will not be able to get it through the crossbench so why go through the agony?" There might have been a few cases like that: "Let's not even bother." But whenever we really needed to we managed to get legislation through. I do not think we ever brought anything in that did not eventually get passed, though sometimes in a highly modified form. The best example of that was probably within my portfolio, the WorkCover reform legislation, which went through several permutations, partly as a result of input from the crossbench and the Parliament, partly as a result of input from the ALP caucus, and partly as a result of external lobbying from the trade union movement in general and a random group of employers and employer organisations on the other side. The Parliament was very much a part of that and, as I said, the crossbench was a part of that. In the end, the legislation could not have gone through Parliament in its original form because the crossbench would not have accepted it. They eventually accepted it in a different form after a long process, which I do not really want to remember. Dr CLUNE: So you were prepared to deal, to accept amendments and to listen to people, so you could get your legislation through in some form. Is that the way it worked? Mr DELLA BOSCA: Yes. There was a group of crossbenchers who had what I would describe as "left- leaning tendencies", including The Greens, and we knew that there were certain things that were hot buttons for them, both positive and negative. Then, of course, there were Fred Nile and his supporters and a few other crossbenchers who we knew, again, had certain hot-button issues both for and against. We could negotiate on that basis for a start. We knew if we had something that was sensitive, for example, a pro-environment initiative, we could get The Greens to support us. We knew that we would get Allan Corbett and Richard Jones to support it; Nile might or might not; and John Tingle probably would not if he thought it was intruding on people's rights. I had that in my mind all of the time. It was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle—like Tetris. We worked it out that way. I think the hardest thing was actually dealing with other Ministers because a lot of them had very little understanding of how the Council works. At 11 o'clock at night, after myself or other members of the Government had been sitting through hours and hours of arguments about amendments in committee and all that toing and froing, I would get an abusive phone call from the Minister's office downstairs saying, "Why hasn’t my legislation passed yet?" I would say, "Well, if we are lucky, it will be passed sometime around 4 o'clock in the morning; if not come back next month.