PLATYPUS AND PARLIAMENT The Australian Senate in Theory and Practice DR STANLEY BACH has published extensively on the United States Congress and other legislatures and has worked as a consultant on parliamentary process in Asia, Africa, South America and Eastern Europe. For more than 30 years he worked with and provided advice to Senators and Representatives on the operations of the US Congress. From 1988 to 2002 he held the office of Senior Specialist in the Legislative Process for the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. In 2002 Dr Bach was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award to study bicameralism in Australia. While in Canberra he was a Fellow in the Political Science Program of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He was also awarded a fellowship in the Department of the Senate which enabled him to observe the operations of the Commonwealth Parliament at first hand. This book is published as part of the Department of the Senate’s program to promote public knowledge and awareness of the role and activities of the Senate. The views expressed in the book are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Senate or its staff. PLATYPUS AND PARLIAMENT The Australian Senate in Theory and Practice STANLEY BACH Department of the Senate Published by The Department of the Senate Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600 Australia First published 2003 © Stanley Bach This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher and the copyright owner. National Library of Australia cataloguing-in-publication data Bach, Stanley. Platypus and parliament: the Australian Senate in theory and practice. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 642 71293 X. ISBN 0 642 71291 3 (pbk.). 1. Australia. Parliament. Senate. I. Australia. Parliament. Senate. II. Title. 328.94 Printed in Australia by Canprint Communications Fyshwick ACT … having called into existence two strong houses, and especially a senate the like of which will not be found in any constitution that is in existence, or has ever been in existence in the world, we ought to make provision for great, important, probably historical occasions when those coordinate houses may be brought into serious conflict. … Now, in an ordinary constitution, where we have an upper house not elected by the people, or not elected on the same basis as the lower house, that second chamber would be disposed to yield to the pressure of the lower chamber elected upon a popular basis; but here, where we are creating a senate which will feel the sap of popular election in its veins, that senate will probably feel stronger than a senate or upper chamber which is elected only on a partial franchise, and, consequently, we ought to make provision for the adjustment of disputes in great emergencies. Dr John Quick Sydney, 1897 We are creating in these two chambers, under our form of government, what you may term an irresistible force on the one side, and what may prove to be an immovable object on the other side. Alfred Deakin Sydney, 1897 Contents List of Tables viii Preface ix 1. Introduction 1 2. The constitutional design 9 3. The electoral and party systems 44 4. The crisis of 1974–75 83 5. Original intent and expectations 120 6. Coalitions in the Chamber 157 7. Dividing the Senate 189 8. The Senate and the House of Representatives 238 9. Mandates and reforms 274 10. The Senate in the balance 326 Bibliography 369 Index 383 List of Tables page 3.1 Government strength in the House of Representatives and the 50 Senate, 1901–2001 3.2 Votes and seats won by minor parties in Senate elections, 51 1949–2001 3.3 Party affiliations following Senate elections, 1910–2001 53 3.4 Percentage of seats won by the Australian Labor Party in 75 Senate elections, 1903–1946 6.1 Divisions won by government coalitions, 1996–2001 161 6.2 Party representation in the Senate, 1996–2002 165 6.3 Voting patterns in Senate divisions, 1996–2001 175 6.4 Results of Senate divisions, 1996–2001 177 6.5 Winning government coalitions in Senate divisions, 1996– 178 2001 6.6 Opposition coalitions on divisions, 1996–2001 181 7.1 Senate divisions on reading motions, 1996–2001 196 7.2 Frequency of winning amendments moved in committee of 209 the whole, 1996–2001 7.3 Party activity in moving amendments in committee of the 216 whole, 1996–2001 7.4 Success rates of amendments and requests moved in 218 committee of the whole, by party, 1996–2001 7.5 Amendments moved in committee of the whole, 1996–2001 225 7.6 Senate divisions on committee amendments, 1996–2001 228 7.7 Party support for committee amendments moved by non- 232 government parties and opposed by the government in the Senate, 1996–2001 viii Preface This is a book, as its subtitle explains, about the Senate of Australia in theory and in practice. Let me explain how and why I came to write it. The best way to learn something is to explain it to others. I discovered this long ago when, after spending six years teaching about and then working in the United States Congress, I found myself at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the Library of Congress. Largely through happenstance, I became one of the CRS ‘experts’ who was tasked with explaining the legislative rules of the game to congressional staff and, less often, to the Representatives and Senators for whom they worked. I soon realized that I knew far less about Congress than I had thought, and I wondered how I could have persevered through all those years of studying political science, a few years of professing to be a professor, and a few more years of acting as if I were a savvy legislative operative, while knowing almost nothing about those very rules that I now was expected to master. So I read and then read some more, and asked questions and more questions, and listened to my mentor explain the same things over and over again, with most of what I read and heard failing to sink in to my brain, as if all this information and insight were a cloudburst falling on desert soil. Again and again I thought that I had learned something only to discover otherwise when I tried unsuccessfully to explain it to someone else. It was at that point that I started to write. The audience for whom I really was writing was not Congress, and certainly not posterity; it was me. As I pounded away on my typewriter (it was many years ago), I was explaining my subject to myself. I was being paid to write these reports for Congress, of course, but I decided that if I could explain a subject lucidly and precisely enough for me to understand it, then my congressional audience certainly should be able to understand it as well. Sometimes I failed; more often than not, I succeeded. I review this very ancient history to explain that what follows is an artefact of my efforts to learn something new and different. When I decided it was time to leave CRS after spending roughly 30 years in various incarnations on Capitol Hill, I chose to take advantage of my x PLATYPUS AND PARLIAMENT new-found freedom by learning something about the counterparts of Congress in other regimes that can make a creditable claim to being called democracies. I was curious to learn more about how other national assemblies, operating in different constitutional contexts, worked in both theory and practice. I soon realized that Australia would be the ideal venue to begin the next stage of my education. So I was extraordinarily fortunate to secure the support of the Australian-American Fulbright Commission and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, enabling me to spend six months of 2002–2003 in Canberra, learning about the Commonwealth Parliament. While in Canberra, I was equally fortunate in being invited to enjoy the hospitality of Parliament, where I was a Fellow in the Department of the Senate, and of the Australian National University, where I was a Visiting Fellow in the Political Science Program of the Research School of Social Sciences. In addition to giving me an unbeatable opportunity for what Richard Fenno has called research by ‘soaking and poking’—poking around Parliament House and soaking up as much as I could—I also was able to do a lot of ‘picking’—picking the brains of an impressive array of scholars and parliamentary officials, all of whom were surpassingly generous in sharing their time, knowledge, and insights. What follows is an extended essay on what I learned while in Canberra and from the additional research I was able to do both before and after my visit there. It is my attempt to explain to myself what I learned, in the guise of explaining it to you. One of the first things that struck me as I began to study the Australian Parliament was the quantity and quality of communication between political scientists and political practitioners. Senior parliamentary staff have taken time from the demands of their daily work to think and write about the health of Parliament as an institution and about its place in the Australian constitutional system. From the other direction, some of Australia’s political scientists ask themselves important questions about Parliament and then write about those questions in terms that are both interesting and intelligible to Parliament’s members and staff.