2016-03-31
Andrew Bartlett
Andrew Bartlett is a former Democrats Senator and Greens candidate for Queensland. He has written a series of articles about Senate Voting Reform and has shared an excerpt with us this week. The unedited version is available on Andrew's blog.
Senate Voting Reform: Is this the Greens' “GST moment”? (hint: No. No it's not.)
I have read a range of comments by people asserting that the current controversy over the Greens support for repairing the Senate voting system will be the "Greens' GST moment." As I am well-qualified to say what a "GST moment" is like, I thought I'd explain why that is not even remotely close to what is happening now.
As a starting point, I'll address comments about Senate Voting Reform contained in this recent 'Views from the Street' column in the Sydney Morning Herald. Under the heading 'Lessons of History', it repeats the suggestion that the Greens determination to take the opportunity to implement their own longstanding policy of repairing the Senate voting system equates to the Democrats decision in 1999 to support John Howard's GST.
I was in the middle of that fateful decision by a majority of Democrat Senators to support the introduction of a GST. Out of all the Democrat Senators from that time, I am the only one who came out of the sad and smouldering ashes of the obliterated ruin and thought 'I think I'll go join another progressive party and have another shot at challenging the 100 year hegemony of the two party monolith, because it was so much fun the first time around'. So I am highly sensitive to any possibility of ever experiencing anything which might be described as 'the Greens' GST moment', as there is probably literally no one else on the planet keener than I am to avoid going through an experience such as that again or witnessing another mistake of that enormity.
But first a couple of corrections to the content of the column. Despite the column's claim that “once (the GST) passed the party was dead in the water”, the Democrats still won four Senate seats at the following election in 2001. Of course it is reasonable to assume that this only happened because the party membership decided to remove Meg Lees as Leader and replace her with Natasha Stott Despoja, one of the two Democrat Senators, along with myself, who voted against the GST in the Senate (an action consistent with the fact that the majority of the party's members opposed the GST deal). The 'dead in the water' bit actually coincided with when Natasha Stott Despoja was subsequently forced out of the leadership by a majority of her Parliamentary colleagues. (And as a free piece of genius advice for anyone anywhere ever who is thinking about trying to remove someone from a leadership position, it is probably a good idea to figure out beforehand who will put themselves forward to be a replacement.) But my point was, even a decision as stupid and damaging as the GST one was, it did not in itself destroy the Democrats capacity to win the same number of seats at the subsequent election as they had at the preceding one.
The column also seeks to draw comparisons to the Democrats deal on the GST by describing the Greens decision to vote for major legislation implementing an important part of their own policy as also being an “expedient deal that just so happens to benefit the conservative government of the day”. (For those who aren't sure, 'expedient' means 'convenient but possibly improper/immoral'). As I wrote in a previous post, this current political situation and its timing is exceedingly inconvenient for the Greens. As it is the party's longstanding policy it is also hard to see how it could be improper. But whilst the timing is inconvenient, it is none the less the only time the chance has arisen to make this major democratic reform in the twenty years since the party first called for it, so it is basically now or never in regards to taking the opportunity. As has also been noted elsewhere, there is no particular reason why these reforms will benefit the conservatives into the future either. The new Senate voting reforms will advantage those parties – of whatever philosophical persuasion – that gain genuine public support from voters above those parties that don't – which is rather the point of having elections in the first place I would have thought.
To compare and contrast, the Greens approach on Senate voting reform:
- Implements a long-standing policy of the party in a pivotal policy area
- Is strongly supported by the party's membership
- Has long been supported by close to every non-aligned advocate in the field
- Would clearly benefit the entire community through a far more accountable and fair electoral system
- Is consistent with the unanimous findings of a comprehensive Parliamentary Committee inquiry process and
- Was (up until almost the moment the legislation finally appeared) supported by both Labor and Liberal parties.
This is a very far cry from the Democrats' support for the GST, which involved supporting something which was:
- Not party policy and had never been a stated goal of the party
- Opposed by the majority of the party's own members
- Ferociously opposed by many organisations from the party's most supportive constituencies
- Widely criticised on multiple fronts throughout a comprehensive process of Parliamentary Committee inquiries
- Clearly and very publicly found through those inquiry processes to cause disadvantage to significant sections of the community unless major amendments were made
- Never ever something which came even remotely close to having bi-partisan support.
Of course, both ending up involving lots of shouts of outrage from the Labor Party and accusations of getting into bed with the Liberals – so I suppose that's similarity.