• “Carlton’s lone classical liberal”, Andrew Norton, weighs in on Liberal hyperbole over third party political campaigns. New Mayo MP Jamie Briggs reckons these to be a “cancer in our democracy” due to the efforts of GetUp! and the ACTU at the last election. Briggs argues that “Australians are entitled to know who is behind the campaigns, how much is being spent and where the money is coming from”, evidently having failed to notice that such groups are indeed required to provide annual disclosure of receipts, expenditure and debts. However, in an interesting discussion at Larvatus Prodeo, Norton also argues that lowering the donation disclosure threshold from $10,000 to $1000 (as proposed by a bill currently before a Senate committee due to report on June 30) could theoretically catch independent political blogs in a “massive compliance net” thanks to a loose definition of “persons or organisations expressing views by any means on candidates or election issues”. Elsewhere, The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen tugs at the heart strings by complaining the disclosure amendments are designed to cut donations to the Liberal Party (from which you can readily infer why the Howard government used its Senate majority to jack the threshold up from $1500 to $10,000 in the first place). More substantially, she argues that “the nature of third-party campaigns in Australia is such that if we ban or cap donations (except by individuals) and allow third-party campaigns by unions to continue unabated, the political field is skewed against one side: the conservatives” – particularly in light of government plans to scrap tax deductibility of party donations while maintaining it for union dues and levies.

• “Dotcom millionaire” Evan Thornley has made himself popular in Labor circles by pulling the plug on his political career on the eve of his anticipated promotion to the Victorian state cabinet. The talk around Thornley was that he viewed his state political career as a stepping stone to federal politics via Simon Crean’s seat of Hotham, beyond which his ambitions were apparently without limit. His entirely unheralded decision to “pursue opportunities outside of political life” has inevitably fuelled all manner of speculation, most of it involving his financial wellbeing. It has also created a vacancy for his upper house seat for the Southern Metropolitan region. The Age reports that the new upper house system instituted at the last election “has created an anomaly for Labor, as party rules do not specify how preselection for an upper house vacancy should be conducted”:

Party sources said the anomoly was expected to be tackled by rule makers in May 2009 before preselections began in earnest for the 2010 election. But Mr Thornley’s shock departure – which sources from both major factions of Victorian Labor described as the most bizarre incident they had ever witnessed in politics – could force the anomaly to be dealt with sooner. While some within Labor believe the rules offer no guidance over preselection, others say the spirit of preselection processes in the lower house should also be adopted for the upper house. Under that scenario, Mr Thornley’s replacement in the Southern Metropolitan electorate would be decided 50:50 by a ballot of ALP branch members and a central selection panel. Many expect Labor’s national executive to ultimately choose his replacement but all agreed it was too early to speculate on the names of likely candidates.

A commenter at Andrew Landeryou’s VexNews writes:

The Left were promised Thornley’s spot but they agreed not to insist as Thornley was then non aligned. Thornley then joined Labor Unity. They left will claim they are entitled to fill Thornley’s vacancy. Labor Unity will most likely want it and there will be an internal facional brawl like Kororoit. Then Mr Dearricott’s non-aligned group will claim their right to the vacancy. A strong tip tonight is that (former Brimbank mayor) Natalie Suleyman is a favourite for the position.

Another hopeful is said to be Dick Gross, former Municipal Association of Victoria president and Port Phillip councillor defeated in recent elections in a “resident revolt over his support for the St Kilda triangle development”. There is also the question of the political future of Theo Theophanous, charged on Christmas Eve with rape. An end to Theophanous’s political career would create another upper house vacancy in Northern Metropolitan. In lieu of Evan Thornley, Theophanous’s position as Industry and Trade Minister has been filled by Martin Pakula, previously best known for his failed preselection bid against Simon Crean in Hotham ahead of the last federal election.

• Michelle Grattan of The Age reports that the Victorian Liberals are “set to reluctantly give the Nationals the number two spot on a joint Senate ticket for the 2010 election”. This would continue an agreement initiated after the 1987 double dissolution election giving the Nationals the unwinnable fourth and safe second seats at alternating elections. The party’s seat in the Senate has been held since 1993 by Julian McGauran, who quit the party for the Liberals in January 2006. One possible explanation for the move was that he did not expect the Liberals would continue with the existing joint ticket arrangement, which as Grattan explains is widely opposed within the party. It had long been thought that the Nationals had been able to negotiate the joint ticket partly because the McGauran family helped delivered it preferences from the Democratic Labor Party, whom they had assisted in legal action to prevent its deregistration. The Nationals’ apparent success in keeping the arrangement going might suggest otherwise. However, another possibility is that McGauran thought his prospects of winning Liberal preselection less unlikely than those of keeping his place with the Nationals. McGauran had an uncomfortably narrow preselection win ahead of the 2004 election over Darren Chester, now the member for Gippsland, and his family’s clout might have been further weakened since by brother Peter’s departure from politics.

• Labor’s Mark Dreyfus, chairman of the House of Representatives Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, says he hopes the government will “soon” announce a non-binding plebiscite to test opinion on a republic before the federal election.

• Robert Taylor of The West Australian has an interesting overview of the new entrants to the WA state parliament.

UPDATE (3/1/09): Malcolm Mackerras reviews the Queensland state redistribution and offers his prediction for the election to be held some time this year, namely an 11 seat Labor majority from an even split on two-party preferred.

• Antony Green has crunched the numbers from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ latest state and territory population figures and concluded that yet another new seat will need to be created in Queensland next year, again at the expense of New South Wales. Queensland will thus have boomed from 26 seats to 30 in little over a decade, having earlier gained Blair in 1998, Bonner in 2004 and Flynn in 2007. New South Wales lost Gwydir in 2007.

• The Australian Electoral Commission has announced that the finalised new federal boundaries for Western Australia will be gazetted on December 18, and maps published henceforth.

• Possum reckons “it’s time to rethink political demographics”, and explains why across a two-part epic here and here.

• A constitutional crisis is brewing in Canada that has some excited observers invoking the example of Australia in 1975. The election on October 14 saw Stephen Harper’s Conservative minority government re-elected, but again requiring the support of Bloc Québécois. However, Bloc Québécois has now signed an accord with the Liberal Party and leftist New Democrats due to dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of the financial crisis. Harper reportedly plans to ask that Governor-General Michaëlle Jean prorogue the parliament so it will not sit until the budget is presented in January. This would avert a sitting on December 8 at which Harper’s government would likely be defeated on a no-confidence motion, and allow him time to pick apart the Liberal-Bloc-NDP deal. This raises the question of whether Jean ought to grant a prorogation to a Prime Minister who might not have the confidence of the House.

UPDATE (5/12/08): Jean agrees to prorogue parliament until January 26. Ben Raue at The Tally Room expresses his displeasure, and proposes reforms to the appointment of prime ministers (citing the practice in the Australian Capital Territory), the scheduling of parliament and the timing elections. I am a little more sympathetic to Jean’s decision, on account of the Liberals’ evident state of disarray – although I can buy the idea that it’s not the Governor-General’s role to make such judgements.

Such concerns have obviously failed to cut much ice beyond the state’s borders. In Tasmania, Premier David Bartlett has recently flagged legislation to fix elections for the third Saturday of every fourth March starting from 2010 (setting up an ongoing clash with elections in South Australia). Northern Territory Chief Minister Paul Henderson last week introduced a bill to set future elections for the fourth Saturday of every fourth August, which his government committed to immediately after its recent brush with death at an election called a full year before time. In Western Australia, the centralist, progressive and utopian Liberal government has approved drafting of legislation for quadrennial elections in February or March. This will commit the current government to a four-and-a-half year term, which had always been a possibility owing to the early September election and constitutional arrangements that fix the expiry of the Legislative Assembly at January 31.

There is also lingering in the background Kevin Rudd’s pre-election promise to hold a referendum on fixed four-year terms in conjunction with the next election. However, a previous proposal for four-year terms put to the people in 1988 illustrates the challenge the Senate presents to any such move at federal level. The constitution currently provides for Senators to serve fixed terms of six years, unless they are cut short by a double dissolution. A simple extension of House terms to four years would require frequent half-Senate elections to be held independently of those for the House, which as well as presenting governments with unwelcome “national by-elections” would defeat one of the main purposes of the reform: reducing the frequency of elections, and hence their cost.

The Hawke government’s solution was to abolish staggered six-year Senate terms, so that the entire Senate would face election at the same time as the House. The favoured explanations for the heavy defeat of the proposal were the innate conservatism of the electorate regarding the constitution, a complacent sales pitch by the government and opportunistic obstruction from the Coalition (then in its first period under John Howard’s leadership). However, what seems remarkable in hindsight is that anyone expected it to succeed in the first place. Lacking a provision for fixed terms, the measure merely sought to increase the power of sitting governments by giving them an extra year to play with. Less ambitious proposals to require simultaneous elections for the House and Senate, without fixing the terms or changing their length, had already been rejected in 1974, 1977 and 1984. The small states in particular were easily persuaded that tying full Senate elections to those for the House would have reduced the independence of the chamber that was established to safeguard their interests. While defeated in all six states, the proposal copped a particularly severe drubbing in Tasmania (74.4 per cent against), South Australia (73.3 per cent) and Western Australia (69.3 per cent).

None of these difficulties have gone away. The minister with responsibility for electoral matters, John Faulkner, recently signalled that the party remained committed to simultaneous elections and four-year terms for both houses, the only alternative being an untenable extension of Senators’ terms to eight years. The only substantial respect in which the next referendum will differ from the last is that terms will be fixed, which will add a new complexity to the required amendments. Fixed terms clash with two of the assumptions on which the constitution was based: firstly, that the conventions of the Westminster system would continue to operate, including the increasingly theoretical expectation that a government defeated in the House should resign or seek a new electoral mandate; and secondly, that elections could be used in the last resort to break deadlocks between the two houses. Fixed term legislation has thus required messy escape clauses making exceptions when the parliament becomes unworkable. Such measures have not caused controversy at state level – so far (though it’s interesting to note that of the states and territories currently considering a move to fixed terms, one has a minority government, another seems very likely to have one after the next election, and the third has a government with a one-seat majority). However, that won’t make any less vexing such issues as whether a fixed term will deprive the Senate of its power to force a government to the polls. Whatever views one might hold on these questions, they are plainly not the stuff of incremental reform of a kind likely to clear the hurdles of a constitutional referendum.

Even in the best of circumstances, a referendum proposing fixed four-year terms would face formidable obstacles. In an election that has Labor fearing a backlash against a New South Wales government entrenched until 2011, the whole endeavour begins to look like a waste of time. The Prime Minister indicated his recognition of this a fortnight ago when he told the Sydney Morning Herald there would be “little point proceeding with a referendum unless it had bipartisan support”. John Faulkner has likewise conceded the proposal “may be too much, too soon, to receive the level of broad bipartisan support that is a prerequisite for any referendum to be successful”. If the government wants to take on something more achievable, it could very easily stick to fixing the term rather than extending it, which could be achieved by legislation alone (UPDATE: Charles Richardson in comments is not so sure: he argues “s. 28 says the House ‘may be sooner dissolved by the Governor-General’; I don’t think legislation could fetter that power.”). Given that this would involve throwing away the tactical advantage of deciding the election date with little corresponding political gain, you would do better to place your money on nothing happening at all.

NOTE: Can we please keep this thread broadly on topic – general discussion about federal politics should be directed to the latest poll thread.