• The Australian’s Michael Owen reports South Australian Labor is finalising its federal preselections, which “senior factional figures” link to a potential early election. Mia Handshin is keen to run again, either in a second tilt at Sturt or where Nicole Cornes failed in Boothby. Cornes herself has found an interesting new line of work as an industrial officer for the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, but is “unlikely to win preselection”. A “senior ALP figure” nonetheless claims she is a genuine future prospect. Owen also reckons Labor Senator Dana Wortley faces electoral oblivion through “moves to relegate her to an unwinnable third spot”, although it was from that unwinnable position that she actually won her seat in 2004.

• Institute of Public Affairs director John Roskam has withdrawn from the contest to succeed Petrio Georgiou as Liberal candidate for Kooyong. He has thrown his support behind industrial relations lawyer John Pesutto, who looms as a threat to merchant banker Josh Frydenberg’s long-held designs on the seat. Rick Wallace of The Australian reports Pesutto also has the support of Ted Baillieu, who angered the Frydenberg camp by attending a function they “claim was to support Mr Pesutto”. Wallace also notes the June preselection will be “one of the first carried out under the Liberal Party’s new constitution, which empowers all eligible members within a seat to vote instead of only specially chosen delegates”. Andrew Landeryou at VexNews is told that “many of them … will be swinging votes with a history of supporting Baillieu/Petro or at least having a significant amount of affection for them or an in-built objection to the recruiting enthusiasms of Joshua”.

• Another interesting preselection for the Victorian Liberals looms in the eastern suburbs seat of Deakin, where two former members are hoping to make a comeback. One is Phil Barresi, who lost the seat to Labor’s Mike Symon in 2007. The other is Ken Aldred, whose eccentric reign extended from 1990 until his preselection defeat by Barresi in 1996. Aldred won a preselection ballot in Holt ahead of the 2007 election, but it was overturned by wiser heads in the party. Rounding out the field of known contenders is Deanna Ryall, a “local businesswoman”. Labor holds the seat with a margin of 1.4 per cent.

• New Queensland Opposition Leader John-Paul Langbroek foreshadows a more “flexible” approach than his predecessor in negotiating fixed four-year terms, improving the prospects for a referendum on the matter during the current term. Langbroek says it is not a priority, but Anna Bligh has apparently put the matter “on the agenda”. A referendum in 1991 for unfixed four-year terms was defeated with a 51.2 per cent no vote.

• Antony Green on the slow death of the election night tally room:

The next South Australian election will be the first conducted without a tallyroom. Both Victoria and NSW have also decided not to hold tallyroms at state elections due in November 2010 and March 2011. These state decisions may yet play a part in deciding whether free to air broadcasters attend the next Federal tallyroom. There were serious noise problems in the tallyroom in 2007, Sky News already bases its coverage from studio, and hosting from a studio would save the ABC and other free-to-air broadcasters considerable amounts of money and allow greater use of studio technology.

• I am maintaining elsewhere progressively updated posts on two looming electoral events: the May 16 Fremantle by-election and May 2 Tasmanian upper house elections.

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.