It is always dangerous to single individuals out, but Jack Evans and Sid Spindler, alongside Don Chipp, were amongst the most crucial people in getting the Democrats established and functional.  Sadly all three have now passed on. Certainly when it comes to Western Australia, there is no other person who played a more fundamental role in the Democrats in that state, from the frantic early days, slowly building the party to a significant political force, in some very difficult days rebuilding the party in the west after some major infighting in the early 1990s – with the party ultimately reaching its strongest ever point in 1998 – and again in the even harder, distressing period where the party was struggling unsuccessfully for parliamentary and political survival.

Jack Evans not only hosted the huge town hall meeting in Perth in 1977 when Don Chipp was barnstorming the country setting up what to date has been the most successful minor party in Australian political history. He was a strong promoter of a ‘centre-line’ party and served as National President and in a number of other positions in those early years of the Democrats when the new party had lots of momentum and many wildy diverse and fervent members, but very little money or political experience. 

Jack Evans only served in the Senate for a single, shortened term, from March 1983 to June 1985.  There is a lot of hard, unglamorous work involved in party politics, and Jack was over represented in that category, but there is also a lot of luck, and he drew some short straws in that department. 

Jack Evans has a few distinctions in electoral history, some of which I’m sure he would have preferred not to have.  He gained the highest Democrat vote in Western Australia in the party’s entire history, at the Democrats’ very first effort in 1997.  With Jack Evans at the head of the ticket, the party gained around 12.6% of the vote.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to get him elected. Meanwhile over in NSW, his Democrat colleague Colin Mason was comfortably elected despite the party only getting around 8.3% of the vote. 

For those interested in political trivia and minutiae, the number 2 candidate following Jack Evans on the Democrat ticket way back in 1977 was Uri Themal, who later went on to head the Queensland government’s Multicultural Affairs department. The number 3 candidate was Olympic gold medal sprinter Shirley Strickland-de la Hunty, who ran as a support candidate for Jack and the Democrats a number of times through into the 1990s. Jack and Shirley know each other from their teenage years, and he spoke at her funeral in Perth in 2004)

Jack recontested for the Senate in 1980, and while the primary vote was much lower at 8.8%, after all the votes were counted and preferences distributed, he came much closer to getting elected – agonisingly so, missing out on the final seat by less than 1000 votes out of around 700 000 votes cast. That final seat went instead to the Liberal’s Noel Crichton-Browne, starting him out on a Senate career which would stretch for another 16 years. 

To rub salt into the wound, the Liberals had advertised in TV, radio and newspapers, as well as through direct mail, with false assertions that a vote for the Democrats was a vote for Labor, along with other alleged inaccuracies about the Democrats’ voting record in the Senate.  Given the final result was so close, it is not unreasonable to assume that these falsehoods may have had sufficient influence to make a difference.

This led to Jack achieving another unwanted political milestone, as the key appellant in a High Court challenge – Evans v Crichton-Browne – to that result.  I believe it was the first test of the provision of the Electoral Act which makes it an illegal practice to be:

“Printing, publishing, or distributing any electoral advertisement, notice, handbill, pamphlet, or card containing any untrue or incorrect statement intended or likely to mislead or improperly interfere with any elector in or in relation to the casting of his vote.”

The High Court found that this provision related only to misleading electors regarding the actual act of voting – i.e. how to fill in the ballot paper or which ballot box to put in it – not in regard to influencing them in deciding who to vote for, so Jack and the WA Democrats lost out again. 

It is not surprising that the Democrats strongly pushed for many years afterwards to get a prohibition against dishonest political advertising inserted into the Electoral Act.  These efforts to remove the ‘licence to lie’ at election time were actually briefly successful – for a short time after the election of the Hawke Labor government, amendments to this effect were passed by the Senate and inserted in the Electoral Act.  However, the two major parties decided to remove them once again before the next election could be held, so they were never used in practice.

Jack was finally successful in getting elected in March 1983. Ironically, the Democrat Senate vote was lower still, at just 6.8%, but the fact it was a double dissolution election, with a lower quota required for election, made the difference. 

However, the downside of being elected in a double dissolution was that firstly Jack only got a three year term instead of the usual six years, and secondly that the start of his term was back-dated to July 1982.  On top of that, the Hawke government, elected in March 1983, called an early election on 1 December 1984.  This time, the Democrat vote was seriously hampered by the brief shooting star of the Nuclear Disarmament Party. The Democrat vote in WA was just 4.8%, while the NDP’s lead candidate, Jo Vallentine, was elected on 6.8% after having been drawn at the top of the ballot paper – well below the level Jack had achieved in 1977 and 1980 without getting elected. 

As another sign of the vagaries of Senate elections for smaller parties, over in NSW the NDP’s rock star candidate Peter Garrett, who had helped generate so much of the momentum for that new party, failed to win a seat despite getting 9.6% of the vote, while the Democrats’ Colin Mason once again managed to get elected, despite polling lower at 7.2%.

If there was one area the ‘consider each issue on its merits’ Democrats had been unyieldingly dogmatic about since their formation, it was the anti-nuclear, pro-disarmanent message, so the splintering of that vote by the NDP,and especially the loss of a seat to them, caused a degree of teeth-gnashing at the time.

When the 1987 election came around, Jack Evans came second in a tightly contested pre-selection ballot within the Democrats.  Jean Jenkins, the lead candidate got elected – in another double dissolution election – with 5.8% of the vote.  Jo Vallentine – recontesting as an Independent, as the NDP has already imploded by this stage – was also re-elected with 4.8% of the vote – the same percentage the unsuccessful Jack Evans led Democrat ticket achieved in the previous election.

Such are the vagaries of Senate polls for smaller parties. The key message isn’t so much a series of hard luck stories, but rather a stark reminder for minor parties that unless they can gain enough support to get a quota in their own right, they will always be subject to the vagaries of preference flows.

But even though Jack had only a short time in the Senate – the second shortest of the 26 people who served as Senators in the Democrats’ history – he still made his mark in that time.  Perhaps most notably, he introduced one of only twelve Private Senators’ Bills (i.e. non-government legislation) to be passed into law in the nearly 109 years since federal Parliament was founded, and one of only two Democrats (along with former Victorian Senator Janet Powell) to be a sole sponsor of such a Bill.  His Income Tax Assessment Amendment Bill (No 2) 1984 was aimed at preventing a particular type of tax evasion.

The topic of tax evasion legislation was very vexed for the Democrat Senators of this period – the first term of the Hawke government. A shared strong aversion to tax evasion at times ran into conflict with a strong opposition to retrospective legislation.  Democrat Senators Chipp, Haines and Macklin tended to go towards only supporting non-retrospective aspects of legislation which clamped down on tax avoidance, while Jack Evans and Colin Mason leaned towards supporting closing tax avoidance loopholes regardless. 

Unlike the later tax troubles the Democrats ran afoul of with the GST legislation in 1999, this much more drawn our public difference of opinion amongst their Senators did not split the party or its supporter base.  Perhaps this was because the positions various Senators took were always openly and honestly explained, and were consistent with their public policies and principles previously pronounced.

In his first speech to the Senatein 1983, Jack Evans highlighted issues that he pursued in the all too brief period he served in that chamber.  Apart from the traditional Democrat emphasis on inclusiveness and the search for constructive cooperation ahead of combative confrontationalism, he strongly promoted the importance of supporting education at all levels as an investment for the future. 

He gave specific mention not just to the need to stop the Franklin Dam, but also to protect precious areas of Western Australia such as the jarrah and karri forests and Cockburn Sound.  While his mention of the women of Greenham Common may seem a bit dated, his emphasis on the importance of nuclear disarmament is as current as ever, as was his mention of the importance of a Bill of rights and individual responsibilities.

He expressed support for cultural diversity as well as economic diversity, with a display of traditional liberal support for individual enterprise, social supports and a reduction in constraints on fair economic competition.

Following the 1987 election, after Jack Evans had been defeated in pre-selection and Jean Jenkins had been elected to the Senate from WA, he moved into the background witin the party for a number of years.  However, Jenkins’ seat was lost at the 1990 election and she was unsuccessful again at the 1993 poll, with the WA Greens (which by that time had formed around Senator Jo Vallentine prior to her retirement in 1991) then holding 2 Senate seats. 

Around this period, a series of infighting broke out in the Democrats in WA which involved the most extraordinary, labyrinthian set of circumstances I’ve ever witnessed.  It reached the stage of one group of members taking another group to court to determine which people were the ‘real’ executive of the WA Division.  It would take far too long to outline the twisting disputes here – and if I started to try, it would probably attract a furious flurry of comments from a few people who are still determined to have their version history recognised, long after everyone else has forgotten the whole affair happened. 

This period ended with a mass expulsion from the party of the major protagonists from both sides of the stoush – plus others who I have to say were basically caught up as collateral damage.  In addition, some other people from outside the party tried to ensure the dispute dragged on in one way or another through the courts for a number of years after – and without raising the names of anyone from outside the Democrats who might already have been mentioned in this piece, suffice to say that there were some disconcerting similarities with efforts made some years later by other people using sizeable amounts of money to pursue court action to derail Pauline Hanson and her party.

In any case, with most of the active members of the WA Democrats either expelled or repelled by the whole saga, Jack Evans came back in to help rebuild the party in WA almost from scratch.  Within a few years, the WA Democrats not only had a Senator elected once again in 1996, with Andrew Murray gaining 9.4%, but in 1998 for the first time ever gained a second WA Senator, with the election of Brian Greig from 6.4% of the vote.

In between those two elections, for the only time in the party’s history they also succeeded in getting people elected to the Upper House of the State Parliament.  The election of Helen Hodgson and Norm Kelly at the state election in late 1997 not only gave the WA branch of the party it’s only ever taste of state success. That election was also historic because, in combination with the election of three candidates from the WA Greens, it broke the conservative’s hold on the WA Upper House for the first time in the state’s history.  The consequences of that were historic, not least because it – eventually – led to the removal of (most of) the disgraceful enormous malapportionment in favour of rural voters which had existed for so long in WA.

Sadly, both of these state seats were lost at the next WA state election in  February 2001- a result which also played a key part in the party’s members across the country moving to generate a ballot of the federal leadership, leading to Meg Lees being replaced by Natasha Stott Despoja less than two months later.

At the 2001 federal election, the Stott Despoja led Democrats – with Jack Evans serving once again as National Campaign Director, as he had in the earliest days of the party – provided the only occasion where the Democrats retained a Senate seat in WA, with Andrew Murray being re-elected on 5.8% of the vote.

I never heard Jack mention it, but if I was him I would have found it interesting to note that results of 12.6% in 1977 and 8.8% in 1980 when he was lead Senate candidate weren’t enough to get a successful outcome, whilst Democrat votes of 5.8% in 1987, 6.4% in 1998 and 5.8% in 2001 were sufficient to be successful.  There a range of reasons why this is so, not least a slightly lower quota after 1984 and the emergence of the NDP/Greens in WA cutting into the Democrat base vote whilst providing strong preference flows if the Democrats could stay above them in the count. 

Despite age and health starting to catch up with him, Jack one again played key roles in the 2007 election for the party in its efforts to stave off parliamentary annihilation.  It must have been a terrible thing for him to witness the final eradication of the party from the national parliament, after thirty years of effort and sacrifice.

I don’t pretend I had no disagreements with Jack now and then over the years, but I could never fault his commitment or his tenacity.  And while he was determined, he wasn’t dogmatic or inflexible. 

It probably sounds shallow, but I also have to say I was terribly envious of his voice, which was rich, deep and resonant – the sort of naturally authoritative and projecting voice which any politician would die for.

In the final paragraphs of the final speech made by a Democrat in the federal Parliament, I mentioned Jack Evans; wondering what might have been if he had had the chance to contribute over a longer period of time in the Senate.   But politics, like life, is full of ‘what ifs’. The most we can do is try our hardest to improve things for the better, and I have no doubt Jack achieved that.

In reading back through a piece I wrote about Don Chipp’s funeralthree years ago, I saw a comment I heard at the time from Paul Keating. He was talking about Chipp, but I think it is fair to give it some application to Jack Evans too, when he said Don Chipp “successfully achieved one of the most difficult things possible in Australian politics – starting a new political party.”

The fact that the party’s time may now have ended doesn’t in any way diminish its achievements over the thirty years when it reshaped the political landscape in Australia, especially when it comes to the Senate.  It doesn’t just leave a historical artifact or curiosity; it leaves an ongoing legacy that impacts on all that follow.

I know the 30 or so years of the Democrats’ history only played one part in the 80 year long life of Jack Evans. I focus on that because I don’t know enough about the rest of his life to comment, but on that score alone, it’s a very good effort.

Barack Obama not only used many aspects of the internet and SMS to fund raise and deliver his message.  In February, he caused a ripple amongst the mainstream media establishment in the USA during a press conference when he called on a writer from a blog to ask a question. The Huffington Post is certainly a much larger operation than your standard amateur blogger like me, but it is still a blog.

He has continued to engage with social media since taking office, using it not just to reach out to his electorate but also in his messages to the global community.

The important role of Twitter and other internet based communication modes in informing the world about the unrest and brutality in Iran has been widely noted.

Michael Tomaskey, a political writer from The Guardian, writes about President Obama’s latest press conference.

The most remarkable thing (about Obama’s press conference was that the best question – I mean far and away the best question – didn’t come from a journalist.

A journalist conveyed it – Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post. He was called on second. As any political junkie knows, Pitney has been doing a fantastic job over the last several days aggregating hundreds of Tweets from Iran and doing his own original reporting, becoming a real go-to source for people wanting to stay up-to-the-minute on post-election developments.

So Obama called on Pitney and even shot him props for the job he’s been doing. Then Pitney asked not his own question, but a question from an Iranian that he had solicited earlier (through the internet).

The Guardian’s Technology Blog also notes

That wasn’t the only social technology used to spread the message, though: in addition, the White House quickly made a version of Obama’s remarks on Iran – also streamed on Facebook – that had subtitles in Farsi and pushed out the message on Twitter in Farsi too, with a message reading roughly: “President Obama’s remarks in his press conference, with Farsi translation”.

This is not going to turn the media world upside down or deliver world peace overnight.  But it is also much more than just an online gimmick or two in an attempt to look hip. It is clearly an effort to engage with more people, in a more direct way – including people from other countries where the information they receive through their official media is far more distorted.  That can only be a good thing.

We’re a long way short of this in Australia, where dated and meaningless ‘bloggers versus journalists’ rants still abound, and over-defensive people in the mainstream media still try to portray all bloggers as anti-social oddballs, bile-filled ravers, unethical or unreliable (or all four) – serving little purpose other making one wonder whether they’ve looking in a mirror.  And even a well-established and clearly influential online media outlet like Crikey has only been allowed access to the annual Budget lockups in the last couple of years.

While a few people in the government sphere, like Lindsay Tanner, are making genuine efforts to making politics and government more accessible, as a whole there isn’t really the desire to genuinely reach out and engage with people in the way that Obama is clearly trying to do.

When I first signed on to Twitter over a year ago, I really couldn’t see what possible value it had. A year later, after finally rediscovering the password to my account, I re-engaged and have since find it quite useful at times (and occasionally also disconcerting at the sort of personal information some people readily put out there).

But the flurry of brief updates and links to information / pictures / videos about what might be happening in parts of Iran right now really takes it to another level. It is less detail rich, but far more immediate and easy to disseminate than sites like Facebook, and makes the standard blog seem incredibly ponderous and slow (although Twits which links to valuable blog posts can also be important).

The situation in Iran at present is not something which happens every day (thankfully), but it does show the ever-evolving benefits of social media in giving unvarnished voice to the here and now.

Searching for #iranelection on Twitter will deliver an extraordinary pile of continually updating tweets – hundresd of new ones every ten minutes or so.  Sure, a lot of them are non-Iranian people re-tweeting messages and generally trying to feel like they are part of the action.  Add in the messages which the Iranian regime is now trying to add in as an effort to smokescreen or derail what’s happening, and perhaps it’s not quite as big as it seems.

But there’s no doubt Twitter is providing a key and very immediate mechanism to get information and voices out that would otherwise never be heard. Quite what effect it will all have for Iranians remains to be seen, but anything which helps circumvent censorship and large-scale misinformation should be welcomed.

If you’re on Twitter, follow @Change_for_Iran and look at some of the updates. It’s impossible to be 100% sure of the veracity of some of the updates, but the same can be said for most immediate on-the-ground reporting.

There will obviously be a lot of interest in the contents of the report flowing out of the consultation process, as well as how the government decides to respond to it.

But putting aside the impact of the consultations on future human rights laws and attitudes, it will also be worth examining the effectiveness of the processes used during those consultations.

This has been a far more public consultation process than those usually carried out by or on behalf of governments, and has sought to use a wide variety of processes to engage people.  The effectiveness of the process itself merits some further examination in considering whether other parliamentary and political processes should adopt some of the practices.

The committee carrying out the consultations seems to have gone to great length to engage with ‘ordinary’ people, rather than just the usual suspects.  The terms of reference have been kept brief and clear, and the Committee has also emphasised that submissions can be as short as people like, and in any format that people are comfortable with. My understanding is that the inquiry also has the capacity to receive submissions in a range of different languages.

In terms of open public engagement, one of the more interesting aspects of the consultations has been the attempt to use an open online forum to seek peoples’ views and enable some debate.  This process is part of the government’s trials of online consultation.

I am told it’s the first online discussion forum established by a government department in Australia that is publishing comments in real time without filtering them through a public service legal team first.

In addition, all comments are considered a submission to the wider public consultation on human rights legislation, and people can keep contributing through the online process for an extra two weeks – until June 26.

It is being run through the Open Forum website – “an independent, non-profit, collaborative think-tank built around an interactive discussion website” which seeks to “provide a platform for focused dialogue on Australian public policy and social issues.”

The process allows debate on each of the three core questions which constitute the Terms of Reference of the Inquiry, as well as an extra  discussion page on whether or not Australia should have a Bill of Rights.

As to be expected in any public forum, online or otherwise, many of the contributions are off-topic or targeting people rather than issues and ideas.  But there are also some worthwhile contributions and presumably many more people reading the comments without contributing.
Unfortunately, the discussion on the main introduction page of the online consultation forum kicks off with some off-the-wall attacks by the Atheist Foundation on the whole inquiry, on the basis that it is chaired by a priest who therefore “cannot adjudicate with an impartial mind on matters conflicting with his faith” and is “a biased and inflexible ideologically driven person,” purely on the basis that he has personal religious beliefs.

I’d usually ignore that sort of nonsense, but being an atheist myself, I cringe every time I see people using the atheist label as an excuse to engage in religious vilification.  When comments and responses from some equally fundamentalist Christians start appearing, it quickly feels like the whole idea might not have been such a good one.

But the forum does move on from the ranting to some of the substantive points under consideration.  As well as occasional brief promptings from Frank Brennan, contributions are also brought in from Law Professors George Williams and Tom Campbell to clarify some of the legal terms and concepts.

No doubt there are better ways to use these processes and tools for more effective and meaningful consultation, but for all it’s limitations, I suggest it is far more meaningful and clearly more representative than the standard inquiry processes where submissions are sought from and hearings held with people from a fairly narrow segment of society. These ‘usual suspects’ play a valuable role, but they also can, and in this inquiry no doubt have participated, much the same as usual.  It is the chance to engage with a wider group of people that is the real benefit of online consultation.

Open Forum’s ‘blogger-in-chief’, Sally Rose, says “The National Human Rights Online Consultation is part of the Australian Government’s online consultation trial, so it’s right that it be critically analysed and understood as a learning process.” She also pleads for any ideas about how to much such mechanisms more effective and valuable for all concerned.

I hope time is taken to do that, regardless of the outcome of the debates for or against more legal protection for human rights in Australia.

In addition to the online forum, the Committee has held public consultation meetings in out of the way places such as Weipa, Tennant Creek, Coober Pedy and Geraldton, as well as Aboriginal communities like Yarrabah and Palm Island and outer urban areas such as Penrith and Ipswich which usually get bypassed by such processes.

The Consultation also used a Facebook page, (which they actually kept reasonably up to date!) and Frank Brennan, as Chair of the Consultation, also kept his Facebook page updated with photos and brief reflections (including the occasional quote from a High Court judgement) as he travelled around hearing from the public in many different areas.

The only real annoyance I’ve had with the process was the difficulty in avoiding confusion between these National Human Rights Consultations and the totally separate work continuing to be carried out by the Australian Human Rights Commission.  I think it was a very good idea to keep this consultation process independent and separate from the Commission, but it wasn’t always easy to make the difference clear to people.

It’s hard to know what else they could have to try to engage the community, although any ideas in that regard I’m sure would be welcome.

It’s no great surprise the Coalition voted against the move, given it was reversing changes they made to make it so much easier for large donations to be kept anonymous, but it’s surprising that there’s been so little outcry about it.

Here’s a reminder of  what the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2008 [2009] would have done:

reduce the disclosure threshold (for donations to political parties) from the current CPI indexed amount of $10,900 to a non-indexed amount of $1,000. ….

The bill will improve transparency in the funding and disclosure regime by requiring participants in the electoral process to report every six months rather than every 12 months.

The bill will also provide consistency by reducing the deadline when the participants in the political process have to lodge disclosure returns with the AEC to a consistent period of eight weeks. This measure will replace the haphazard deadlines currently in the Electoral Act which range from 15 weeks, 16 weeks or 20 weeks, depending on the person or the entity.

To ensure that the new $1,000 disclosure threshold is not avoided by a person giving multiple amounts below the threshold to various branches or divisions of the same political party, the bill will treat donations to different branches of a political party as if the donations were given to the same political party.

The bill prohibits the receipt of a gift of foreign property or an anonymous gift outright for some people and entities while for other people and entities it will be unlawful to receive a gift of foreign property or an anonymous gift if that gift is used for political expenditure.

The bill seeks to prevent the possibility that some candidates and other groups may obtain a windfall payment of election funding by tying electoral funding to the actual electoral expenditure incurred.

Senator Fielding did not express opposition to any of these measures, but none the less voted against all of them.  His remarks focused on his view that there should be a limit of $10 million on the public funding any political parties can receive from one election.  This is a view worthy of debate, although in my view it’s not the best way to try to limit or cap election expenditure by political parties.

He also made the curious statement that “one of the biggest opportunities for corruption arises under public funding for federal election campaigns.”  It is actually private donations that provide by far the biggest opportunity for corruption – a key reason why public funding was brought in in the first place.

Senator Fielding concluded his remarks in the Senate by saying that “Family First is moving to cap the amount that each major political party can claim from the public to fund their election campaign to a maximum of $10 million.”  Barely fifteen minutes later, he then voted against the Bill, not only providing the crucial vote which enabled it to be defeated, but also preventing himself from being able to move the amendment he said was so essential.

Regardless of whether or not a cap on public funding is a good idea, this decision has left open a scandalous legal mechanism which allows anonymous donations of close to $90 000 to be made to political parties, for major donations to come from foreign interests and for long delays in disclosure of donations.

Once again, the Senate sitting days are fairly light on this year – just  fifty-two days.  This is supplemented by sixteen days of Estimates Committee hearings and plenty of other Committee inquiries, but it’s still not a great deal of time committed to debate and consideration of all the proposed laws that get put before the Parliament.

At the end of this first sitting week, old Parliament House in Canberra will play host to a Citizens’ Parliament.  150 randomly selected citizens will deliberate on and attempt to answer the very important question:

“How can Australia’s political system be strengthened to serve us better?”

According to their website, the mission of deliberative processes like the Australian Citizens’ Parliament is to change the way we talk about politics and make political decisions.

One aspect of our Parliamentary system which I believe is given far too little attention is the adequacy of the process used to deliberate on and pass legislation.  Almost all the media focus is on the political contest and the mostly empty and meaningless theatre of Question Time.  But it is the legislation which directly affects our lives, not the political point scoring and insults.

Last year also saw just 52 sitting days for the Senate.  According to statistics on the Senate’s website, exactly 50 per cent of the Senate’s time – equating to a bit over 224 hours – was spent debating government business (which is mostly legislation, but also includes some procedural matters). So perhaps little more than 200 hours was spent debating and voting on the 164 Bills were passed by the Senate and another 15 that were either negatived or discharged.

In the time spent debating all these Bills, there were also 667 amendments moved, 18 amendments to amendments and 104 motions to oppose specific items within a Bill.  Of course many of these are moved as a block, rather than a whole series of individual amendments.  None the less, it is a lot to fit into around 200 hours.

There is a very interesting article in Inside Story by James Panichi which goes in detail into some of the personal and political history of this process in Italy, Australia and South America.  

While the article highlights some of the flaws with the model the Italian parliament chose, I still think there are some worthwhile lessons to learn from the attempt the Italians made.  Australia does not do anywhere near enough to engage our diaspora – it is very much an out of sight out of mind attitude.  I think this is a major mistake given the ever more fluid movements of people around the globe. 

There was a sadly neglected Senate Committee report on this topic back in 2005.  Of course, the vast majority of Senate Committee reports from the final years of the Howard-era were ignored by the then-government, but I think this one in particular could benefit from some re-examination.

It would be worthwhile for Australia to do more to directly engage our diaspora, although I am not convinced the Italian approach was the best way to go electorally.  I prefer the sort of approach Andrew Leigh put forward back in 2004.

But the result which really astonished me was on a proposition to set up a non-partisan authority to draw the electoral boundaries in the state. I wasn’t surprised that it passed, but I was amazed that it only just squeaked through – 50.7 per cent to 49.3 per cent! Maybe it’s just my Queensland upbringing, where Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s government used to draw their own electorate boundaries, but I find it hard to imagine why anyone – let alone 49 per cent of people – could support partisan boundary rigging. It’s almost like voting against democracy.

The results for all twelve Californian propositions held at the same time as their general election are at this link.  A much more positive and more comprehensive a result, with 63 per cent in favour, was a proposition that requires “calves raised for veal, egg-laying hens and pregnant pigs be confined only in ways that allow these animals to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely” (with exceptions for situations such as transportation, rodeos, lawful slaughter, research and veterinary purposes).

It might seem like a fairly mild reform, simply giving farm animals enough space to turn around, but it is not something you’ll see permitted in Australia any time soon.

Every system has its drawbacks, but while I am very disappointed about the result on the same sex marriage proposition, I still believe there is a lot going for giving voters the opportunity to hold such referenda.

One other positive feature of the process, at least in California, is the online provision of information to voters in six other languages, as well as English, outlining the case for and against the various propositions.

UPDATE: The American Civil Liberties Union and others have filed a court challenge to the validity of Proposition 8 – the one which sought to make same sex marriages unconstitutional. There will be some fighting over this issue for some time yet.

Which made me somewhat surprised to see these comments from ACT Labor Leader Jon Stanhope:

”We have won this election. The people of Canberra have invested in us the responsibility for governing the community for the next four years,” Mr Stanhope said.  He and his deputy, Katy Gallagher, will constitute the Labor team to meet the three Greens representatives. Mr Stanhope said he was confident a resolution would be reached soon. ”I don’t see it so much as a negotiation meeting, I’m not sure what there is to negotiate,” he said.

I know the entrenched two party system sometimes clouds political analysis in this country, but I thought that to “win” an election, a party had to demonstrate that a majority of the people elected were willing to support them in the relevant Parliamentary chamber. Seven (or even eight if the count falls their way) seats out of seventeen doesn’t quite make it.

I suppose it’s possible Jon Stanhope is engaging in some clever reverse psychology, trying to be offensive and presumptuous in an attempt to make the Greens choose the Liberals, with the expectation this would be highly unstable and cause major political problems for the Greens, thus driving the electorate back into the familiar arms of Labor.  But I think it’s more likely Stanhope is just being incredibly presumptuous.

Now I think the odds of the Greens coming to an agreement which would see the Liberals governing in the ACT are 1000-1.  There’s no doubt the Greens need to look for ways to broaden their voter appeal and show they do not always lean towards Labor, but supporting the ACT Liberals would surely be a bridge too far in this circumstance – far more so than for the WA Nationals to backLabor ahead of the Liberals after their recent poll. Of course, that proved too politically risky for them despite Labor offering a better upfront deal.

It would be a potentially very damaging move for the Greens to let the Liberals govern at this stage – perhaps not quite on the scale of the Democrats supporting the GST, but asking for trouble none the less.   Bold political moves are fine, but (a) it helps to properly prepare your main support base somewhat in advance, and (b) you need to be able to credibly justify and explain it the morning after, when the excitement of making the ‘couragous’ deal fades away.

Minority governments are the norm rather than the exception in the ACT and the highly democratic electoral system means the count takes longer to finalise – all of which makes this small delay in resolving the outcome fairly run of the mill.  While the Greens are highly likely to go with Labor, they have every right – indeed a responsibility – to use their position to ensure the next government operates in a more open manner, and to seek to have their policy concerns treated seriously and adopted where possible.  This is particularly the case in the ACT, which is not your standard Westminster style Australian parliament and there is the potential to explore processes and practices that are more collegiate.

Probably the one thing that could make it politically feasible and credible for the Greens to reach an agreement with the Liberals would be if Labor maintained a “there is nothing to negotiate” stance in the weeks ahead.

Labor’s Nick Lalich, who has already served as Mayor of Fairfield, was born in Egypt after his parents fled Yugoslavia near the end of World War II, and came to Australia when he was three years old.

Liberal candidate Dai Le came to Australia at age eleven, after she and her family spent three years in a refugee camp after fleeing Vietnam at the end of the war.

Our Parliaments will naturally tend to lag a bit behind when it comes to reflecting the reality of our cultural diversity, but the more this gap can be bridged the better.  Migrants – and even more so refugees – have experiences that most Australian born people haven’t had; especially those whose ancestors migrated here a few generations ago. We can all benefit from being more exposed to those perspectives. 

People with a southern and eastern European heritage have started to make their way into senior political positions – as the outgoing member for Lakemba and former Premier Morris Iemma demonstrates – but as yet there are not many of Asian heritage.

Encouraging the involvement of people from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds in political processes is a key way to improve integration.  There are some significant barriers to this – many of them cultural, some of them structural.  The Constitutional bar on dual citizens running for federal Parliament is an obvious one, but the non-participatory nature of party politics and the tendency of major parties to play it safe when it comes to winnable seats also play their part.

This article from Slate details the (partly unintended) impacts of Ireland’s migration and citizenry laws, which enabled “Rotimi Adebari, a Nigerian refugee who arrived in Ireland in 2000, to become the mayor of Portlaoise, a commuter town outside Dublin, even though he’s not (yet) an Irish citizen.”

According to the Australian Parliament House website, currently 31 of our 226 federal MPs were born overseas.  Of course you can be an Australian born overseas, just as you can be born in Australia and not necessarily be eligible to become a citizen, so nation of birth is not a perfect indicator. But it’s not too bad a guide.  15 of those 31 were born in the UK or New Zealand, and only 2 were born in Asia. 

I can’t finish an article like this without noting that none of the 226 representatives in the federal Parliament are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders.  107 years since Federation and we are still yet to see the first Indigenous person elected to the House of Representatives, with only two being elected to the Senate over that period.