Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Senate reforms the next thing overboard

The unlikely cause of constitutional reform may have looked like a useful distraction for John Howard in the past few weeks, but already it is fading like a beautiful dream.

His plan to break deadlocks between the Reps and the Senate by the brutal but effective device of de-balling the upper house has met with predictable outrage from the minor parties and an ultimatum from Labor: give us real reform or forget it. Howard, the conservative pragmatist to whom genuine improvement in the political process is anathema, has beaten a hasty retreat.

He may be prepared to consider four year terms of parliament, but is very reluctant to have such terms fixed; he likes the unfairly weighted system, which allows him to choose election dates. And of course he would never take from the Senate the power that really matters, the power to block supply. Since the changes he wants can only be achieved through a referendum, which would have little chance of success even with Labor's support and absolutely none without it, Howard's little flirtation with change returns to the fantasy world whence it came.

But if he is really, truly serious about pulling the senate into line (his line) there is a way to do it without referendum, through legislation alone. This would also require Labor's support (to get the legislation through the senate) but that might just be forthcoming, as the effect would be to annihilate the minor parties which have, in the past, been just as much a hindrance to Labor as they now are to the coalition. This final solution to the senate problem is to abolish the system of proportional representation and return to the winner-takes-all system which prevails in the Reps and which was also used in the Senate until 1948.

Ironically it was Labor that made the change; Bert Evatt, whose arithmetic was as suspect as his temperament, managed to convince his party that with proportional representation Labor would never lose control of the upper house. Ben Chifley pushed the bill through, with the result that Labor has never once controlled the Senate in the 55 years since. Under the previous system there was always a fair chance that the party in government would also have the numbers in the Senate, which is what Howard - and indeed any but the most idealistic prime minister, a creature long since extinct in Australian politics - really wants. Is he desperate enough to give it a try?

Well, perhaps. The depths of Howard's real disrespect for political principle were shown as long ago as 1988 when Bob Hawke's Labor government proposed four referenda, one of which was for the formal recognition of local government in the constitution. This was in fact part of the Liberal Party's platform; but the conspiratorial Peter Reith argued that it would be simpler for the Libs to oppose all four referenda than to consider them on their individual merits and his leader John Howard, already majoring in opportunism, enthusiastically agreed.

It is a piece of bastardry worth recalling when Howard starts talking sanctimoniously about the need for constitutional reform.

The new health minister, Tony Abbot, entered the ring with the Australian Medical Association breathing fire, promising a knock-down, drag-out struggle to the death, vowing there would be no retreat.

Now, after a fortnight of furious back-pedalling he has called time out with every sign that he is preparing to throw in the towel. The doctors have already got much of what they wanted and Abbot's face-saving inquiry will probably give them the rest before Christmas.

Abbot is not the first minister to discover just how vicious the caring, healing medical profession can become when it detects a threat to its hip pocket. When Bill Hayden was trying to introduce Medibank (the predecessor of Medicare) in 1973 the medicos ran a well-funded campaign that included everything from comparisons with Adolf Hitler to rumours questioning his sanity. Hayden persevered, and the irony is that the profession belatedly realised that the public health system had unlocked Treasury itself for them.

Now they expect the taxpayers to top up their incomes whenever there is the slightest danger of it falling. That great scourge of less well-organised trade unions, chief head-kicker Tony Abbot, is only too happy to oblige. After all, many of them are his own constituents.

The death of Jim Cairns severs another link with those near-forgotten years when politics was fired with passion, rage and hope.

Cairns, the charismatic face of the anti-Vietnam war movement, was always a greater force on the streets than in parliament and turned out to be more effective in opposition than in government. As he admitted, he let his heart rule his head, and in his politically disastrous affair with Juni Morosi, another organ took over from both.

Nonetheless, he was a giant in his times, and we need a few in today's Lilliputian scene. Of the grand old left only Tom Uren is still standing.

The most gorge-raising episode of the week was undoubtedly the image of John Howard dragging the anniversary of the Bali bombing into the opening ceremony of the Rugby World Cup. The man has no shame and no class.

But at least a large proportion of the crowd booed as he smarmed his way onto the rostrum, as was also the case at the Rugby League grand final. Perhaps all is not lost.