The Senate: House of Review, or House of ‘Hang on, Let Me Read This Properly’

The Senate: House of Review, or House of "Hang on, Let Me Read This Properly"

Twelve Senators Per State, One Purpose, Infinite Procedural Options

If the House of Representatives is where laws are made, the Senate is where they are improved, delayed, amended, referred to committee, referred back from committee, amended again, passed in a form nobody originally proposed, or blocked entirely by a man in a suit who has read the legislation in question more carefully than anyone else in the building and has Feelings about clause 47(b).

The Senate is Australia’s upper house – "upper" in constitutional position, though senators are careful to note this does not imply superiority, merely a different and complementary democratic function, a distinction they make with the calm confidence of people who know they can block supply. It consists of 76 senators: twelve from each of the six states and two each from the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory. This arrangement gives Tasmania – population approximately 570,000, roughly the size of a medium suburb of Sydney – the same Senate representation as New South Wales, population eight million. Tasmanians find this perfectly reasonable.

How the Senate is Elected: A Mild Adventure in Mathematics

Senators are elected by proportional representation – specifically, a system of above-the-line and below-the-line voting so intricate that it once produced a Senator elected with 0.51% of first-preference votes in Victoria. The gentleman in question represented the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party. He served until 2017. His name was Ricky Muir and he arrived in Canberra having given one media interview in his life and departed it as one of the more thoughtfully independent voices the Senate has seen, which is either an advertisement for the system or a very interesting accident, depending on your view of democratic theory.

The proportional system means the Senate regularly elects representatives from minor parties and independent candidates who would not survive in a single-member electorate. This produces a crossbench of varying ideological composition – Greens, One Nation, independents, occasional genuine surprises – that exercises considerable influence on legislation. Major parties regard this as either the healthy pluralism of a mature democracy or an obstacle course designed by malevolent elves, depending entirely on whether they currently hold a Senate majority.

The Crossbench: Democracy’s Spice Rack

The Senate crossbench – those senators belonging to neither the government nor the official opposition – is the element that makes the Senate genuinely unpredictable and, for students of political science, genuinely interesting. Crossbenchers must be negotiated with. Their votes must be sought. Their concerns must be addressed, or at least acknowledged, or at minimum heard for long enough that they feel consulted before voting against you anyway.

This produces the phenomenon of ministers visiting Senate crossbenchers with policy concessions the way one visits a particularly opinionated aunt before Christmas: you know what she wants to talk about, you know you’ll have to agree to something, and you know the conversation will take longer than anyone planned.

According to the Centre for Legislative Spice Metrics – an institution that exists in this paragraph and nowhere else – crossbench senators have amended, delayed, or blocked approximately 340 pieces of major legislation since 1990, saving the nation from several catastrophes and causing at least three others, in proportions that remain contested along political lines.

The Senate as a States’ House: A Constitutional Theory Honoured Mostly in Theory

The Senate was originally conceived as a states’ house – a body that would represent the interests of the federated states against Commonwealth encroachment. In practice, senators vote along party lines with roughly the same discipline as their House colleagues, making the Senate less a guardian of state interests and more a second chamber that happens to be elected differently, contains more minor party representation, and has slightly better coffee.

The states’ house function does occasionally emerge during debates about Commonwealth funding to the states, natural resource legislation, and anything touching on Queensland, which maintains a relationship with the federal Senate best described as "spirited." But as a systematic check on Commonwealth power in the name of federalism, the Senate’s record suggests that party solidarity tends to trump state loyalty at roughly the same rate that it does everywhere else in the building.

Senate Estimates: Where Bureaucrats Are Asked Questions They Cannot Answer in Public

Twice yearly, the Senate conducts Estimates hearings – marathon committee sessions in which public servants are questioned by senators about government spending with a thoroughness that the House of Representatives, focused on the daily theatre of Question Time, does not replicate. Senate Estimates is where genuine scrutiny of government administration occurs. It is also where the truly dedicated student of Australian government discovers that it is possible to ask the same question seventeen different ways without receiving an answer to any of them, and that senior public servants have elevated "I’ll have to take that on notice" to a form of high art.

"The Senate is the group project member who actually read the brief," observes Professor Reginald Clipboard III, with the weary respect of a man who has attended committee hearings. "Whether this makes them valuable or annoying depends entirely on whether you wrote the brief."

For coverage of legislative bodies that slow things down for reasons that, on reflection, are occasionally quite good, visit The London Prat’s upper house dispatches – prat.uk – where the House of Lords provides a comparison study in chambers that were not designed to be efficient and have thoroughly delivered on that promise.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com