Would Like a 'Parliamentary Political Systems for Americans' Primer

Politics & Elections
121

With celebrities and sole elected members of parties generally, they can flounder easily. Here in Australia there was footage this week of the brand new members of parliament who came in the recent election being given their introductory tour around Parliament House.

Most are independents [not affiliated to the main govt or opposition parties]. Some stood as individuals, a few as a loose coalition [‘the Teal independents’ - basically Liberal party people who had a Green agenda], others as representatives of minor parties.

How busy they are in the next 3 years depends entirely on the numbers - if the Govt holds an absolute majority, then it can ignore them, but if it doesn’t then it has to schmooze enough of them to pass legislation. If you are, say, a Tasmanian independent and the government is one vote short, then you can expect the Prime Minister to be outside your bedroom window serenading you with hydro-electricity dams, export subsidies and hospital extensions every night.

If that’s not the case, you could well be ignored. You may have been elected on a platform to put Big Pharma in its place, but if you are part of the numerical minority you may have little or no chance of ever being heard on the floor of Parliament.

The mechanism that is useful here is the Committee system, which are either standing or ad hoc creations. This is where legislation and national policies are presented for detailed review and scrutiny. They are still dominated by party politics but draft legislation is picked apart, experts are interviewed and hearings are held, and it is not uncommon that a piece of bad law-making is quietly strangled to death ‘by committee’, ie including members of the govt who promulgated it.

The trick for the novice parliamentarian is to find a spot on a committee that reflects their interest in boring it up Big Pharma, so they can use it to show how busy and successful they are to their own constituents. More commonly it will be as a faceless member of some committee reviewing import subsidies on cheese-processing machinery, which may be critical to the nation but has few enough photo opportunities, let alone chances to grand-stand and show how effective you are to your backers.

That’s why it can be really tough to be an independent or small-party representative - the work you have to do does not lead to effective self-promotion. It usually only the crazies [in Oz rightwing parties like One Nation and Clive Palmer] who try to do stupid and sensationalist things to remind people that they are still alive, and [to their audience back home at least] are sticking it to the Man.
The irony is that they usually campaign on a platform that Parliament is dysfunctional and forgets the concerns of the regular person, but they are doing the opposite of what would make it work better and smoother.

122

Don’t individual candidates have to sign up in some way to confirm their nomination?

123

Nope. I think the party is required to remove you if you request it, but in 2015 the Progress Party put a non party member on their municipal election list by mistake because of similar names and the general opinion at the time was that it was a valid election and this “wrong” person had to attend municipal council meetings.

I can’t immediately find any follow up reports on the case.

124

We don’t have PM Questions in our federal Parliament. It’s Question Period, and the Opposition members can direct their questions to any minister, including the PM. The PM may choose to answer, or the minister to whom the question was posed, or possibly a different minister, if they think that it should really be directed to the different minister.

Yes, it’s political show, but it’s also the basic principle, that every day Parliament is sitting, the Cabinet has to respond to questions from the Opposition and give an answer.

125

The constitution was changed in 2020 to allow people to declare in writing they did not want to be on a party list. Before that you couldn’t force a party to remove your name unless you weren’t eligible to be elected.

126

Found it! It took them about a month, but the municipal council voted unanimously to free her from the obligation to participate and the next candidate on the list took her seat. Must have been annoying for the person who was supposed to have been on the list though.

127

Well, one learns something new every day. Over here, the candidate has to sign their consent to nomination, as do each of the required number of proposers (who have to be registered to vote in the area).

I don’t suppose it’s ever happened, but I’d have thought there’d be a case to sue for defamation if the ‘No mainstream party is racist enough for me’ party” falsely claimed that someone was even a sympathiser, let alone a candidate.

128

I expect if someone had tried, the defense would have been that "a reasonable person is aware that parties can and have filled out the lower part of the list with random celebrities. Then again I don’t know what really qualifies as defamation in Norway. I suspect you more directly have to label someone something horrendous though.

129

In the UK the ‘First past the post’ electoral system tends to deliver one party winning more seats than the rest put together - an absolute majority. They are then able to pursue their legislative program and pass the laws to support the policies they set out in the general election. Smaller parties get frozen out. Coming second in every constituency get you zero MPs though millions may have voted for your party. This tends to remove the ultra left or right wing loony tunes.

However, in the past few governments, this has fallen apart. The David Cameron had a small majority relied in coalition agreement with the small Libetak Democrats party. Cameron had to control a Conservative party that had a large Eurosceptic tendency. The rival UK Independence Party led by Nigel Farage supported by various millionaire backers threatened to attract some Conservative MPs. So he threw the Eurosceptics a bone in the form of a Brexit referendum. That led to a sea of troubles for the Conservatives. Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, had a minority government dependent on support from the Ulster Unionists. She had to bribe them with some infrastructure budget increases Northern Ireland. Boris Johnson turned the Conservative Party wholly towards Brexit, removing UKIP as a threat. He achieved an absolute majority from an electorate exhausted and exasperated by Brexit. Helped considerably by the Labour Party which had swung too far to the left under Corbin to be electable.

So the UK Parliamentary system with the First past the post voting has been through a period of instability that caused no end of problems for governments trying to deliver their political programme. It seems to have stabilised now, but unelected upper chamber, the House of Lords, needs attention. Far too many Lords. Some hereditary, some reserved for the clergy (yes, really!) But many are political appointments that are the gift of Prime Ministers. Boris Johnson intends to create more Lords than previous Prime Ministers. He likes to look after his backers. Most notably these have included Lebvedev, whose father is an oligarch and supporter of Putin.

The House of Lords is in need of reform. Too many rascals looking for a club and not enough experts to revise laws and serve on learned committees.