Politics
The Solicitor-General on the Voice
Harry Hobbs of the University of Technology, Sydney, has done us the favour of interpreting the Solicitor-General’s advice on the Voice. In his Conversation contribution – Solicitor-general confirms Voice model is legally sound, will not ‘fetter or impede’ parliament – he summarizes the Solicitor-General’s advice in relation to the two questions on which he was asked to give advice:
whether the proposed amendment is compatible with Australia’s system of government;
and whether the proposed amendment gives parliament the power to decide the legal effect of any representation, or whether parliament and the executive are required to consider or follow those representations.
On the first question the Solicitor-General stresses that there would be no obligation on Parliament or the executive to consult with the Voice or to follow its advice. The Solicitor General also states that ensuring that indigenous Australians can have their voice heard would improve our democracy.
On the second question he stresses that it would be desirable for executive government to consider any representations made by the Voice, but there would be no such obligation. Parliament has the ultimate authority on the powers of the Voice.
How much more reassurance do we need? We need to hear more from thoughtful and non-partisan Australians, because a fringe of Voice opponents are spreading outright lies. We get an impression of that landscape when the deputy leader of the opposition can claim in public that the Voice could veto Anzac Day – a statement so outrageously untrue that even a popular right-wing radio talkback host found it out of place.
The Liberal Party should reform or disappear
While some Labor die-hards may be enjoying Schadenfreude as the Liberal Party slides into irrelevance, the present situation is not healthy for democracy in Australia. The Liberal Party should either reform or disappear, making way for some other party or political grouping to occupy the pragmatic centre-right of the political spectrum.
Sean Kelly, writing in The Age, speculates that the Liberal Party may be on a path to oblivion: The problem for the Liberal Party is that history doesn’t always repeat. Negativism has helped the party win elections, but it has been inflicting an accumulation of damage on the party. Kelly reminds us that Abbott was a formidable election fighter, but his negativism on climate change, the issue on which he successfully won the election, has left the party badly wounded.
Carolyn Holbrook of Deakin University and James Weller of Monash University have a Conversationcontribution, and like Kelly they see the party’s negativism as a political burden: Will a preoccupation with party unity destroy the Liberal Party?. They liken the party’s present travails to the problems of the UAP when it tore itself apart in the 1940s, although the party is not yet in such dire straits. Regarding Dutton’s policy stances they write:
This recourse to negativity and fearmongering, employed with electoral success by Tony Abbott in 2013 and Morrison in 2019, is once more to the fore in Dutton’s resort to questions and division rather than positive engagement with the Voice.
They believe the party can reform, by recruiting an enlarged membership and modernizing its policies. But they also note that Dutton is concentrating on holding the party together. It’s hard to see how a political strategy of consolidating around a small and unrepresentative parliamentary core is compatible with a Menzies-style renewal.
Paul Bongiorno’s regular Saturday Paper contribution is titled Dutton hands Coalition to Nationals. He notes that in relation to the Voice, Dutton has followed a Nationals agenda. Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who has been shoehorned into the Coalition’s shadow cabinet, is de-facto a member of the Nationals. Dutton has conceded a position to the Nationals without even being asked, and more seriously has joined with the Nationals in turning the party’s back on urban voters. That is not a path to electoral success.
Are the party’s problems simply a consequence of the incompetence and corruption of the Morrison government? Writing in The Conversation – “A combination of deficiencies”: the “disastrous” Morrison government dissected – Dennis Altman examines the political and economic incompetence of the Morrison government. His article is a review of the multi-author book The Morrison Government, part of the Australian Commonwealth Administration series. His review seems to suggest that the authors have put a great deal of emphasis on Morrison himself, and his administrative style, rather than any possible malaise in the party itself.
A party cannot reform itself just by changing its “leader”. Academics and journalists seem to have so much invested in an analytical framework around the two parties that they fail to see that Australian politics has been rather fluid ever since 1788. The Liberal Party does not have a guarantee of immortality.