Brenton Best Crosses the Floor!
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The broke-no-rules defence is a bush this site’s been round before with another errant (now ex-) Labor figure. Brenton Best broke no formal party rules in crossing the floor to vote against his coalition colleague because no rule against doing so had been made for him to break. The Premier is publicly refashioning this as a virtue and normal practice and “not done anything wrong” post hoc, but it’s not (and I suspect that behind closed doors the story is very different). The reason no rule exists is not that it is a natural and laudable state of affairs for backbenchers to act this way. Rather, it’s exactly the reverse – that it is so obvious that government backbenchers should not act in this way, that the party has never bothered to codify a rule against it.
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If Best is allowed to get away with this repeatedly, then that means there is a confidence-and-supply agreement between Cabinet Labor and the Cabinet Greens, but that backbenchers are free to cooperate with the Opposition on motions against Ministers as they like. So in theory any three backbenchers drawn from Labor and the Greens, in cooperation with the Liberals, could force the Premier to reshuffle Cabinet however they pleased. The idea that a government backbencher can freely vote with the Opposition on a confidence vote against the Minister implies that the government delegates the formation of the ministry to the Parliament rather than relying on its own combined numbers to choose its ministry itself.
I think the only reason no-one is thinking through just how radical and unstable such an idea is is that everyone assumes it is only Brenton or maybe Kim Booth who will do it (and not both on the same issue) and therefore nothing but solitary grandstanding will happen.
Read more: http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/brenton-best-crosses-floor.html
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