It was a bad mistake to slash the size of State Parliament to that of little more than a country council.
It’s time to have a rethink.
So said veteran Denison MHA Michael Hodgman and his Braddon colleague Brett Whiteley this week.
And in his Saturday Mercury column Crawford points out that “only the Greens — that pesky group of dissidents which the Labor and Liberal parties had conspired to debilitate by reducing the overall number of politicians and theoretically making it harder for minority groups to be elected — opposed reducing the size of Parliament.”
Respected political scientist and outspoken commentator Associate Professor Richard Herr, of the University of Tasmania, goes even further, saying that what we have been left with since the size of Parliament was hacked back, is not even the true Westminster system.
Indeed, he made the point after this week’s appointment of the new, expanded Cabinet of nine that even with one of the ministers coming from the Legislative Council, the Government is without an effective backbench to keep the ministry accountable; and the Opposition is so diminished it does not even have enough members to shadow the ministry, person for person.
And it’s not as if there has been money saved by the cut:
The modest savings which came from sacking Members of Parliament has been more than taken up by replacing them with a burgeoning phalanx of factotums who cannot be held to account by the electors.
The motivation behind the reduction in the size of Parliament was not even particularly honourable, justified or well thought through.
In his controversial book of reflections about his brief and somewhat erratic period in Parliament, Cheeky: Confessions of a Ferret Salesman, former Liberal leader Bob Cheek recalls being pestered regularly by erstwhile Liberal premier Robin Gray, now a member of the Gunns Ltd board, to support a reduction in the size of Parliament as a way of getting rid of the Greens. That plan did not work — and even the pro-forestry, anti-Greens Premier Paul Lennon conceded after the election that the Greens are here to stay — a permanent part of the political landscape.
Cheek, who set the ball rolling by crossing the floor in support of a Labor plan to downsize the Parliament, writes that the ultimately successful public campaign to pare Parliament down to the bare bones was born mainly out of vindictiveness generated by the notorious 40 per cent pay rise granted to politicians under the Groom Liberal government in 1993.
Crawford says that “while Members of Parliament are flawed individuals, just like those in the community they represent, the majority are hard-working, honest, and have entered what should be regarded as an honourable profession with genuinely altruistic motives. Indeed, I take my hat off to anyone prepared to put their hand up and offer themselves for election. Candidature invariably comes at a high financial cost (Liberal candidate in Franklin Vanessa Goodwin admitted to having spent more than $30,000 to raise her profile to the point where she almost won a seat); with the risk of being publicly insulted and abused and facing the prospect of having your private life trawled through by political opponents. And in the end there is always the danger your vote will be so humiliatingly low that it will appear even your family and friends couldn’t bring themselves to vote for you.”
And he highlights the fact that there are no guarantees about career prospects:
Take, for example, the popular and capable former Mayor of Glenorchy Terry Martin. After 15 years of running one of the biggest and most progressive municipalities in Tasmania and standing successfully for the Legislative Council seat of Elwick in the expectation (encouraged by former premier the late Jim Bacon) that he would soon be in the Cabinet, Martin is now faced with possibly spending years cooling his heels as a backbencher, largely because he doesn’t play the faction game. With the four other Labor MLCs having been given appointments as Minister, Parliamentary Secretary, Government Leader or Deputy, Martin — whose administrative experience and political savvy are acknowledged as impressive — is the only one left as a Government backbench MLC. Clearly ministerial appointments are not a meritocracy. Other issues — factional, regional, personal — get in the way.
In the House of Assembly, after excluding ministers, Parliamentary Secretary, the Speaker and Deputy, and the Whip, there is a Labor backbench of two — new Denison MP Lisa Singh, and the low-profile Lyons Member Heather Butler, who replaced the luckless Ken Bacon when he retired in controversial circumstances last year, citing ill-health.
Crawford quotes Richard Herr that in the Westminster tradition, a large, hungry and ambitious backbench is a necessary element in keeping the Cabinet accountable and responsible to Parliament — rather than having a Parliament controlled by the Executive. Added to this is the problem that in Franklin, for example, all the Government members are ministers, so there is no backbench to look after grassroots constituency issues.
Similarly, in the opposition every member has shadow ministry responsibility. Herr says the smallness of the Parliament has “nobbled the Opposition” and hampered its ability to serve effectively. Not only does it not have enough to shadow all ministers, but it is without any backbench.
Herr says Executive accountability “is well down,” and after eight years’ experience with a smaller Parliament, it is time the Committee on the Working Arrangements of Parliament did a full scale review of the new setup, including the smaller “critical mass” available for everything from Cabinet to Parliamentary committees.
Crawford concludes that the Greens may “have passed up their best opportunity yet to get representation in the Upper House”:
The Hobart-based division of Wellington includes Battery Point, West Hobart, Glebe, and the inner northern suburbs — incorporating some of the Greenest areas of Australia’s Greenest electorate. Of the 19 Denison booths which take in Wellington, the Greens topped the poll in nine on March 18, and had (Cassy) O’Connor decided to capitalise on the profile she built up and stand in Wellington, she would have given Parkinson a run for his money.
