Ideas@TheCentre
Principled politics and populist plebiscites
The Leader of the Opposition’s proposed carbon tax plebiscite has been widely disparaged as a populist stunt.
Plebiscites and other forms of direct democracy have long been controversial subjects in Australia and in other nations whose political system is based on the British model of parliamentary government.
Support for direct democracy emerged in the late-nineteenth century, initially in the United States, in reaction to the low and often corrupt standards of public life.
There never was a golden age of democratic politics. Since the manhood suffrage acts were passed in the Australian colonies in the 1850s, politicians have been held in contempt for being self-serving and disregarding public interest.
Plebiscites and other innovations, such as the initiative and the recall, were designed to make government of, by and for the people the reality.
However, the best contemporary critics argued that if Parliament got into the habit of subjecting difficult and divisive questions to the vagaries of the direct vote, it would result in worse, not better, politics. Politicians would hesitate to take principled stands on important issues and become weathervanes blown whatever direction public sentiment was running.
The suppression of sound leadership and judicious policy would follow as the parliamentarians best informed about complex public affairs would be forced to defer to the opinions of the least knowledgeable voters.
These were among the reasons Bernhard Ringrose Wise – the NSW free trade liberal, federal father, and democrat – strongly objected to direct democracy.
Wise maintained that MPs had a duty to vote on matters before Parliament as wisdom and conscience dictated. They then had a responsibility to return to their constituencies and explain their position. At the next election, the thus better informed voters would be free to judge how well or otherwise MPs had represented the people.
Wise’s high-minded idea of representative democracy appears very idealistic in the age of poll-driven politics.
Hooray, then, for idealism and remembering that a non-binding plebiscite is just a giant, taxpayer-funded opinion poll.
Therefore, whatever one thinks about the government’s proposed carbon tax and the obfuscation surrounding it, the Senate’s rejection of the opposition’s plebiscite proposal may be best for the health of the polity.
At least this will not set a populist precedent and risk making our politics even more unprincipled.
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. Initiative and Referendum: The People's Law, a book written by Geoffrey Q Walker and published by CIS in 1987, analyses direct democracy at length.
