Ideas@TheCentre

Fixed terms revisited

In July 2013, we know the next New South Wales election will be held on the last Saturday in March 2015, but of the next federal election, we only know that it will be sometime between 17 August and 30 November this year.

The current bout of speculation about the election date should serve as a reminder that there is a way to put a stop to this silly game once and for all – it’s called fixed terms. A lot of other countries have them, not to mention three Australian states, but at the federal level the idea has never gone beyond talk.

The issue of fixed terms has often been mixed up with the idea of extending the maximum length of parliamentary terms to four years – a proposal that failed miserably in a 1988 referendum. But the duration and fixity of terms are separate issues. A referendum proposing three-year fixed terms would stand a better chance.

Fixed terms have two big things going for them.

The first is that they would deny prime ministers the tactical advantage of being able to keep the opposition guessing, springing an early election at a time of perceived political benefit to the government, or delaying an election (subject to constitutional limits) in the hope or expectation of events that will be to the government’s benefit.

The history of federal elections shows that our prime ministers have taken full advantage of this flexibility. Of 26 elections since the Second World War, 11 have occurred more than three months before the three-year mark, and 20 have fallen more than a month either side of it. Incumbency has many advantages, but this particular advantage is one that can and should be taken away. Democracy works best if the electoral playing field is as level as possible.

The second benefit of fixed terms is that uncertainty about election dates is disruptive to investment decisions and economic activity. Uncertainty about election outcomes is unavoidable (except in countries with sham elections) and desirable, but there is no reason to compound it by making the dates unpredictable as well.

Fixed terms would need to be qualified to deal with eventualities such as the loss of a confidence vote by a government, or a deadlock between the upper and lower houses. But such details are manageable, as the state versions of fixed terms demonstrate.

Robert Carling is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.