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A Comparative Study of Australian Parties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Leon D. Epstein
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Extract

At the beginning of his book on Australian politics, David Butler tellingly contrasts an earlier American exploration with his expedition to Canberra. Familiarity with British government had initially led him to ask untranslatable questions about a separate and essentially non-comparable American system. But the same British background, he reports, made for appropriate questions in Australia even though the answers might differ from those received in Britain itself. Australian government, unlike American, could be conceived of as a variant of the Westminster model. It follows that the Canberra model is so different from Washington's that a strictly American background might likewise engender the wrong questions about Australian politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , January 1977 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

1 Butler, David, The Canberra Model (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1973), p. 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Epstein, Leon D., ‘A Comparative Study of Canadian Parties’, American Political Science Review, LVIII (1964), 46–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Subsequently, Allan Kornberg provided substantial empirical evidence concerning Canada's cohesive parliamentary parties; see especially his Canadian Legislative Behavior (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967).Google Scholar

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5 I am adopting the distinction between social and structural that Aaron Wildavsky used in his ‘Party Discipline under Federalism: Implications of Australian Experience’, Social Research, XXVIII (1961), 437–58Google Scholar. The distinction is plainly useful for other nations as well as for Australia.

6 Of thirty-two amendments proposed by parliament, 1901–1974, twenty-seven (including wage and price control proposals in 1973) were rejected in the referenda prescribed by the constitution. Crisp, L. F., Australian National Government (Hawthorne, Vic: Longman, 1974), Chap. 2.Google Scholar

7 Crisp, , Australian National Government, p. 82Google Scholar, reflects a perspective of this kind.

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11 Australians, in Hancock, W. K.'s famous phrase, have come to look upon the state as ‘a vast public utility’. Australia (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1930), p. 72.Google Scholar

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15 Having a second chamber is not exclusively a national arrangement in Australia. Five of the six states remain bicameral.

16 On revenue and appropriation measures, Article 53 of the constitution prohibits the Senate from amending, allows the Senate to request changes (which the House may accept if it sees fit), and says nothing explicit about the Senate's power to reject, defer, or othewise fail to enact. A constitutional intention to deny the Senate's power to block supply might well be inferred from Article 53, but such inference, although occasionally argued with cogency, has not prevailed. More often, even among the opponents of Senate blockage of supply during the 1975 crisis, the narrowly legal basis for blockage has been conceded. As noted later in the text, the main argument of opponents in 1975 was that the Senate should not use the power, despite any documentary-derived authority for it, on the ground that to do so would violate twentieth-century British-style conventions.

17 In 1974, the Labor prime minister responded to the Senate's tactic by calling for new elections of both houses. When the same prime minister refused thus to respond in 1975 it will be remembered that the forcing of a general election now involved a largely unanticipated action by the Governor-General. He invoked a constitutional power, often assumed to have been dormant. He dismissed the prime minister even though he had a House majority, and then replaced him with the Opposition leader, whose Senate followers passed the appropriation bills on condition that there would be a general election (for both houses). Two books, both critical of the Governor-General's action, appeared soon after the events: Home, Donald, Death of the Lucky Country (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books, 1976)Google Scholar and Lloyd, Clem and Clark, Andrew, Kerr's King Hit! (Stanmore, N.S.W.: Cassel, 1976)Google Scholar. The constitutional crisis is also discussed in a forthcoming book on the 1975 election being edited by Howard R. Penniman and to be published by the American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., and in a symposium, ‘Australian Politics – A New Ball Game?’, Politics, xi (1976), 1–68.Google Scholar

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19 The distribution and the counting of House preferential votes in 1974 are fully presented, constituency by constituency, in Mackerras, Malcolm, Elections 1975 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1975).Google Scholar

20 Counting votes under Australian PR–STV is fully explained by Odgers, J. R., Australian Senate Practice (Canberra: Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1972), pp. 46–51.Google Scholar

21 On the development of the DLP, see Murray, Robert, The Split: Australian Labor in the Fifties (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1970)Google Scholar. Reynolds, P. L. analyzes the party's electoral role through the early 1970s, The Democratic Labor Party (Milton, Q.: Jacaranda Press, 1974).Google Scholar

22 With some state-to-state variation in name as well as alliances, the usual label was Country party until the prefatory National was added in 1975. The principal recent state variation is the National party in Queensland.

23 Aitkin, Don, The Country Party in New South Wales (Canberra: ANU Press, 1972)Google Scholar, describes the party's social basis in country towns as being much as among farmers.

24 The combined South Australian party, called the Liberal and Country League, tended to be too rural-oriented for its more progressive members, who formed a separate Liberal Movement, but also not rural enough to preclude efforts to re-establish a separate Country party. The problem of containing the diverse elements in the LCL is discussed by Hall, Steele, A Liberal Awakening: The LM Story (Leabrook, S.A.: Investigator Press, 1973), p. 61.Google Scholar

25 Aitkin, Don, Stability and Change in Australian Politics (Canberra, ANU Press, 1976)Google Scholar, stresses the long-established nature of the electoral alignment. In addition to this major study of Australian voting behavior, see also Aitkin, Don and Kahan, Michael, ‘Australia: Class Politics in the New World’, in Rose, Richard, ed., Electoral Behavior: A Comparative Handbook (New York: The Free Press, 1974), pp. 437–80.Google Scholar

26 Watson, Lex, ‘The Party Machines’, in Mayer, Henry and Nelson, Helen, eds., Australian Politics: A Third Reader (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1974), pp. 339–65.Google Scholar

27 Wildavsky, contends, in ‘Party Discipline under Federalism’, p. 180Google Scholar, that structural federalism has prevented extraparliamentary control by the ALP. Since Wildavsky wrote, the ALP's Federal Conference has added national members to its still numerically dominant state delegates but these national members are parliamentary leaders.

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30 Burns, Creighton, Parties and People: A Survey Based on the La Trobe Electorate (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1961), pp. 152–62.Google Scholar

31 The pre-1910 national party groups are discussed by La Nauze, J. A., Alfred Deakin (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1965), Vol. 2Google Scholar. At the state level, however, well-organized parties had existed before federation. Loveday, P. and Martin, A. W., Parliament Factions and Parties: The First Thirty Years of Responsible Government in New South Wales, 1856–1889 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

32 Saying only this much does not require an acceptance of the much-criticized view of the ALP as the party of initiative and of non-Labor as the party of resistance. Mayer, Henry originally criticized this view in ‘Some Conceptions of the Australian Party System 1910–1950’, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, VIII (1956), 253–70Google Scholar. A later version, ‘Parties of Initiative and Resistance’, in his Australian Politics: A Reader (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1966), pp. 223–30Google Scholar, began a controversy involving RawsonMayer, D. W. Mayer, D. W., and Goot, Murray in Politics, III (1968), 41–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and IV (1969), 84–99, 212–16.

33 Rawson, , Labor in Vain?Google Scholar, treats socialism as of limited significance for the ALP (Chap. 5); the party was formally committed to socialism, in the sense of public ownership of principal industries, only between 1919 and 1927 (pp. 66–7). See also Turner, Ian, Industrial Labour and Politics: The Dynamics of the Labour Movement in Eastern Australia 1900–1921 (Canberra: ANU Press, and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1965), pp. 226, 231.Google Scholar

34 Connell, R. W. and Irving, T. H., ‘Yes, Virginia, There is a Ruling Class’Google Scholar, in Mayer, and Nelson, , eds., Australian Politics: A Third Reader, pp. 31–47Google Scholar, refer to the ALP's radical rather than socialist ideology at p. 39.

35 Grattan, Michelle, ‘The Australian Labor Party’Google Scholar, in Mayer, and Nelson, , eds., Australian Politics: A Third Reader, pp. 389–406Google Scholar, has occupational and educational data on Labor members from 1929 through 1972, pp. 402–3. Other data, confirming the shift reported by Grattan, are in Crisp, L. F. and Anderson, Barbara, Australian Labor Party: Federal Personnel 1901–1975 (Canberra: ANU mimeo, 07 1975)Google Scholar and in the Australian Parliamentary Handbook (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1975)Google Scholar. See also Encel, S., ‘The Political Elite in Australia’Google Scholar, in Hughes, C. A., ed., Readings in Australian Government (St Lucia, Q.: University of Queensland Press, 1968), pp. 86–106Google Scholar, and Alford, Robert R., Party and Society (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), pp. 97–8.Google Scholar

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37 ‘Pre-selection’ is the standard Australian term for candidate selection. Watson, , ‘The Party Machines’, pp. 360–1Google Scholar, has tabulated the variation by party, state, and office, as of the early 1970s. After that tabulation, the roles of state executives and of delegate conferences, at the constituency level, further increased, and the use of plebiscites continued to diminish. There are good descriptions of state practices by Aimer, Peter, Politics, Power and Persuasion: The Liberals in Victoria (Melbourne: James Bennett, 1974), pp. 116–37Google Scholar, and by Blewett, Neal and Jaensch, Dean, Playford to Dunstan (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1971), pp. 67–86Google Scholar. Other studies of particular constituency parties are: Burns, , Parties and People, Chap. 3Google Scholar; Campbell, Ian, State Ballot: The N.S.W. General Election of March 1962 (Sydney: APSA Mimeo No. 7, 1963), pp. 29–30Google Scholar; Connell, R. W. and Gould, Florence, Politics of the Extreme Right: Warringah 1966 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967), pp. 53–63Google Scholar; Cornish, John A., ‘Pre-Selection Politics: The Parramatta Example’Google Scholar, in Lucy, , ed., The Pieces of Politics, pp. 234–49Google Scholar; Grattan, Michelle, ‘The Kooyong By-Election 1966’, Politics (Special Supplement), I (1966), pp. 3–18Google Scholar; and Mayer, Henry and Rydon, Joan, The Gwydir By-Election 1953: A Study of Political Conflict (Canberra: ANU Social Science Mimeo, 1954), pp. 45–53.Google Scholar

38 An observer, I can testify from personal experience, is permitted to attend only as a privilege formally extended (also graciously so by the Liberal party that opened its pre-selection conference to me).

39 Rawson, , Labor in Vain?, p. 23Google Scholar. Blewett, and Jaensch, , Playford to Dunstan, p. 78Google Scholar, describe South Australia's Liberal and Country League plebiscite that has since been dropped.

40 Finding from interviews that most members of the House of Representatives had strong party backgrounds, Emy, Hugh V. writes: ‘The prevalence of the party-man is a tribute to the uniformity and conservatism of the pre-selection processes among all parties….’ The Politics of Australian Democracy (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1974), p. 462.Google Scholar

41 Aitkin, Don, The Colonel: A Political Biography of Sir Michael Buxner (Canberra: ANU Press, 1969), p. 36Google Scholar, reports that the Progressives, who became the Country party, especially disliked the Nationalists (the Liberals, of the post-1918 period) for their pre-selection practice.

42 Emy, , The Politics of Australian Democracy, p. 290.Google Scholar

43 Lloyd, C. J. and Reid, G. S., Out of the Wilderness: The Return of Labor (North Melbourne: Cassell, 1974), p. 182.Google Scholar

44 Crisp, , Australian National Government, p. 192Google Scholar. A uniquely useful look at the Labor parliamentary caucus is provided by Weller, P. M., ed., Caucus Minutes 1901–1949, Vols. I–III (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

45 Loveday, and Martin, , Parliament Factions and Parties.Google Scholar

46 The caucus's role generally in the ALP government of 1972–74 is analyzed by Lloyd, and Reid, , Out of the Wilderness, Chap. 6.Google Scholar

47 Reid, G. S., ‘The Trinitarian Struggle: Parliamentary-Executive Relations’Google Scholar, in Mayer, and Nelson, , Australian Politics: A Third Reader, pp. 513–26Google Scholar, has a convenient tabulation of Senate party strengths, at p. 523, and also a most incisive analysis of House–Senate conflict.

48 There is evidence, however, that governments have enacted extensive legislative programs despite the absence of Senate majorities. The ALP government that held office after 1972, against unquestionably great Senate opposition, was able to secure passage of most of its policies. Weller, P. M., and Smith, R. F. I., ‘The Impossibility of Party Government’, in Scott, R. and Richardson, J., eds., The First Thousand Days of Labor, Vol. I (Canberra: APSA Conference 1975). pp. 52–69.Google Scholar

49 Such majority control may exist, after a double dissolution, in both houses or, in a joint sitting of House and Senate that can be used only to enact the proposed legislation on which the two houses had been deadlocked before the general election. The latter was the operative result in 1974, when Labor retained enough of a House majority to control a joint sitting although it had failed to gain a Senate majority in the double dissolution election. Majorities in both houses were won by the coalition government after the 1951 double dissolution, but majorities had been lost by the non-Labor government which first tried double dissolution in 1914. The fourth double dissolution in 1975 produced majorities in both houses, but for the caretaker coalition government installed by the Governor-General and so against the predissolution Labor prime minister.

50 In fact, Australian state premiers and their parties have continued to function nearly as prescribed by the Westminster model despite exceptional contraventions by upper houses blocking supply and forcing elections, as recently as 1947 and 1952 in Victoria.