J.R. Nethercote
Politics and Public Administration Group
11 May 1999
Contents
Major
Issues
Introduction
The Mandate: An Elusive Concept with a Long
History
Mandate
Doctrine: Aspects of its History
United Kingdom
Australia
Australia's Mandate Debate
1998
The
Protagonist: the Prime Minister
The Antagonists
Media Analysis
Mandate: Dictionary and Academic
Analyses
Conclusion
Appendix 1: Mandate-Dictionary
Definitions
Appendix
2: Dictionaries of Politics
Appendix 3: Academic
Analysis
Endnotes
Major Issues
The purposes of this paper are to
provide:
-
- analysis of the meaning and character of mandate doctrine
-
- background on the part played by mandate doctrine in the
evolution of representative and responsible government in the
United Kingdom and Australia
-
- an explanation of why mandate debate in Australia is more
frequent and more complex than in other Westminster-based
parliamentary systems, especially since introduction of the
proportional method of electing Senators in 1948
-
- an authoritative account of debate about the mandate arising
during and after the 1998 national elections
-
- appendices include material on dictionary definitions and
academic analyses.
The principal findings of the research
are:
-
- during and following the 1998 elections there was debate about
the Government's bid for a mandate for its tax proposals,
especially the goods and services tax component. Debate centred on
both voting and seats won in the Senate and the House of
Representatives. There have been similar debates during the Whitlam
Government, 1972-75, and following election of the Howard
Government in 1996
-
- because of the character of Australia's bicameral Parliament,
both Houses of which are elected and have comparable powers, debate
in Australia about the mandate is more frequent, more complex and
more vigorous than in other Westminster-style parliaments, for
example, in the UK and Canada, where the lower house's preeminence
over a non-elected upper house is well-established
-
- mandate is a political idea in two senses. Mandate doctrine
derives from the politics of responsible government on a democratic
basis. It does not derive from constitutional, legal or
parliamentary prescription. Moreover, a mandate is not a substitute
for prescribed constitutional, legal or parliamentary procedures,
though it may influence the workings of such procedures
-
- second, mandate doctrine has been mainly developed by
politicians in political forums rather than by philosophers or
academics
-
- the purpose of mandate doctrine is to accord a larger role to
the people than simply casting a vote at specified intervals. It is
about politicians declaring the philosophies, principles, policies,
plans and programs which they will support if they win office.
President Eisenhower furnished a succinct definition of what
mandate is about. He entitled the first volume of his presidential
memoirs, Mandate for Change, and the relevant chapter,
'Promises to Keep'
-
- there is considerable debate about what a mandate is. Does it
apply to the entire platform (or manifesto) of a winning party only
to the more important item or to matters mainly the subject of
contention during a campaign? And can others, apart from winners,
claim to have a mandate? Likewise, there is considerable debate
about how a mandate may be discerned-seats in a legislature, seats
in which chamber of a legislature or the voting strengths which lie
behind respective party strengths in parliament? And what of voting
strength not translated into representation?
-
- in the UK, mandate ideas were related, first, to the rise of
campaigning and the need to tell the voters how power, if won,
would be exercised. They were also important in the ascendancy of
the House of Commons over the House of Lords
-
- in Australia, it has been a different story, especially since
adoption of the 1948 method of electing Senators. As a consequence,
disputes between the Houses are more likely than previously, but it
is less likely that they will be resolved by recourse to
simultaneous dissolutions of the Houses except with respect to the
legislation on which the dissolutions are based
-
- the debate in Australia during and after the 1998 elections
reflected the long history of discourse on mandate doctrine and
embraced many of the elements which have arisen during the past two
centuries of democratic responsible government
-
- academic analysis of mandate matters is divided. Some authors
consider it is a political idea which seeks to give meaning to
elections and that criticisms are based on overly literal
definitions of the term. Others believe that the legitimacy of
democratic politics requires that, as much as possible, commitments
made on the hustings should be honoured once the election result is
settled (recognising that there are circumstances where a mandate
will lose its relevance or be overtaken by events), and
-
- critics of mandate doctrine portray it as a device for
nullifying or circumventing due processes of government and
legislation. The conception of mandate doctrine which they
criticise is the product of rhetoric rather than more considered
expositions.
Introduction
During the 1998 elections for the House of
Representatives and the Senate the Prime Minister, John Howard,
sought a mandate for the Government's tax package, especially the
goods and services tax component. Once the Government had been
returned to office-that is, had a majority of seats in the House of
Representatives-the Prime Minister claimed a mandate. The claim was
subsequently contested by the Opposition and by the Australian
Democrats, a cross-bench party represented only in the Senate.
Until new Senate terms commence on 1 July 1999, the Government can
secure Senate consent to legislation providing it has the support
of either the Australian Democrats or independent Senators
Harradine and Colston. After the new terms commence, Democrat
support will be essential for any Government measures to which the
Opposition is opposed.
The Prime Minister's claim to a mandate in these
circumstances is based on the Government's support in the House of
Representatives where it has a majority of 12 over all others. The
Opposition legitimises its argument by reference to relative voting
strengths behind representation in the Senate and the House of
Representatives. The Australian Democrats' claim likewise turns on
relative voting strengths rather than results in terms of seats;
they also distinguish between outcomes for the House of
Representatives and the Senate.
Questions about mandates also arose following
the first election of the Howard Government in March 1996 and, even
more prominently, during the Whitlam Government, 1972-75. Indeed,
it was Prime Minister Whitlam who essentially placed the term
mandate itself in the Australian political lexicon.(1)
There are differences between the respective
claims of the two prime ministers. The Whitlam Government had an
exceedingly comprehensive program whereas the Howard Government has
focussed its mandate claims, on each occasion, on a small number of
specific, albeit major, policies (for example, in 1996, the partial
sale of Telstra). In terms of seats in the House of Representatives
the Whitlam Government's majorities were very small, nine after
1972 and seven after 1974 (eventually five). It never had a
majority in the Senate; indeed, there was only one Senate election
in the period, that which occurred in May 1974 following
simultaneous dissolutions of the two Houses.
After 1996 the Coalition had a majority in the
House of 40 over all other parties; this fell to 12 following the
1998 election; its voting base likewise fell in terms of two-party
preferred voting from 47.2 to 39.5 per cent (House of
Representatives), though the Opposition made only limited headway
as nearly eight per cent went to the new Pauline Hanson One Nation
Party. The Government's Senate strength was initially just two
short of a majority; when Senators elected in 1998 take their seats
on 1 July 1999 the Coalition will be four short of a majority.
In Britain, the term mandate historically was
bound up, first, with the growth of campaigning for office and the
view that party leaders should make declarations to the voters
about their principles and policies. It was, second, and probably
more significantly, central to adaptation of the respective roles
of the Lords and Commons following the Reform Act of 1832, and,
more especially, extension of the franchise in 1867. The mandate
question has been of reduced significance since the Commons
established its pre-eminence through the Parliament Act
1911. This history is outlined in greater detail later in this
paper.
Nor is the mandate a doctrine of great
consequence in other countries with Westminster-style governments
where the parliamentary arrangements are similar, that is, where
the lower house has a clear pre-eminence as in Canada or where the
parliament is unicameral as in New Zealand. In these cases, the
principal import of mandate doctrine is that major measures,
circumstances permitting, should be open to scrutiny in an
electoral context before implementation. In the late 1980s in
Canada the Progressive Conservative Government headed by Brian
Mulroney was criticised because it was claimed there was no mandate
to introduce a goods and services tax. A majority in the House of
Commons was enough even though it was eventually necessary to
resort to special constitutional measures to ensure the legislation
passed the Senate in the face of the then Liberal majority in that
chamber.(2) Similarly, in New Zealand, the Lange Labor Government
has been criticised on the basis that it lacked a sufficient
mandate for the sweeping economic changes it introduced.
In these cases the governments in question were
able to proceed with their programs without conclusive resistance
from parliament. For legislative purposes, a majority in the lower
house was enough. Whether to proceed or not because of criticism
about want of a mandate or any other reason was a political
judgment for the ministry itself to decide.
At the national level in Australia it is a
different story because of the character of the bicameralism of the
Parliament. As a result, mandate debate is more frequent, more
complex and more vigorous.
In Australia, a government must have the support
of the Senate as well as the House of Representatives for
legislation. Where there is a disagreement between the Houses it is
a contest between two parliamentary bodies elected on a similar
franchise (if not necessarily at the same time except following
simultaneous dissolutions). The Senate is not vulnerable to attack
on democratic grounds as are the non-elected upper houses of
Britain and Canada. Moreover, since adoption of the present method
of electing Senators in 1948 the constitutional procedure (section
57) for resolving disputes between the two Houses has proven to be
very limited, and largely retrospective, in scope. The difficulty
in resolving problems in relations between the Houses helps to
account for the fervour with which Australian parliamentarians
address the mandate question-a government in seeking to win over
Senate opposition, inter alia, through public pressure if not other
means; opponents of the government seeking to be seen as
representing popular interests against an insensitive ministry.
Australia's national situation is more analogous
to mandate contests which sometimes mark relations between
presidents of the United States, elected on a nation-wide basis,
and either or both Houses of the Congress. Unlike the Australian
Constitution, the US Constitution does not include any formal
provisions for resolving disputes between a president and the
Congress, or between the two Houses of Congress. If the matter of
who has the mandate is to be resolved it has to be at the
constitutionally scheduled elections.
This paper mainly focusses on mandate doctrine
in the workings of parliament and elections but it is well to
remember that it is utilised in other forums, mainly as a
rhetorical weapon. Clear statements of policies during elections
are an aid to party leaders afterwards establishing and maintaining
unity and cohesion among their followers, outside as well as within
Parliament.(3) Mandate might also be invoked in relations with the
courts,(4) public sector agencies,(5) and international financial
institutions.(6)
This paper primarily seeks to assist in
understanding the debate about mandate which occurred in Australia
during and after the 1998 national elections by providing:
-
- analysis of the meaning and character of mandate doctrine, an
elusive concept with a long history
-
- background on the significance of mandate doctrine in the
evolution of representative and responsible government in the
United Kingdom, particularly in adaptation of the role and
eventually the powers of the House of Lords as the franchise of the
Commons was increasingly democratised
-
- an account of the place of the mandate idea in Australia's
parliamentary politics and especially the interconnection between
increasing rhetorical resort to mandate doctrine and the 1948
method of electing Senators
-
- an authoritative account of the terms of the mandate debate
during and following the 1998 national elections, and
-
- appendices which include material on dictionary definitions and
academic analysis.
The
Mandate: An Elusive Concept with a Long History
The term mandate, and certainly the ideas lying
behind it, has been central to the evolution of responsible
parliamentary government on a democratic basis throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Australia, it has from the
start been prominent in debates about relations between the Senate
and the House of Representatives. These debates have had particular
edge since adoption in 1948 of a proportional method of electing
Senators, for, thereafter, it became both more likely that there
would be deadlocks between the two Houses and less likely that such
deadlocks could be resolved except in respect of specified
contested legislation. This feature of Australia's parliamentary
arrangements is explained more fully below.
The mandate idea is quintessentially a political
doctrine in two important senses. In the first instance, it exists
in the realms of political debate and competition. It is not a term
which is, in the sense addressed in this paper, to be found in
constitutions or laws.
Acknowledgment, or disavowal, of a mandate may
have a bearing on the workings of constitutional or legal
processes. A mandate, however, is a supplementary force, not a
substitute for prescribed constitutional, parliamentary or legal
processes or procedures. It is part of the physiology of the body
politic rather than the anatomy. It is a doctrine which seeks to
reinforce the legal basis on which election winners take the reins
of government with a claim to legitimacy in so doing; the winners
take office as agents of popular will as well as in their own
right.
Mandate can often be a program adjunct of a
leader seen (not necessarily by everyone) to have charisma. This
sentiment may be strengthened if the margin of victory is
substantial. (But there is no inevitability in this: charisma may
characterise narrow wins and ambitious leadership just as large
wins may be secured by uncharismatic leaders with limited
programs).
A second sense in which mandate is a political
doctrine is its provenance. It has been developed by politicians
themselves in the context of electoral and parliamentary activity.
Hence, although analytical and academic expositions of mandate
ideas are relatively few, the idea, on the other hand, has a long
case history.
The idea of mandate derives from the view that
elections are about more than periodically casting a vote for
particular individuals. The idea embraces candidates and/or parties
telling the voters what they stand for in terms of philosophies,
principles, plans and programs; what they stand against; and what
they propose to do should their campaign be successful. An early
expression of the mandate idea was the view that, circumstances
permitting, major new policies or programs should be submitted to
the people before being enacted. The mandate idea applied both to
legislation and to policy which might be implemented on the basis
of executive power. President Eisenhower provided a succinct
definition in the first volume of his presidential memoirs,
Mandate for Change, when he headed the relevant chapter
'The Platform: Promises to Keep'.(7)
In these senses, the mandate idea is as
applicable in a unicameral parliament, or a parliament in which one
chamber is constitutionally pre-eminent, as it is to parliaments
which are effectively bicameral, or systems with competing sources
of popular power, as in the United States and France.
In the United States, the mandate is most
frequently invoked by presidents trying to persuade either or both
houses to pass the administration's legislation. Both the president
and the Congress may lay claim to a mandate on the basis that each
is elected.(8) Comparable if not identical contests periodically
occur in France when a government of a different political
complexion to the president secures support in the Assemblée
Nationale. The bifurcation in this instance stems in part from
different terms: the president is elected for seven years whilst
the term of the Assemblée Nationale is four years.
Presidents normally dissolve the Assemblée upon election
(which has normally brought a friendly majority). However, at the
next elections, midway through the President's term, an
Assemblée with an opposition disposition has been elected on
three occasions (1985, 1992 and 1998). The consequential political
accommodation is known as cohabitation and the president perforce
assumes a less active role, especially in domestic matters.
Whilst the mandate idea has a long history in
the context of responsible government on a democratic foundation,
it has never been constitutionally or legally entrenched. Its
meaning as well as the means whereby its existence may be divined
are continuing subjects of debate in politics.
Mandates may be challenged where parliamentary
majorities are at best insecure; where the outcome in one forum is
not reflected in others (as in Australia when a substantial
majority in the House of Representatives is not matched by even a
small majority in the Senate); where they are not supported by
voting majorities, or unambiguous pluralities; where party
manifestos are so long and complex that the significance of
particular items is unclear; and where a policy to which a
government subsequently attaches great weight attracted little or
no attention in the relevant campaign. A mandate also has greater
force immediately following an election; the legitimacy it confers
wanes as a new poll approaches.
Practical problems aside, the mandate has been
roundly criticised on general grounds as a means for avoiding,
circumventing, short circuiting or nullifying parliamentary process
in the making of legislation. In this view, the mandate is
portrayed as a bludgeon in the hands of a majority party for
imposing its views on others; behind this lies a fear that the view
of the majority party is only that of a majority within it and
therefore a minority within the whole.
Critics of mandate doctrine usually focus on its
rhetorical rather than philosophical expositions. Few if any
defenders of the mandate eschew the need for parliamentary process
in law making. For them the mandate is about the significance of
commitments to the electorate before and during elections; the need
subsequently to realise obligations made during campaigns; and the
importance of these for maintaining the legitimacy of democratic
parliamentary politics.
In the debate about the mandate these apologia
are critical for they demonstrate that such authority as is
conferred by a mandate has its source in undertakings given by a
winning side during a campaign. Authority thus flows from
obligation and commitment. The integrity of politics will be
diminished if promises made on the hustings can be readily
discarded once victory has been achieved.
Recent debates centre on incumbent governments
seeking to honour obligations made during campaigns in the face of
continuing resistance from opponents with a footing in the
parliament and, thereby, also able to claim electoral support for
their position.
There are occasions, however, where it is the
victors who wish to turn away from undertakings made in the course
of a campaign. That the main sanction against their doing so is
their likely fate at the next election underlines the political
character of mandate doctrine, and, in illustration, the fact that
the penalties, such as they are, are themselves political, not
constitutional nor legal.
Mandate Doctrine: Aspects of its
History
Mandate doctrine has been developed in the
forums of electoral and parliamentary politics themselves. The aim
of this part of the paper is to provide information on this
development in British and Australian national politics.
United
Kingdom
In the UK, mandate doctrine has been integral to
development of responsible government on a democratic basis, in
particular, linking the campaign activities of parties to their
activities if they win office. A second, and derivative, dimension
of its importance emerged in its role in resolving conflicts, or
potential conflicts, between the House of Commons and the House of
Lords. It was contended that providing it was feasible to do so,
major measures, especially any measures affecting the institutions
of the country, should be put before the country before enacting
legislation
Mandate as statement of
principles
Perhaps the most significant illustration of the
mandate idea in the first of the above senses was Sir Robert Peel's
Tamworth manifesto of 1834 in which he announced Conservative
acceptance of the Reform settlement of 1832. The need for the
manifesto arose, according to Peel himself, from an abrupt change
of government, the fact that Parliament was not sitting, the policy
of aiding friends at the election and the aim of winning 'the
adhesion of moderate men, not professing adherence to our
politics'.(9)
Mandate as prior
notice
Mandate doctrine played a key role in shaping
relations between the two Houses as the franchise for the House of
Commons was increasingly democratised. Thus, in 1867, Disraeli,
prime minister without majority support, challenged Gladstone's
attempt to introduce legislation to disestablish the Church of
Ireland on the basis that it was beyond the:
... moral competence [of Parliament] to do that
without an appeal to the nation ... . You cannot come, on a sudden,
and without the country being the least informed of your intention,
to a decision that will alter the character of England and her
institutions ... . Technically, no doubt, Parliament has power to
do so ... . But, ... it is most wise that you should hold your hand
unless you have assured yourselves of such an amount of popular
sympathy and support as will make your legislation permanent and
beneficial.(10)
Gladstone, for his part, found this view
'ultra-democratic' and 'anarchical'. Nevertheless, having won the
1868 election, he proceeded with his plan. Lord Salisbury urged the
Lords to accept the legislation on the basis that they should give
way 'when the House of Commons is at one with the nation'.(11)
Another aspect of the same approach arose in
1886. Following an election Gladstone again became prime minister
and introduced legislation to grant Home Rule to Ireland. It was
defeated, not least because of Liberal Party defections. These were
justified on the basis that the matter had not been canvassed at
the recent general election. Lord Hartington told the House of
Commons that:
The constituents of Great Britain are the source
of power, at all events in this branch of Parliament; and I
maintain that, in the presence of an emergency which could not have
been foreseen, the House of Commons has no more right to initiate
legislation, especially immediately upon its first meeting, of
which the constituencies were not informed, and as to which, if
they had been so informed, there is, at all events, the very
greatest doubt as to what their decision might be.(12)
Hartington was at pains to deny the existence of
a mandate-'there exists in our Constitution no principle of the
mandate'. But, as one author has observed, 'it would be difficult
to find any other single term by which to describe the obligations
which he mentioned as being due to the electorate'.(13)
Management of relations between the Commons and
the Lords according to practice and convention based largely on
mandate doctrine broke down during the Liberal governments of
Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith especially over the so-called
People's Budget of 1909. Even then the tactic of the Conservative
opposition was to delay passage until there had been a general
election (four years ahead of schedule). However, when, following
the first election of 1910, the House of Lords still resisted, the
matters at issue at the second election later that year were not
only the financial and taxation measures but also the powers of the
upper house itself.
Under the Parliament Act 1911
the Lords lost their powers over finance legislation and kept only
a suspensive veto of two years over other legislation, providing
the bill was passed again by the Commons at intervening sessions.
In recognition of the augmented power of the Commons as a
consequence of this legislation, the maximum interval between
elections was reduced from seven years to five in order that it
should be accountable to the people more frequently.
The 1911 settlement was tested when the first
Labour Government with a majority-a considerable majority at
that-in the Commons was elected in 1945. The mandate idea was
crucial to the formula devised by the Conservative peers to
determine their attitude to the Government's legislation. The
Leader in the Lords at the time, Lord Salisbury (grandson of
Victoria's prime minister), has stated:
... our broad guiding rule [was] that what had
been on the Labour Party programme at the preceding General
Election should be regarded as having been approved by the British
people ... . When however measures were introduced which had not
been in the Labour Party manifesto at the preceding election, we
reserved full liberty of action.
In Salisbury's view, it was more difficult to
apply the rule when a government had only a small majority in the
Commons and when, as was the case in 1964, there was a substantial
vote for minor opposition parties.(14)
During the period of Labour governments with
small or no majorities, 1974-79, the Conservative leader in the
Lords, Lord Carrington, stated that 'the will of the elected House
must in the end prevail' but there were occasions when there might
be 'a delay in which there can be reassessment by Government, by
parties and by the people of this country of the rights or wrongs
of an issue'.(15)
Even as the preeminence of the House of Commons
was settled, the view remained alive that major changes generally
should be exposed at general elections before implementation. This
has been so throughout the twentieth century especially on tariff
matters and, later, British entry to the European Economic
Community. Another famous instance of a different kind was the
National Government's successful call for a 'doctor's mandate'
during the 1931 general elections.
Australia
As in the United Kingdom, mandate debate in
Australia has reached its greatest intensity during periods of
dispute between the two Houses of Parliament. The source of the
intensity lies in the effective equality of the two Houses in terms
of legislative power, the fact that both are elected on a similar
franchise, and the limitations of the deadlock provision in the
Constitution (section 57), especially under the method of electing
Senators adopted in 1948.
Mandate Disputes-Inherent in the
Constitutional Framework
That there was a possibility of inter-cameral
mandate disputes under the Constitution was recognised by Alfred
Deakin at the Constitutional Conventions. He observed in 1897
that:
One chamber represents the people, and acts
under the impression that it has a mandate to do certain work in a
certain way, while the other chamber, also claiming that it has a
mandate from the people, resists that policy, or its expression in
a particular measure.(16)
Deakin considered that mandate disputes would be
'abnormal'.(17) One reason lying behind this view of Deakin's was
the fact that, unlike in the colonial legislatures, the two Houses
would essentially be elected on the same franchise:
Receiving their mandate, deriving their
authority from the same franchise, although not exactly in the same
numerical proportion, the two chambers, it appears to me, must
necessarily, on all major questions, be brought into line in a
shorter period of time than we can expect our houses of legislature
in the different colonies to be brought into line.(18)
Mandate Disputes,
1910-1949
Inter-house disputes were indeed abnormal until
the present method of electing Senators was introduced in 1948.
From 1910, the first occasion when the governing party had a
majority in its own right in the House of Representatives, until
1949, governments had Senate majorities most of the time. However,
the Cook Government, 1913-14, had to deal with a Senate in which
the Labor Party had 29 of the 36 seats. In seeking to resolve the
situation it was necessary for Cook to establish that section 57
should be activated immediately, once the formal prescriptions had
been met, and that a fresh election for the House alone, following
British practice, would not resolve anything from the Government's
perspective. The legislation on which the simultaneous dissolutions
were based concerned union preference in public service employment.
Cook's advice to the Governor-General seeking simultaneous
dissolutions stated:
The present Government, on assuming office,
decided that its mandate from the country would not be fulfilled by
simply ceasing to apply the obnoxious principle, and that it was
necessary to make it impossible for any Government again to resort
to it without the express authority of Parliament.(19)
The Labor Party secured control of both Houses
as a result of the 1914 simultaneous dissolutions. However,
uncertain of support within his own party led Prime Minister Hughes
in 1916 to seek authorisation for his conscription policy by means
of a plebiscite. Following the subsequent split in the Labor Party,
neither the Hughes National Labour nor the Hughes Nationalist
governments had majorities in the Senate. Nevertheless, even with
clear majorities in both the Senate and the House following the
1917 elections, the Nationalist Government again resorted to a
plebiscite in a second attempt, also unsuccessful, to introduce
conscription.
The next Labor Government, led by J. H. Scullin,
came to office following the first ever sole House of
Representatives election. It faced a hostile Senate-29 Opposition
to seven Government-but, notwithstanding the Opposition's
aggressiveness, it did not seek to resolve the deadlock by the only
means possible, simultaneous dissolutions. It was defeated in the
House of Representatives itself after two years.
In the unstable politics which followed the
death of Prime Minister Lyons in 1939 the Menzies Government's
nominal minority in the Senate was buttressed from Opposition
attack by four Country Party Senators who subsequently returned to
the government benches when the Country Party returned to coalition
with the United Australia Party (UAP). The Curtin Government,
however, faced a Senate in which it was two short of a majority
when it assumed office in October 1941. Also in a minority in the
House, it nevertheless survived without great discomfort until the
1943 elections when it secured comfortable majorities in both
Houses.
In this period, 1910 to 1946, it was as unusual
for a government to lack a majority in the Senate as it has
subsequently been for it to have one. Hence there was little need
for party leaders to invoke mandate doctrine in the bid to win
parliamentary approval of legislation. Moreover, on three of the
five occasions between 1910 and 1946 when there was a change of
government as a direct result of an election, the incoming
government also had a Senate majority (1910, 1914 and 1932). The
simultaneous dissolutions procedure was activated on the first
occasion that an incoming government found itself without a
majority in the Senate (1914); on the other occasion the new
government acquiesced in the situation it inherited (1929-31).
Mandate Disputes: the Story
under Proportional Representation in the Senate
The story is very different after the 1948
changes to the method of electing Senators. First, on only one
occasion has an incoming government secured a majority in the
Senate when it was elected (Fraser in the unusual circumstances of
1975). Second, it has been relatively rare for governments to have
majorities in the Senate (only after the elections of 1951, 1953,
1958, 1975 and 1977). Third, while it is less likely now than
previously that a government will have a majority in the Senate,
the section 57 mechanism is less viable under the 1948 voting
method as a means of settling a deadlock one way or the other,
except on the specific bills giving rise to the simultaneous
dissolutions.
Menzies comprehended this at the time. In his
speech on the 1948 legislation, on which he observed that the
Chifley Government was acting 'without any mandate', he explained
his basic philosophy: the House of Representatives was the
pre-eminent chamber but the Senate had a legitimate if 'subordinate
role'; in the event of disagreement, resolution was then possible
by means of double dissolution:
... in the last analysis a measure which has
passed through this House-perhaps by a government fresh from an
election-may be sent to the Senate again in the next session, so
that if that body again rejects it there will be a double
dissolution. In that way the will of the people can prevail ... .
It is this House which, after all, makes and unmakes governments,
and represents in its most recent form the public opinion of the
country ... . [W]hen proportional representation is introduced into
the system of election for the Senate, the threat, spoken or
unspoken, of a double dissolution will be much less formidable than
it has been to date.(20)
Menzies' focus on the unworkability of the
Parliament as a whole, and the need to find a way of ensuring that
the 1948 voting system for Senators did not mean continuing,
unresolvable deadlock between the Houses, lay behind the
constitutional amendment legislation he introduced in 1950 shortly
after resuming the prime ministership. The aim of the proposed
amendment, with which he did not persevere, was to ensure that:
If there is a double dissolution, the Parliament
thereafter will be able to get to work and that, whatever
government emerges, it will know it has not only a mandate from the
people and majority in this House, but also a majority in the Upper
House.(21)
His deeper view foreshadowed much of the
subsequent rhetoric about the impact of the 1948 method of electing
Senators on Parliament and government:
If proportional representation can produce an
equality of voting strength in the Senate out of inequality of
voting strength in the electorates; in other words, if a majority
of the electors can do no more than produce equality of strength in
the Senate, then proportional representation is defective indeed.
Worse still, it is a denial of popular self-government, and we
shall not leave a position like that untouched. The claimed
purposes of proportional representation are two in number. The
first is that, like any other system of voting, it purports to
reflect in the Parliament the will of a majority of electors,
expressed through a majority of their representatives. Secondly,
proportional representation aims at giving effective
representation, but not equal representation, in the Parliament to
minorities. Once a minority is given equal representation with a
majority in the Parliament, the validity of the majority is denied,
government becomes impossible, and the whole purpose of the
institution of Parliament is defeated ... . Nothing could be more
exasperating to a community that wants clear administration and a
firm course of legislation, than to have the prospect of a double
dissolution that will leave matters exactly where they
were.(22)
It has also been exasperating to prime ministers
and it is this feature of Australia's current constitutional and
parliamentary arrangements which partly explains the fervour with
which newly elected prime ministers have advocated observance of
mandate doctrine in Australia's national parliamentary
politics.
Menzies himself was the first to do so, drawing
attention to the Government's 'new mandate from the people'. In his
advice to the Governor-General of 16 March 1951 he observed:
... the Government, with a new mandate from the
people, has been in major affairs, constantly delayed and
frustrated by the facts that the two Houses are of opposite
political complexions and that in consequence the legislative
machine, except in respect of relatively minor matters, has been
materially slowed down and rendered extremely uncertain in its
operation.
Under these circumstances, if the only condition
upon which a Double Dissolution could be granted was, broadly
expressed, that a serious conflict between the two Houses ought to
be ended by the votes of the electors, then I would have no doubt
whatever that as Prime Minister I should be more than justified in
asking you to take the necessary steps to have determined by those
electors a disagreement which tends so strongly against the giving
of prompt expression to the public will.(23)
After 1951 Menzies himself did not make any
further attempt to address what he saw as the deficiencies of the
1948 method of electing Senators for the workings of the bicameral
Parliament and there is little evidence of any action by others
even when, from 1967, the Senate became an increasingly active
chamber. Prime Minister Whitlam, who as Opposition Leader had
exploited avenues in the Senate for holding governments to account,
relied from the earliest days after the 1972 election win on the
mandate, not only in disputes with the Senate but as a general
source of authority. The mandate was basically seen to be embodied
in the policy speech with which he had opened the campaign. Thus,
for example, when recommending that the Governor-General exercise
the prerogative of mercy and release several youths who had refused
national service, Whitlam wrote:
It may be assumed that this was endorsed by the
electors and that Your Excellency's Government has a mandate to
take these steps.(24)
But as the Opposition mounted a resistance in
the Senate to legislation embodying Labor promises, the Prime
Minister increasingly looked to the mandate as a self-sufficient
justification for the policies the government was seeking to
implement. As one of his biographers wrote: 'The more obstructive
the Senate became, the more Whitlam insisted on the principle that
the mandate was, indeed, mandatory';(25) note, however, Harold
Macmillan's view that '[a] mandate is permissive and not
compulsory. You are not compelled to commit a folly'.(26)
Whitlam's most extended exposition of his view
of the mandate is to be found in the August 1975 Chifley Memorial
Lecture:
So the debate about the meaning of the mandate
has centred on the question of whether in 1972 and again in 1974
the Australian Labor Party was given only a general mandate to
govern or a specific mandate to implement each part of its
programme.
Is the mandate merely general or is it specific?
Is it a grant of permission to preside or a command to perform? Our
opponents naturally interpret it in the weakest sense as a general
and highly-qualified mandate to govern-on their terms and indeed by
their grace and favour. I interpret the mandate as being both
general and specific-a general mandate to govern for the term for
which we were elected and a specific mandate to implement the
undertakings we made, within that term. But even when I speak of a
general mandate I cannot accept the conservative definition of a
mere mandate to govern, a permit to preside over the administration
of government and, hopefully, to administer the existing system in
a sufficiently acceptable way to give reasonable prospects of
re-election-for a further renewal of the mere mandate to preside.
The mandate as I interpret it is to move by specific programmes
toward the general goals and the general objectives accepted by the
people at elections.(27)
The Opposition of the time was more circumspect
about the Prime Minister's wide-ranging view of the mandate. Its
Leader, B. M. Snedden, said 'we will not obstruct policies which we
believe Australians want and for which a mandate exists'; the
Opposition Leader in the Senate thought that later election
results-by-elections and State elections-had invalidated the claim
to a mandate; and an Opposition backbencher said quite simply
that:
...when in the course of an election campaign a
political leader makes what he is pleased to call a policy speech
and a number of other speeches and issues supplementary statements
and so on there may be 199 different matters that he has mentioned.
To claim that he has a mandate for every one of these is of course
on the face of it obviously absurd.(28)
Two political scientists, Gordon Reid and Clem
Lloyd, wrote in 1974:
The theory of mandate applied by Mr Whitlam was
often naïve and obscure. Inherent in it were very real dangers
of inflexibility in the composition of policy, and confrontation
with the Senate on the wrong political issues. Undoubtedly, the
Whitlam mandate also gave expression to a strong strain of idealism
and a remarkable fidelity to the performance of electoral
promises.(29)
From 1975 until 1996 the mandate idea lost some
of its prominence though related issues periodically came to the
fore. When Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser sought simultaneous
dissolutions in 1983 it was on the basis that 'there is a need for
the Government, in the critical period we face, to have decisive
control over both Houses of Parliament'.(30) He was seeking a
result which, as Menzies had argued more than three decades
earlier, was very difficult to achieve under the 1948 method of
electing Senators.
Four years later the Hawke Government secured a
double dissolution on a single measure, the Australia Card Bill,
which it said was 'a fundamental part of the Government's
legislative program both in terms of its economic impact and in
terms of the principle of equity it represents'. The advice
referred also to Senate 'obstruction' of other measures.(31)
The Government won a significant majority in the
House (86 to 62) but had only 32 of the 76 seats in the
Senate-enough to secure passage of the Australia Card legislation
at a joint sitting but by no means sufficient to remedy its general
problem in the Senate. Notwithstanding the strength of its position
in electoral and parliamentary terms, the Government abandoned the
legislation when the Opposition announced that it would disallow in
the Senate regulations made under the Act needed to implement it.
This case again illustrated the very limited scope of section 57
for resolving inter-cameral differences.
Immediately following the 1993 elections, the
Keating Government introduced a number of taxation measures which
ran counter to statements made during the campaign. The Opposition
opposed these moves on the basis that they were at odds with
statements made prior to the elections and during the campaign.
The 1996 elections brought a new government to
office with a number of policies hotly debated during the campaign.
It had a large majority in the House of Representatives but fell
short by two of a majority in the Senate. In claiming victory on
election night the Prime Minister-elect, John Howard, declared:
... we have been elected with a mandate, a very
powerful mandate. And whilst I will seek at all times unity and a
common point of view, we have not been elected to be just a pale
imitation of the government that we have replaced. We have been
given this emphatic mandate tonight because there have been many
things that have been left undone that need to be attended to and
addressed.(32)
Two analysts at the time considered that the
Coalition's mandate was 'enormously broad', 'several hundred
specific commitments', any one of which 'might legitimately be
advanced ... as part of [the] mandate, just as the failure to meet
any such undertaking is always likely to be presented with similar
legitimacy by the opposition as a broken promise'. They
concluded:
The concepts of mandate and 'broken promise' are
the opposite sides of the same coin in the Australian political
game, but all players know that policy commitments are always open
to various interpretations and that some must be adjusted or
abandoned as circumstances in the political, legal, economic,
social and technological environment change or as new information
becomes available.(33)
In the course of the 1996-98 Parliament the
Government achieved many of the goals it had set itself but not
infrequently in the context of negotiation with cross-bench
Senators. On a number of key matters such as unfair dismissal laws
it was not successful.
The Howard Government is the first to win office
since introduction of the 1948 method of electing Senators which
was neither elected following simultaneous dissolutions nor which
endeavoured to improve its parliamentary position subsequently by
seeking simultaneous dissolutions. However, like all newly-elected
governments since the Second World War, it went to the polls again
well before expiry of the Parliament, with a wide-ranging set of
tax proposals, of which a goods and services tax was a major
feature. This provided the context for vigorous debate about the
mandate both during the campaign and subsequently. The following
section provides an account of that debate.
Australia's Mandate Debate 1998
Australia's mandate debate in 1998 occurred in
the context of re-election of the Howard Government with a reduced
but sufficient majority in the House of Representatives and needing
Australian Democrat votes to secure Senate support for legislation
to which the Opposition is opposed once the new Senate terms
commence on 1 July 1999.
It is in this situation that, in the context of
discussion and debate about the Government's plans for tax reform,
there has been a concurrent debate about the concept of mandate and
its application in contemporary Australian national politics. It
has been a debate which extensively if implicitly draws upon nearly
two centuries of political discourse on the mandate-the term and
the idea-and the powers, roles and responsibilities of government
and democratically elected legislative bodies.
The Protagonist: the Prime Minister
The Prime Minister, John Howard, has been the
leading protagonist in this concurrent debate. In a speech
delivered within a week of the general election he stated:
There has been a lot of debate about mandates.
There's been a lot of debate about what we are now entitled to do
... we made taxation reform a central issue of this election
campaign. We were up front, we were unashamed, we were forthright,
we were open, we were honest, and we didn't hide anything about it.
And having won that election it is our intention to press ahead
with all of the resources at our disposal to implement the program
on which we were elected. ... just before I left home to come here
tonight I saw the Premier of New South Wales on television saying
that he supported our right to implement the taxation program on
which we were elected. And can I say that I welcome the remarks
that Mr Carr made. I welcome the fact that he acknowledges that any
government commanding support in the Lower House of an Australian
Parliament has the right to implement the program on which that
government has been elected.(34)
A month later the Prime Minister told a meeting
of the Tasmanian Liberal Party that:
I have a very simple view about the political
process in this country. And that view is that elections are
opportunities for opposing political forces to lay their plans in
detail before the Australian people and when the Australian people
have made a decision it is the obligation of the victor in that
political contest to implement the plans laid before the Australian
people. There is nothing complicated about it. All this talk about
reviews and surveys and examinations and reconsiderations seems to
ignore this simple fact that we had an election. We had a
seven-week campaign, effectively, from the release of the
Government's tax plan to polling day. And we subjected ourselves to
all the scrutiny imaginable. I hear Mr Beazley complaining about
the lack of detail. There hasn't been a government in Australia's
history that has laid out more detail before an election about a
fundamental reform than my Government did before the last
election.(35)
On other occasions the Prime Minister has
asserted his view in more general terms: 'We got the mandate, we
got the authority, we got the votes of the Australian people on
3 October [1998] and we intend to press ahead'.(36)
Answering a question from a journalist also on
27 October 1998 he said:
Look, we can spend all day to-ing and fro-ing
but nothing can alter the fact ... that we went to the election
with a GST, we took our courage in our hands, we put our political
bodies on the line and we won. And on that basis, if parliamentary
democracy means anything, we're entitled to have the plan that we
took to the Australian people put through and those who would
frustrate that plan are really challenging the verdict of the
Australian people.(37)
The Prime Minister's case for a mandate for the
Government's tax plan has several elements:
-
- the mandate attaches to a policy/plan/program which is 'a
really major issue ... right there slap bang in the
middle'(38)
-
- the Government's tax plan 'occupied the centrality of an
election campaign ... there will be nothing like it in terms of an
identifiable mandate ...'(39)
-
- it is a plan about which the Australian people were,
appropriately, 'given an early opportunity to express their will at
the ballot box'; 'on matters of such fundamental importance, it is
critical that the Government knows it has the full confidence of
the Australian people'(40)
-
- where a Government wins in the House of Representatives but not
in the Senate, 'we should listen to the verdict of the Australian
people. I would hope ... that those who might control the numbers
in the Senate would look favourably upon that decision and would
listen to the verdict of the Australian people ... ',(41) and
-
- on the basis that the tax plan has won the support of the
Australian people, as expressed in the party composition of the
House of Representatives, there would be an inquiry in the Senate;
' ... it should be a sensible inquiry but it should not be an
inquiry that burns up so much time that you don't have proper time
left for sensible debate and a vote to be taken before 30 June
[1999]'.(42)
The Antagonists
The Leader of
the Opposition in the House of Representatives
There are, however, other views about the
outcome of the 1998 election and the implications for legislative
activity in the Parliament. Among those who have advanced different
views are the Leader of the Opposition in the House of
Representatives, Kim Beazley, and the Leader of the Australian
Democrats, Senator Lees.
Several themes run through the Opposition
Leader's views on the mandate concept and its interpretation in the
context of the election results for both the House of
Representatives and the Senate. Among these themes are the
importance of trust and credibility in electioneering and
subsequent political activity. Another is the relationship of these
views to the Opposition's attitude to the GST. Other elements
include the nature of the Government mandate and the connection
between election results and parliamentary process.
During the election campaign itself the
Opposition Leader raised the topics of trust and credibility on a
number of occasions in the context of honouring promises and
commitments made during the campaign: 'The electorate out there now
does not trust the major political parties. That's the truth of the
matter'.(43) On that occasion the point of the statement was
Coalition commitments about compensating various groups, in
particular, pensioners, for the impact of a GST. In an address to
the National Press Club in the week prior to polling day he
returned to the theme of honouring promises:
Both John Howard and I know of the cynicism
abroad in the community about politicians. That cynicism is a
cautionary note to both of us. If the Australian people are again
subjected after this election to the tired old charade of the bare
cupboard, the gnashing of teeth, and the core and non-core
promises, we will have failed perhaps our last test.(44)
The Opposition Leader claimed that during the
campaign his party had had a 'determination to keep our promises
reasonable, credible, and deliverable ... we want to keep every
promise we have made in this campaign. And we will'.(45) Whilst
stating that some of the Prime Minister's promises would be 'core'
and 'non-core', the Opposition Leader asserted that 'his GST is a
core promise-expect him to keep it'.(46)
The Leader of the Opposition, recognising the
particular prominence of certain matters in the election, also
stressed the larger picture. As he said on the day following
release of the Government's tax plan:
... this coming election must not only be about
taxation or the privatisation of Telstra. This must be an election
about the entirety of the national agenda-our national investment
in the skills of our people, the future of our regions and
industries, the strength of our infrastructure, and the
availability and security of Australian jobs.(47)
On the eve of polling day the Opposition Leader,
however, told the National Press Club that '... the Australian
people will not want for a clear choice this weekend.'(48)As he saw
it, two matters 'must rank above all others'. These were sale of
the remainder of Telstra ('no subsequent government will be able to
buy it back') and the GST ('no future government will be able to
remove it'). He continued: 'These are threshold choices for the
Australian people, and the alternatives could not be
clearer'.(49)
In the wake of the election, the Opposition
Leader's focus was on the character of the Government's mandate in
relation to the GST and on the parliamentary process. He portrayed
the Government as having a very circumscribed mandate based on a
contrast of votes for the House of Representatives and the
Senate:
John Howard has won this election. There's no
question about that. But he's won it with the lowest vote to win an
election that any of us can actually recollect ... He has a right
to govern well. And a government has a right to introduce anything
that they like ... He is entitled to put forward any piece of
legislation that he wants. And he can claim for that legislation
the merits of the arguments associated with that legislation. He
can claim no more for it than that.(50)
A month later he was more pointed: 'He cannot
claim a mandate for his GST, and he certainly cannot claim a
mandate for the indecent haste with which he wants to implement
it'.(51)
The Opposition's 51.5 per cent of the two-party
preferred vote, including majorities in four of the six states, was
'a clear indication to Mr Howard that the community does not want
his Goods and Services tax ... the actual real practical evidence
of the voting outcome indicates that folk did not want a Goods and
Services tax'.(52)
He later pointed to the Senate vote: 'In the
Senate, 60 per cent voted for parties they assumed would stop
it.'(53)The composition of the vote in both the Senate and House
elections was thus seen to legitimise parliamentary activity
concerning the GST: 'A vote for Labor is a rolled gold vote against
the GST. We will not accept it now. We will not put it forward as
our policy option and we will oppose it absolutely. Now, we've made
that amply clear'.(54)
The Opposition criticised the decision to call
an election immediately upon release of the tax package: '[John
Howard] did not want it subject to Parliamentary scrutiny. He did
not want the accountability that normally comes when you are in
office ...'(55) The Opposition Leader also underlined the
institutional context in which the legislation would be handled:
'Neither Mr Howard, nor myself, will enjoy a majority in the Senate
after this election. Whether he wins or I win, neither of us
will'.(56) And at the National Press Club:
Much as I don't like the fact ... that I'd have
to, as a Prime Minister deal with a Senate that would not be my
way, that is nevertheless the political system that the Australian
people endorse. They expect governments to get on with the Senate,
and I would be doing my level best to do that.(57)
After the election the Opposition Leader
continued to develop his case for the legitimacy of parliamentary
action: '... part of the duty of Opposition is to hold Government
accountable on [the GST]'. The Opposition would 'argue the merits
of [the GST] legislation in the House and the Senate'(58). He left
no doubt that the Opposition was 'opposing [the GST] lock, stock
and barrel'.(59) On 28 October he told a media conference: '... we
will manoeuvre tactically in whatever way we can to try and procure
the defeat of this legislation.'(60) Part of the case was the
argument for parliamentary process: 'If ever there was a
justification for a high level Senate Inquiry into a matter of
Government policy, this is it'.(61)
The Opposition also commented that the Senate
which would consider the legislation, especially if it were to be
dealt with by 30 June 1999 as the Government desired, was an 'old
Senate',(62) its members having been elected at either the
periodical elections of March 1993 or March 1996. The Leader of the
Opposition was especially critical of any voting support for GST
legislation from the former Labor senator, Senator Colston
(Queensland), on the basis that he [Senator Colston] had been last
elected in 1993 on an anti-GST platform.(63)
The Leader of the Australian
Democrats
On 14 September 1998 Democrat leader Senator Meg
Lees (South Australia) entered the mandate debate, stating that
'there is also a valid mandate in the "House of Review"'. Her view
was that the outcome in the Senate as well as that in the House of
Representatives should be respected. '"The voters' choice cuts both
ways'', Senator Lees says'.(64)
In the week before polling day the Democrats
'pledged to expand the role of the Senate as a House of Review,
saying it is the best way of forcing Government to be honest,
accountable and responsive to the public'.(65) The day after
polling Senator Lees stated:
Clearly, with the combined Democrat, Labor and
Green vote exceeding the Coalition Senate vote by 11.7 per cent,
and their House vote by 8.6 per cent, John Howard has a mandate to
form Government, but no mandate to impose unfair policies on the
Senate. If, as the voting trends suggest, the Democrats regain the
balance of power in our own right in the Senate, we will treat the
Coalition's legislative program fairly and responsibly, but won't
be bullied into becoming a rubber stamp', she concluded.(66)
Four days later, in another media release:
Senator Lees said the Government should respect
the Senate's separate mandate as a House of Review. 58 per cent of
people who voted in the Senate voted for parties opposed to the
Coalition's current tax plan, while the Coalition's Senate vote of
38 per cent was its lowest in half a century.
As John Howard himself acknowledged on 1987, the
mandate theory that says people approve every piece of Government
policy at election time has always been phony(sic).(67)
Media
Analysis
Within a week of polling Paul Kelly,
international editor of The Australian, took issue with
'efforts to delegitimise [John Howard's] victory typified by the
misuse of the mandate theory'. Kelly's core argument was that
'[m]andates, under the classical theory, relate to governments. The
mandate is the link, the trust, the bond between the ruler and the
people'. And later:
If the mandate is killed, then you kill the
central means of keeping governments honest. The government has a
right to implement its policies; but it has a responsibility to
honour its promises. A government that breaks its promises is
abusing its mandate. An Opposition that denies a government a
mandate denies any expectation that its promises will be kept ...
(68)
Kelly buttressed his argument by locating the
mandate-a polemical device-among those 'other conventions, rules or
theories [needed] to make our democracy work' for, 'the
Constitution, as law, can render Australia ungovernable'. Kelly
especially concentrated his defence of the mandate on its
challengers in the Senate:
The entire Senate wasn't even elected last
Saturday. The Senate can't claim a mandate on a GST because this
was a half-Senate poll. The arrogance for the people held by some
senators who claim mandates when half their numbers didn't even
face the voters is as breathtaking as it is contempuous.
The mandate-the trust between the elected
government and the people-can't apply to the Senate because the
Senate doesn't determine the government and the Senate as a whole
didn't go to the election.
In Kelly's analysis, the mandate concept is
essential for Australia's system of government to work:
... our system can't function with equal and
competing mandates given the Senate's powers.
The system can work only if the Senate
discharges its house of review functions recognising the legitimacy
of the Government's program.
If the Democrats have a mandate, then One Nation
has a mandate ... This is the crazy logic we have created for
ourselves.
A leading article in the Financial
Review on the same day adopted a similar view: '... Mr Howard
won on Saturday ... Australia made its choice with its eyes open
and the Government should now be allowed to deliver'. It considered
the argument that different voting for the Senate meant 'the
intention of excising key elements of the package is also
flawed'.(69) It continued:
With an Upper House in which it is virtually
impossible to secure a majority, this is to suggest that the
Australian people want governments which aren't able to govern. The
Senate is a house of review and a check on government excesses and
duplicities, not a vehicle to stop them enacting clearly stated
programs.
Peter Cole-Adams in the Canberra Times
endeavoured to locate the mandate idea in the institutional context
of Australia's bicameral national parliament:
To question the usefulness of the mandate idea
is not to undermine the authority of governments, or to say that
political parties should not make commitments, or to suggest that
they should not do their damnedest to honour them. The electorate
will punish them if they do not. It is simply to
acknowledge the reality that what the Australian
electorate gives a winning party is a parliament with which it must
live.
Our system, the way it has evolved, gives
governments the power to rule but, when it comes to change, it
usually guarantees them little more than the right to negotiate
from a position of strength with minor parties.(70)
Others were less sanguine about the case for the
mandate. In The Age of 6 October 1998 Tim Colebatch
wrote:
The Government has every right to govern. It has
no right to make unconstitutional demands on the Senate, such as
insisting that it rubber stamp legislation. Senators are elected to
form a house of review over legislation; that is their purpose; it
is their constitutional duty, and there is no reason why that right
should be abandoned.(71)
Peter O'Connor, a Canberra-based journalist,
wrote in like terms in the Financial Review of 16 December
1998:
In our system, as in all democracies, the
Parliament legislates, the executive governs.
The mandate theorists would have us believe
Parliament should function as an electoral college for the
executive and then hibernate between polls, while Cabinet seizes
legislative power.(72)
Mandate: Dictionary and Academic
Analyses
Because in Australia and elsewhere mandate
doctrine is at the heart of debate and contention among active
politicians, it is not surprising that dictionaries, either general
or political, do not provide unequivocal definitions. Most hesitate
to vest the term in its political application with definitive
meaning. Appendix 1 contains a brief survey of relevant entries in
Australian, British and American dictionaries.
Compilers of dictionaries of politics do not
have any hesitation about including an entry on mandate in their
lexicons but they, too, have considerable reservation about whether
any precise or binding meaning can be attached to the term.
The dictionaries of politics refer to the usual
range of matters-mandates are claimed even when winning margins are
small and for policies which hardly figured at all during the
campaign. Indeed, there is a view that the comprehensivity of
modern manifestos dilutes any particular claim for a mandate.
Dictionaries from American sources write mainly in terms of the
significance of mandates in presidential strategies for securing
congressional support for administration programs, but some see the
concept as more applicable to British than American politics.
Appendix 2 contains a more extended review of entries in a selected
range of dictionaries of politics.
Academic analysis of mandate doctrine falls
broadly into two categories. Authors in the first category believe
that the term has substance and is important for the integrity and
democratic qualities of politics and government. Authors in the
second category question both the doctrine and its adverse
implications for considered government and proper conduct of the
legislative process. Relevant academic analyses are surveyed in
Appendix 3.
Conclusion
The many questions to which the term, mandate,
and the related ideas give rise are firmly located in the centre of
politics. They concern not only the interpretation of election
results for purposes of legislation and policy, but also who, if
anyone, is able to impose an interpretation on the results of a
particular election or, indeed, if anyone should do so.
What distinguishes Australia's situation in
comparison to other Westminster-style systems is that the
Government itself, whose claim to office is based on the House of
Representatives, is only in a position to impose its view of the
mandate on those rare occasions when it also has a majority in the
Senate. Otherwise the question is decided by whether and on what
terms a government can build a majority in the Senate, finding
support from beyond the ranks of its own party supporters. In this
sense, an Australian Government has a good deal less latitude than
various counterparts.
It is not only that Australian governments have
less latitude in interpreting election results in terms of
legislation and policies, the constitutional framework for
bicameralism in the Commonwealth Parliament and the 1948 method of
electing Senators mean that attempts to resolve a dispute about
mandate by resort to section 57 is only of limited and, in most
cases, retrospective, value. For some analysts this is not an
unsatisfactory situation and, indeed, an assurance of at least a
measure of parliamentary control of the Executive. On most matters
Australian governments win parliamentary support for most of what
they want; they certainly fare better with the Senate than US
presidents do with the Congress. They also preside over a House of
Representatives which is more tightly controlled than many other
lower houses in Westminster-based parliaments, including the Houses
of Commons at Westminster and Ottawa.
The other view is that of Sir Robert Menzies. If
there is some dispute between the Senate and the House of
Representatives, and it is remitted to the people under section 57
of the Constitution, there should be a reasonable prospect of
decisive resolution in favour of one side or the other. Such
decisive resolution is unlikely under the 1948 method of electing
Senators.
Appendix 1: Mandate-Dictionary Definitions
In a dictionary sense, the political usage of
the term is neither primary nor prominent. In the 1989 edition of
the Oxford English Dictionary political usage is fourth of
five meanings: 'The instruction or commission as to policy supposed
to be given by the electors to parliament or one of its members'
(vol. IX, p. 301).
Its first use in this sense dates from the late
eighteenth century in France and in form has a decidedly Burkean
resonance: 'The members of the legislative body are not the
representation of the department which has chosen them, but of the
whole nation, and no mandate instructions can be given them'.
Other dictionaries likewise give a low rating to
the political usage of the word. For Webster's it ranks
third: 'the wishes of constituents expressed to a representative,
legislature, etc. as an order, or regarded as an order' (p. 1093).
The third edition of the Macquarie Dictionary includes the
following under its entry for mandate: '3. Politics the instruction
as to policy given or supposed to be given by electors to a
legislative body or to one or more of its members' (p. 1308).
There is thus an equivocal quality to the
entries in the OED and Macquarie; both hesitate
to vest the term in its political application with definitive
meaning.
Appendix
2: Dictionaries of Politics
Authors of dictionaries of politics do not have
any doubt that mandate has a place in their lexicons but they, too,
share the hesitations of the general dictionaries about whether
definitive meaning can be attached to the term. A typical such
entry is to be found in David Robertson's A Dictionary of
Modern Politics (1993):
Mandates are typically claimed by successful
parties in national elections even when they have actually gained
only a smallish plurality of votes. If a party, or a candidate, has
stood for election on a particular set of policies, then, having
won election, a mandate from the people has been granted to
implement those policies. Thus governments often claim that they
are 'mandated' to carry out some action even if there is no good
reason to believe that the policy in question had very much to do
with their victory ...
Questions of whether a mandate does or could
exist, how much anyone is bound by it, and when an election result
would certify such a mandate are hotly-contested matters of modern
arguments about democracy both in parliaments and parties.(73)
The conservative philosopher, Roger Scruton,
wrote in A Dictionary of Political Thought that:
The doctrine of the mandate is highly
influential in democratic politics, although it is extremely
difficult to see quite what it means, the problem here being
inextricably bound up with the general problems of collective
choice. It is sometimes said that when a political party stands for
election, it makes certain promises, and by virtue of this secures
the vote of the electorate. In return for the voluntary act of the
electorate, it therefore stands under a contractual or
quasi-contractual obligation to fulfil its promises, and has a
'mandate from the electorate' so to do. In other words, the
relation between a party in office and the electorate is one of
mandation. The mandate is held to be a sufficient (some say also
necessary) condition for the legitimacy of acts performed in
fulfilment of it. The whole structure of obligation stems therefore
from the fundamental act of consent whereby democracies establish
their claims to legitimacy.(74)
Scruton, however, enumerated several problems:
the diversity of policies in a party program; the range of reasons
lying behind the voting preferences of electors; the likelihood
that for reasons, for example, of necessity it may be desirable or
expedient to change a policy. On the other side of the ledger
Scruton posited that a
... party programme seems to express some kind
of commitment. It may be that the correct response is to say that
there is a mandate after election, but that its basis is
not to be found in contract, or promise-keeping; alternatively,
that there is no such thing as a mandate, in which case, with what
authority does the ruling party act?
The Oxford scholar S. E. Finer perceived the
positive and negative dimensions of the term: positively it implied
that 'a government is bound to follow instructions given by the
electorate in a general election; or, negatively, that a government
ought not, in a democracy, to adopt some new policy unless it has
first been put before the electorate'. Like other writers Finer
considered that the range of modern party manifestos makes it
'difficult to maintain the doctrine'.(75)
In American political science protagonists of
the presidency tend to be strong advocates of the mandate (for the
president) whilst others who place more weight on 'checks and
balances', and the importance of the Congress, are more sceptical.
President Eisenhower entitled the first volume of his presidential
memoirs, Mandate for Change; the title of the relevant
chapter (8) is: 'The Platform: Promises to Keep'.(76)
Eisenhower initially won office by a significant
majority, supported by majorities in both the Senate and the House
(though it was a frequent irritation to him that Republicans in the
Congress did not feel it a duty to support Administration policies
and programs).
The New York Times columnist William
Safire, in Safire's New Political Dictionary defined the
term simply as 'the authority to carry out a program conferred on
an elected official; especially strong after a landslide
victory'.(77) He pointed out that in 1960, Eisenhower's successor,
President John F. Kennedy, had a wafer-thin win in the popular
vote-barely 0.1 per cent; but, as one of his leading acolytes
wrote:
The fact remains that he won, and on the day
after the election, and every day thereafter, he rejected the
argument that the country had given him no mandate. Every election
has a winner and a loser, he said in effect. The margin is narrow,
but the responsibility is clear. There may be difficulties with the
Congress, but a margin of only one vote would still be a
mandate.
Another acolyte, the noted historian Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr, observed:
Kennedy had very little leverage ... [He had
been elected] by the slimmest of margins; no one could possibly
claim his victory as a mandate for change.(78)
The American Political Dictionary
combines a general definition:
Mandate
Popular support for a political program. A
mandate is assumed to emerge from an election as a result of
popular support given to a political party or to elected officials
who ran on a set of pledges to the voters. A mandate may be vague
or specific, depending upon the clarity with which alternatives are
presented to the voters,
with a deprecatory assessment of its
significance in American politics:
The mandate concept is best implemented where a
responsible, well-disciplined party, ready and able to carry out
its promised program, exists. The American party system, unlike the
British, lacks these qualities, and the mandate is consequently
weakened.
The authors observe, however, some signs of a
trend 'in which voter action produces change'; for example, Ross
Perot's bids for the presidency and the 1994 Republican 'Contract
with America'.(79)
Andrew Heywood in Political Ideas and
Concepts-An Introduction (1994) presents a view of the mandate
doctrine which underlines its two-way character where many analysts
perceive only a one-way bid for power by winning politicians. He
writes that the 'winning party or candidate not only enjoys a
popular mandate to carry out its manifesto pledges but has a duty
to do so'. 'The great merit of the mandate doctrine is that it
seems to impose some kind of meaning upon an election, and so
offers popular guidance to those who exercise government
power'.
Whilst Heywood highlights the constructive
characteristics of the mandate doctrine in its enhancement of
democracy by giving a measure of substance to its meaning as
government by the people, he is similarly concerned by the
notion of a 'mandate to rule', not only because it is 'hopelessly
vague' but because it 'comes close to investing politicians with
unrestricted authority simply because they have won an
election'.(80)
Appendix 3: Academic Analysis
Important evidence that the mandate doctrine
enjoys a lively existence in democratic life is illustrated by the
attention it has received in general texts on politics. Most of
these reflect the scepticism and hesitancy of the dictionary
documentation and analysis of the term but there are some notable
exceptions which attempt to discern the importance of the doctrine
for democratic polities and, among other things, reasons for its
durability. After all, the term was sufficiently prominent during
the latter half of the nineteenth century to support a London
University doctoral dissertation on the doctrine as it applied to
British politics from the Second Reform Act 1867 to the
passage of the Parliament Act 1911.(81)
In the academic literature of the past
generation there have been two important expositions of the
significance and substance of mandate theory, and its importance
for the integrity and democratic qualities of politics and
government. Two other major essays have questioned the doctrine
both in its own terms and in terms of its adverse implications for
considered government and proper conduct of the legislative
process.
Richard Mulgan, then of the University of Otago
and now in the Public Policy Program at The Australian National
University, was attracted to a study of the mandate doctrine in
late 1978 for a number of reasons including the significance
attached to it by ministers and Opposition parliamentarians in New
Zealand, in contrast to the tendency of academics either to dismiss
the term or, as he expressed it, to take 'the notion ... too
literally'.(82)
He briefly traversed various incidents in New
Zealand where the mandate was seen to be a central justification
for some action of government. One such incident involved
termination of a royal commission, an intention which attracted
little attention during the campaign. Mulgan concluded that:
Inclusion in the election policy is sufficient,
as well as necessary, for the existence of a mandate. If the public
is unaware of or not interested in the policy, the mandate may be
weakened but not destroyed.(83)
A more significant incident entailed suspension
of a superannuation scheme on the basis of the election mandate, to
be validated retrospectively by legislation: 'the mandate ...
provided the moral and political justification for the Government
to announce, without summoning Parliament, that existing
legislation was no longer effective'.
In the subsequent court case, however, it was
held that the Prime Minister [Muldoon] had acted illegally, on the
basis that under the Bill of Rights the Crown may not suspend laws
without the consent of Parliament.(84)
Mulgan was prepared to concede certain
criticisms of mandate doctrine, for example, that 'most voters are
unaware of most issues', or that mandates do not cover all policies
advocated by a particular party, but his fundamental conclusion was
that:
The theory of the mandate may thus be taken to
justify governments in enacting their election policy and to oblige
them not to introduce major measures which are outside that policy.
As such it seems an intelligible convention which is vital to our
political system; without it both the authority and the
accountability of elected governments would be seriously
limited.(85)
Nearly two decades later, on the basis of debate
about the mandate which followed election of the Howard Government
in 1996, Professor Hugh Emy of Monash University supported a broad
formulation of the doctrine on the basis that it contains 'ideas of
substance for organising representative democracy'.(86) His
formulation, which he characterised as 'a descendant of the
delegate theory of representation', is as follows:
In the context of Australian national
government, mandate is usually taken to mean that a party which
fights an election on the basis of policies clearly stated in its
manifesto or the leader's policy speech, is entitled to pursue
those policies if it wins a majority of seats in the House of
Representatives. The mandate is a commission to govern. This
includes a general right to govern and a particular right to pursue
stated policies. Conversely, the public has a right to expect that
the new government will abide 'by the terms of its mandate', i.e.
as far as possible it should honour its promises and commitments.
If it reneges on the terms of the implied contract with the people
through which it gained power, it may be accused of ' dishonouring
its mandate'.(87)
Emy also recognised that the mandate has a
practical as well as rhetorical dimension. As manifestos became
long and detailed documents, they placed certain limits on the
winning party's scope for action. He traced evidence in Britain
that the parties take their manifestos seriously and, citing a 1992
study, 'what governments do "relates broadly either to their
manifesto emphases or to their long-standing ideological
commitments"'.(88)
In a key observation Emy contended that 'the
mandate has two faces which are two aspects of one relationship'.
He continued:
An elected government does enjoy a right to
govern and to legislate in pursuit of policies it announced either
during or prior to the election campaign. However, the citizens
also have a right to expect that the government will govern in line
with its stated intentions or promises; and, that faced with the
unexpected, it will at least try to respond consistently with
established policy and/or its political principles.(89)
Emy sees the vitality of mandate doctrine as
having important implications for the reputation of government and
politics. Among the sources of low esteem of politics,
... one is certainly the growing practice among
modern parties of seeking power by concealing their real intentions
from the voters, making promises they have no intention of keeping,
in effect seeking power on a program of 'plausible lies'.(90)
Emy thus sees in the mandate doctrine a
mechanism for upholding 'the ethic of responsible party government
itself'.(91)
Like Mulgan, Emy's analysis recognises most (if
not all) of the various criticisms of the mandate doctrine; his own
position, again like Mulgan's, is especially sustainable because he
does not interpret the doctrine as a carte blanche for the
winner, however defined:
... the right to govern does not give an
executive an automatic right to convert its policy into law. It
must explain itself fully. It is obliged to defend itself against
charges of inconsistency: that a Bill departs noticeably from what
was foreshadowed, or confers too much discretion on minister and
public servants. With controversial policies, the government cannot
necessarily invoke its own mandate as a trump card.(92)
In the context of responsible government in
Australia, Emy posits an important role for the Senate to
scrutinise claims made by a government to exercise 'a trustee's
discretion to vary or create new policies'.(93)
One of the major challenges to mandate doctrine
came from America's leading theorist on democracy, Robert A. Dahl
of Yale University, during the Reagan presidency:
... Reagan's lofty mandate was provided by 50.9
per cent of the voters ... what was widely interpreted as Reagan's
mandate, not only by supporters but by opponents, was more myth
than reality.(94)
The mandate, according to Dahl, who was in turn
relying on a 1983 study, Interpreting Elections, by
Stanley Kelley, has four supports: that elections carry messages
about problems, policies and programs; certain of those messages
must be treated as authoritative concerns; to qualify as mandates,
the messages must reflect the stable views of voters and
the electorate; and, finally, a negative imperative that, except in
emergencies, governments should not undertake major innovations in
policy or procedure unless the electorate has had an opportunity to
consider them in an election.(95)
Dahl found little difficulty in negating these
stipulations and concluding that:
Beyond revealing the first preferences of a
plurality of voters, do presidential elections also reveal the
additional information that a plurality (or a majority) of voters
prefer the policies of the winner and wish the winner to pursue
those policies.(96)
In empirical analysis, Dahl pointed out that
while in 1984 Reagan had a landslide, Democratic candidates in the
House of Representatives secured 52 per cent of the vote, down from
55 per cent at the 1982 mid-term elections.
Dahl cast the claims for a presidential mandate
in terms of what he characterised as the pseudo-democratisation of
the presidency and an attempt to elevate it above the Congress. In
contrast to Emy, who seems to hold that only governments have
mandates,(97) Dahl considered that members of the Congress opposing
presidential measures 'in effect also claim a mandate for their
policies'.(98)
(It is of interest that Dahl's inspiration for
his essay was Reagan's comparatively comfortable victories rather
than Kennedy's much more questionable victory, decisive though it
was in the electoral college).
The scheme in the United States Constitution for
election of presidents was, according to Dahl, designed to improve
the chances of victory for a national figure rather than a faction
leader or a demagogue-the president was not to be a tribune of the
people.(99)
This philosophy was challenged by the eighth
president of the United States, Andrew Jackson, in 1828 (when he
lost in the electoral college having led the vote) and 1832.
Jackson conceived the president as 'an immediate
and direct representative of the people'. Little more than a decade
later James Polk was justifying his use of the veto on legislation
on the basis that the President was responsible to the people of
the whole Union, as the representatives in the legislative branches
were responsible to the people of particular States and
districts.(100)
According to Dahl, it was Woodrow Wilson who
elevated the doctrine of presidential mandate to 'what ... appears
to be its canonical form'. In an essay of 1908 on
Constitutional Government in the United States, Wilson
wrote that the earlier Whig theory of the presidency was 'far from
being a democratic theory ... It [was] particularly intended to
prevent the will of the people as a whole from having at any moment
an unobstructed sweep and ascendancy'.(101)
Of the president, Wilson wrote: 'No-one else
represents the people as a whole, exercising a national choice ...
His is the only national voice in affairs ... . He is the
representative of no constituency, but of the whole
people.'(102)
Not the least of Dahl's objections to
presidential mandates is its use as a device to circumvent the due
processes of policy formulation and legislation provided for in the
Constitution. Emphasizing the 'crucial importance of opportunities
for understanding' and 'deliberation', he
observed: '... deliberation is surely central to the idea of a
democratic decision-making'.(103)
By far the most trenchant attack on mandate
theory came from Professor Campbell Sharman of the University of
Western Australia in the December 1998 Senate Department Lecture.
Sharman pointed up the importance of mandate debate in Australia
because of the bicameralism of the Commonwealth Parliament. The
institutional and electoral situation:
... requires governments to compromise so that a
larger group than the governing party, perhaps even a body of
parliamentarians representing a real majority of voters, supports a
proposed measure. This means that, quite apart from any amendments
that may be required, legislation is closely scrutinised, and the
government of the day and its supporting bureaucracy must publicly
justify every proposed law to a legislative body whose support
cannot be taken for granted.(104)
Like Dahl, Sharman stressed the importance of
public deliberation, and deprecated employment of mandate theory
when it is used as a means of circumscribing, or even subverting,
the constitutional processes of government and legislation.
Sharman's argument focused heavily on features of mandate doctrine
which would be seen as abuses by those who take a more benign view
of the doctrine.
Sharman asserted:
[The mandate] does not mean that the government
can make any new law it wants by the stroke of the prime minister's
pen. Governing is not the same as legislating ... the only body
that can make laws is the Parliament ... the whole point of
parliamentary democracy is that governments are forced to submit
new legislation to a representative assembly to gain consent for
it.(105)
He saw mandate claims as pre-empting discussion
of the merits of particular policy or amendments to legislation. In
Australia's current debate he disputed the existence of a mandate
on the basis of votes: 'The coalition parties won just under 40 per
cent of the vote for the House of Representatives at the last
election, but gained a fraction over 54 per cent of the seats'.
Murray Goot of Macquarie University provided
another commentary on the current debate in Australia. Goot
followed Dahl in seeking to use public opinion polling as a means
of probing beyond election results to ascertain the voters' minds
on questions at issue.
He believed a claim to a mandate is difficult to
sustain in a bicameral parliament in which each house has
comparable powers. In Australia, he pointed out, 'the Senate turns
out to be a better-not a worse-mirror of the nation's mind than the
House of Representatives'.(106)
Goot traced growing criticism of mandate theory
but believed that opinion polling provided a means to ascertain
whether or not there is substantial support for particular
policies. On the basis of the polls he found, in the case of
Australia, that there is often popular support for Senate actions
and, moreover, cases where the public does not have any objection
to a Government failing to honour a promise.
Whilst polls and kindred methods of appraising
public opinion are no doubt used by governments and other party
leaders in settling their strategies and tactics, it is unlikely
that they could be invoked authoritatively to settle a
constitutional or even a political point.
Nor will all analysts, let alone
parliamentarians, accept Goot's view that 'in politics,
promise-keeping is a political act; it is neither a question of
morality nor a question of logic';(107) this view is certainly at
odds with Emy's interest in the mandate and the connections between
meeting commitments made during elections and the general
reputation of politics.
Most analysis of the mandate question focuses on
a simple set of circumstances-a party makes promises during an
election campaign which it is expected to implement in the event of
victory.
Politics is, nevertheless, a dynamic process;
today's promise may simply be irrelevant tomorrow. The question of
realising a mandate may be as much a question of the party's
prospects at a succeeding election as one of keeping promises made
during a recent contest. Public opinion about a policy or program
may change and there is no impediment to an incumbent government
responding to that change; indeed, in a democracy it would be
wholly appropriate for it to do so. Opinion polls may inform
decisions of this character but they cannot, of themselves,
legitimate decisions having this effect.
The circumstances giving rise to a particular
policy may likewise change necessitating change to the policy or
even its abandonment.
Endnotes
-
- Gough Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, 1972-1975,
Viking, 1985, esp. chapter 1; Graham Freudenberg, A Certain
Grandeur: Gough Whitlam in Politics, Macmillan, 1977,
pp. 243-5; G. S. Reid and C. J. Lloyd, Out of the
Wilderness, Cassell Australia, 1974, pp. 197-210.
- David Leyton-Brown, Canadian Annual Review of Politics and
Public Affairs 1989, University of Toronto Press, 1995, p.p.
23-5; David Leyton-Brown, Canadian Annual Review of Politics
and Public Affairs 1990, University of Toronto Press, 1997,
pp. 26-31.
- G. S. Reid and C. J. Lloyd, op. cit., pp. 208-9.
- As in the case of Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempt to increase
the number of justices of the United States Supreme Court following
various decisions which declared New Deal legislation to be
unconstitutional. See Kermit L. Hall (ed.), The Oxford
Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, New York,
1992, p. 743.
- R. H. S. Crossman, Inside View, Jonathan Cape, 1972,
chapters 2 and 3.
- Harold Wilson, The Labour Government 1964-70. A Personal
Record, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Michael Joseph, 1971,
pp. 37-8; James Callaghan, Time and Change, Collins, 1987,
pp. 174-5.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, Heinemann,
1963, ch. 4.
- Robert A. Dahl, 'The Myth of the Presidential Mandate',
Political Science Quarterly, vol. 105 (3), November 1990,
pp. 355-72.
- As quoted by Norman Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction in
English Politics 1832-1852, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965, p.
142.
- As quoted by Vernon Bogdanor, The People and the Party
System, Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 17.
- ibid., p. 17.
- As quoted by Cecil S. Emden, The People and the
Constitution, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956, p. 220.
- Cecil S. Emden, op. cit., p. 220.
- As quoted in M. A. J. Wheeler-Booth, 'The House of Lords', J.
A. G. Griffith and Michael Ryle, Parliament, Sweet and
Maxwell, 1989, pp. 504-5.
- As quoted ibid., p. 505.
- Alfred Deakin, Official Record of the Debates of the
Australian Federal Convention, 20 September 1897, p. 818.
- ibid., 20 September 1897, p. 818.
- Alfred Deakin, op. cit., 15 September 1897, p. 582.
- Memorandum from the Prime Minister (Joseph Cook) to the
Governor-General, 4 June 1914, published in Double
Dissolution, PP 2/1914, p. 6.
- R. G. Menzies, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates,
vol. 196, 21 April 1948, p. 1002.
- R. G. Menzies, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates,
vol. 207, 4 May 1950, p. 2222.
- ibid., pp. 2222-3.
- R. G. Menzies to W. J. McKell (Governor-General), 16 March
1951, 14-5, Documents Relating to the Simultaneous Dissolution
of the Senate and the House of Representatives by His Excellency
the Governor-General on 19th March, 1951, PP
6/1957.
- As quoted in Graham Freudenberg, op. cit., Macmillan,
1977, pp. 244-5.
- Freudenberg, op. cit., p. 243.
- As quoted by Lloyd and Reid, op. cit., p. 197.
- As quoted by Freudenberg, op. cit., p. 244.
- As quoted by Lloyd and Reid, op. cit., pp. 203-4.
- Lloyd and Reid, op. cit., p. 210.
- As quoted in Harry Evans (ed.), Odgers' Australian Senate
Practice, AGPS, 1995, p. 107.
- As quoted in Harry Evans (ed.), op. cit., p. 109.
- As quoted in Scott Prasser and Graeme Starr, Policy &
Change: The Howard Mandate, Hale and Iremonger, 1997, p. 17.
- Prasser and Starr, op. cit., p. 17.
- Transcript of address to the Australian Business Limited's
Annual Dinner, Sydney Convention Centre, 8 October 1998, p. 3.
- Transcript of Opening Address to Tasmanian Division's State
Council, Burnie Civic Centre, Burnie, Tasmania.
- Transcript of address to the New South Wales Division's State
Council,24 October 1998, p. 4.
- Transcript of doorstop interview following declaration of poll,
AEC office, Gladesville, 27 October 1998, p. 3.
- Transcript of press conference, Parliament House, 13 August
1998, p. 7.
- Transcript of questions and answers, National Press Club, 1
October 1998, p. 2.
- Letter to His Excellency the Honourable Sir William Deane, 30
August 1998, p. 1.
- Transcript of press conference, Prime Minister's Courtyard,
Parliament House, 30 August 1998, p. 6.
- Transcript of press conference, Prime Minister's Courtyard, 13
November 1998, pp. 4-5.
- Transcript of doorstop at the Rockingham Council Chambers,
Perth, 8 September 1998, p. 4.
- Address to National Press Club, Canberra, 30 September 1998, p.
2.
- ibid., p. 2.
- ibid., p. 2.
- Address to South Australian Israel Chamber of Commerce
Luncheon, 'The Tax Package: Labor's Response', Adelaide, 14 August
1998, p. 1.
- Address to National Press Club, Canberra, 30 September 1998, p.
1.
- ibid., p. 1.
- Transcript of doorstop, Australian Electoral Commission,
Rockingham, WA, 12 October 1998, p. 2.
- Address to ACOSS National Congress, 'Taxation Reform: More Than
Just Tax', Adelaide, 6 November 1998.
- Transcript of doorstop, Australian Electoral Commission,
Rockingham, WA, 12 October 1998, p. 1.
- Transcript of introductory remarks to ALP Caucus meeting,
Parliament House, Canberra, 19 October 1998, p. 1.
- Transcript of doorstop, Woy Woy Leagues Club, Central Coast,
NSW, 4 September 1998, p. 5.
- Transcript of press conference, The Domain, Sydney, 30 August
1998, p. 1.
- Transcript of doorstop, Woy Woy Leagues Club, Central Coast,
NSW, 4 September 1998, p. 6.
- Transcript of question and answers, National Press Club,
Canberra, 30 September 1998, p. 9.
- Transcript of doorstop, Electoral Commission, Albion,
Queensland, 15 October 1998, p. 5.
- Transcript of doorstop, Australian Electoral Commission,
Rockingham, WA, 12 October 1998, p. 3.
- Transcript of doorstop, Parliament House, Canberra, 28 October
1998, p. 2.
- Transcript of introductory remarks at the shadow ministry
meeting, Parliament House, Canberra, 28 October 1998, p. 2.
- Transcript of doorstop, Australian Electoral Commission,
Rockingham, WA, 12 October 1998, p. 1.
- Address to ACOSS National Congress, 'Taxation Reform: More than
just Tax', Adelaide, 16 November 1998, p. 3.
- The Great Debate: A Mandate Works in Both Houses', Media
Release 98/674, 14 September 1998.
- Strong Senate the best guarantee of better, accountable
Government', Media Release 98/767, 30 September 1998.
- Record representation for Democrats', Media Release
98/793, 4 October 1998.
- No rise needed in GST rate, say Democrats', Media
Release 98/796, 6 October 1998.
- Paul Kelly, 'Promises the PM is entitled to honour', The
Australian, 7 October 1998, p. 15.
- 'A mandate is a mandate', Australian Financial Review,
7 October 1998, p. 18.
- Peter Cole-Adams, 'Mandates? It's time to get real',
Canberra Times, 9 October 1998, p. 11.
- Tim Colebatch, 'Howard's choice: seek consensus or try to crash
through', The Age, 6 October 1998, p. A15.
- Peter O'Connor, 'Constitution puts tax in Senate's lap',
Australian Financial Review, 16 December 1998, p. 17.
- David Robertson, A Dictionary of Modern Politics, 2nd
ed., Europa Publications Limited, 1993, p. 296.
- Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought,
Macmillan, 1982, p. 282.
- Vernon Bogdanor (ed), The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of
Political Institutions, Blackwell Reference, 1987, p. 352.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, Heinemann,
1963.
- William Safire, Safire's New Political Dictionary,
Random House, 1993, p. 433.
- ibid.
- Jack C. Plano and Milton Greenberg, The American Political
Dictionary, Tenth edition, Harcourt Brace College Publishers,
1997, p. 87.
- Andrew Heywood, Political Ideas and Concepts-an
Introduction, 1994, p. 181.
- Patricia Kelvin, The development and use of the concept of
the electoral mandate in British politics, 1867 to
1911, PhD thesis, University of London, 1977.
- R. G. Mulgan, The Concept of Mandate in New Zealand
Politics, Political Science, vol. 30(2), December 1978, p. 94.
- ibid., p. 91.
- ibid., pp. 91-2.
- ibid., p. 94.
- Emy, op. cit., p. 66.
- ibid., p. 66.
- ibid., p. 69.
- ibid., p. 70.
- ibid., p. 73.
- ibid., p. 73.
- ibid., p. 76.
- ibid., p. 76.
- Robert A. Dahl, op. cit., p. 362.
- ibid., p. 361; Dahl quotes from Stanley Kelley,
Interpreting Elections, Princeton University Press, 1983,
p. 99.
- Dahl, op. cit., p. 365.
- Emy, op. cit., p. 74.
- Dahl, op. cit, p. 370.
- ibid., p. 369.
- ibid., pp. 356-7.
- cited ibid., pp. 360-1.
- cited ibid., p. 360.
- ibid., p. 371.
- Campbell Sharman, 'The Senate and Good Government',
Senate Occasional Lecture, 11 December 1998, p. 2.
- ibid., p. 3.
- Murray Goot, 'Whose Mandate? Policy Promises, Strong
Bicameralism and Polled Opinion', paper presented to Department of
Political Science, Research School of Social Sciences, The
Australian National University, 1998, p. 9.
- ibid., p. 21.