Yes, we have been down this path before. I suspect we will see our Parliaments continue to go down this path again and again, until a new view of parliamentary accountability takes hold. But first we will have to elect members who understand why our system of Parliamentary governance creates problems for itself when we adopt this libertarian free-lancing approach to Parliamentary conscience.
Why do I wish to draw attention to it here, right in the middle of Senator Hanson-Young's call for gay-marriage rights? Well, I do so, because politically it is simply appropriate that these observations be made now, particularly with her repeated emphasis upon the need to uphold "rights". At points, all major political parties seem somewhat oblivious of the track on which they are walking, even when the "rights" of electors are subverted when an appeal to "recent poll results" are allowed to trump the political platforms which were endorsed by the electors when the member was elected.
By now, the disastrous consequences of recent political experience should have made us very wary about calls for parliamentary "conscience votes". Such calls may come from within the parliament, or from within the various parties, and sometimes from out in the electorate that often feels very alienated from any parliamentary decision-making.
There are important questions we should be asking at this point. What is going on? What is being played out here? What has happened to our system of parliamentary representation that a "conscience vote" can apparently provide a "trigger" by which politicians can dis-connect her/himself from their Parliamentary responsibilities and cancel their accountability to their electors? They are, after all, elected representatives.
Those who have followed Nurturing Justice over the years will recall my repeated attention to a most notorious example by which a decision by the former Prime Minister resorted to a conscience vote to fudge an issue and wilfully walk away from his pre-election commitment. I refer of course to the precipitous double-back flip on embryonic stem-cell research by Mr. Howard back in 2001-2002, after the election.
At this point, you may well be scratching your head and asking what this has to do with the latest call for a " conscience vote". Senator Hanson-Young, of the Greens, has put forward a private member's Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2009, which "seeks to remove all discrimination from the Marriage Act 1961 on the basis of sexuality and gender identity and to permit marriage regardless of sex, sexuality and gender identity". Now she has also tried to decisively intervene in the internal Labor Party debate about the justice of granting marriage rights to same-sex couples. Last week, the Tasmanian Labor Conference passed a motion calling on the Federal Government to amend the Marriage Act to allow for a redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples.
Her attempt to play "wedge" politics is evident in that after reporting on the Tasmanian Labor Conference, she called upon the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, to give Labor members of the Federal Parliament, a "conscience" vote on her proposed amendments to the Marriage Act.
There is a serious political issue here which Senator Hanson-Young is clearly trying to exploit. There are internal policy differences within the Labor Party from which she is wanting to gain leverage for her Bill when it comes to a vote. Her proposed legislation is currently before the Parliament, being considered by the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs (seeking submissions from the public). Her call to the Rudd Government "to allow a conscience vote on this bill, to reflect the true will of those elected members" - despite the apparent piety of her appeal to the "true will of those elected members" - is simply another instance by which an appeal to "personal conscience" sidesteps the accountability of elected parliamentary representatives to electors on the basis of the platform on which his or her own election took place. And so, her call to the Prime Minister is a decisive instance by which the Senator actually endorses the political path pioneered by the former Prime Minister and member for Bennelong, which implicitly cancels accountability of elected parliamentarians to their electors.
This is not the way to promote just parliamentary debate of an issue about which there is significant public unease, if not public confusion. If Senator Hanson-Young's urging of the Prime Minister on this issue would result in a "conscience vote" being allowed on this issue, then we would have to conclude that the Labor Party was not just walking away from a particular pre-election commitment that was explicitly based on the view that a homosexual friendship is not a marriage. It would be more than that. It would represent that the Labor Party was intent upon walking away from a party commitment to stand by its own election platform. This would be a further move down the track (albeit contrary to all the good intentions of all elected representatives from all sides) on which the inherited Westminster standard about a member's accountability to his/her electors is ignored. Our system of political representation still assumes that a member is accountable to the electors who cast their votes on the basis of that member's publicly declared political platform.
How can a legal redefinition of marriage bring justice? Sept 2008 &
Body politics (1) Nov 2007 &
Body politics (2) Nov 2007 &
Conscience
votes and the withering of conscience - Nov 2006
_______________________________________________________________
Nurturing Justice
encourages a sustained
Christian political contribution by seeking justice in the gentle and merciful
rule of Jesus Christ, the ruler over all of the earth's political regimes.
July
2009 © The
contents of this email are copyright. Documents may be photocopied or
retransmitted in their entirety but not otherwise reprinted or transmitted
without permission. "Nurturing Justice" is a project to encourage
Christian political reflection based upon wise and loving civic participation.
Comments are welcome and should be sent to bcwearne@ozemail.com.au