politicalowl

Monday, 1st August 2005    - Richard Farmer   With the Senate about to meet for the first time with its new members, a little reminder about the piece we wrote back in December entitled  Blackmailers in the Ranks  where we described blackmailers outside the Coalition being replaced with blackmailers within it. What we will see in the coming years, we argued then, is not a Senate where the executive can ride roughshod over democracy but a Senate where the power has shifted from third forces like the Greens and the Democrats to backbench Government Senators. Prime Minister John Howard clearly understands what the "new" Senate regime will be like because his political memory goes back to those days of his boyhood when Senators Reg Wright and Ian Wood crossed the floor regularly on points of principle. That is why Mr Howard is taking the trouble to be extremely cooperative towards the new representative of the Family First Party even though that newcome...

The conventional wisdom has it that the Howard Government will have an open slather with legislation when the Liberal and National Parties gain control of the Senate on 1 July 2005. In truth the situation will not be so simple. What will happen next year is that blackmailers outside the Coalition will be replaced with blackmailers within it. The power to decide will pass from Democrats, Greens and Independents to any backbench Senator on the Government side disenchanted with the role being a rubber stamp for his or her colleagues fortunate enough to have been tapped on the shoulder by John Howard or John Anderson to become Ministers. The significance of this shift in power form the third forces to backbench Government Senators has been missed by the political commentators because so few of them were around in the days when Reg Wright, the Liberal Senator from Tasmania, was the bete noir of Prime Minister Robert Menzies. Senator Wright, sometimes with his Queensland colleague Senat...