politicalowl

Once upon a time, many, many years ago, MPs used to stand up and ask a question about something that interested or concerned them. Sometimes ministers did not even know what was coming, even if the questioner was from their own political side. Alas, that kind of real interrogation has vanished from Canberra life. These days government backbenchers are told what to ask so a minister can carefully give the prepared answer. On the other side of the house a few frontbenchers monopolise the questioning aiming to get a short grab of their words on television rather than provoking a meaningful response. This silly game of charades has developed further to the point where the party apparatchiks send out each morning’s catch phrases to be emailed, tweeted and uttered by all and sundry. Members of Parliament are now little more than robot drones to be manipulated by their spinners. It is the need to be seen playing the game in order to get political promotion that prompts these otherwise in...

Most members of Parliament – certainly those not in the Ministry or the Shadow Ministry – have little say in how the country is run. They turn up in Canberra but their opinions are rarely sought and even more rarely listened to. Which is why the selection of a new leader was such an excitement for so many of the Labor lot over the last few weeks: for once they had a role that might even get them interviewed on the radio and their name put in the newspaper. Now that the choice has been made it will be back to anonymity and the discipline of the factions until the next ballot for positions. For those in the Liberal Party things are probably worse. The only election they get involved in is for the Leader and with John Howard firmly in control there have not been many of them in recent years. Liberal backbench boredom is behind the talk of reforms to the taxation system which is getting a bit of an airing in the Murdoch press but that issue is unlikely to amount to much. Neither PM ...

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...