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Why Direct Election (of the President), and Reasons Not to Get Hysterical About It

Why Direct Election?

I was not originally a "direct election or nothing" republican. Among republics with "responsible government" and a non-executive President there are many with a President elected by the members of Parliament (either the central Parliament alone or together with members of the regional Parliaments) that work perfectly well, and also many with a directly elected President that work perfectly well.

Direct election (DE) starts, of course, with one huge positive reason in its favour - it is the most visible way in which we can signal that the people hold the sovereign power in the country. However, either system could work perfectly well here in Australia, and I previously would have been happy with either (though I objected to the Prime Minister's power of instant dismissal of the President in the model offered to us in 1999).

I have however, become a "DE or nothing" advocate for two reasons:

the fact that it is pretty clear that the people of Australia will accept nothing else - see my analysis of the Australian Constitutional Referendum Study. If I thought that the majority wanted something that was dangerous or wrong in principle, I'd argue against it even if nobody else shared my opinion, but if the majority want something that is perfectly workable (as direct election is), then let's go for that.
the absolutely hysterical nature of the arguments put forward by the proponents of the Parliamentary-selection (PS) model. Some of the arguments the other way (for DE, against PS) were a little hysterical too, and I have previously written something attacking both republican camps for their hysterical arguments. However, the arguments against DE were snobbish and inconsistent as well as hysterical. The people would elect a pop star, or a sports champion, who would know nothing about government - or perhaps they would elect a politician who would know altogether too much and would somehow grab power from the members of Parliament! Well, snobs, make up your minds - what is the danger?? All the arguments were based on a priori speculation about what the stupid Australian voters and untrustworthy Presidents might do, dogmatically argued in complete ignorance of the evidence from other countries that a system of direct election can work perfectly well.

And of course, the positive reason remains - it's a symbol of the sovereignty of the people. So sorry, elitists and demophobes*, we've come to the parting of the ways. A republic with a directly elected President is the only one that's seriously on the agenda, and the only one I will consider from now on.
[* a word I have coined - clearly it means those who fear the people]

Assumption - a Non-Executive President

I will not discuss here the possibility that we would copy the American model, with a President who is both Head of State and Head of Government - an "elected King", with the executive power of the country vested in him. It seems clear that most Australians who want direct election want the President to be a non-executive President with more or less the same powers as the Governor-General, like most Presidents in the democratic world. That is, it is assumed that we will continue with the system of "responsible government" or "parliamentary government" where the real executive power is exercised by a group of Ministers ("the Cabinet") who depend on the continuing support of a majority of the members of the House of Representatives. There are good reasons for this, though I won't expand on them here except to say (perhaps rather glibly) that the Watergate scandal under Nixon proved that the opposite of responsible government is irresponsible government.

Use of Other Republics' Experience

I refer frequently below to the experience of other countries as offering proof that direct election can work. [I sometimes summarise all the argumetns below by saying there are four reasons for not being frightened of direct election: 1, it works in Iceland; 2, it works in Ireland; 3, it works in Austria; and 4, it works in Portugal.]

Some people (some who should have known much better) have said to me that the workings of European countries (like Iceland, Ireland, Austria and Portugal, in particular - see Four Precedents) are not relevant because every country has its own political culture and what works there may not work here. But a principal feature of the political culture of those four countries - and of many other democracies - is copied from the same source as ours - from the United Kingdom. When they became independent, or overthrew their dictatorships, these countries quite consciously borrowed the idea of a government responsible to an elected parliament, with a President who had a mere supervisory role, from the UK. But unlike the UK they spelled out the rules about the powers of the Parliament, the Ministers and the President in a Constitution.

If other countries can borrow the architecture of responsible government from the UK but replace the elected monarchy with an elected President, we should be ready to study their system and see what we can learn and borrow from them. And we can certainly use them as proof that such a system can work and should work here - unless we think that Australian voters are more stupid than Icelanders, the Irish, Austrians or Portuguese, or that our politicians are more cunning and unprincipled than theirs. (Anyone who thinks so, leave the country now!)

Of course, we have to develop our own Constitution and of course it won't be identical to that of any other country, but we'd be stupid if we didn't study how other countries have approached the same problems, were not prepared to borrow ideas that seem useful, and to use their experience to show that some things can work. [More on this in the next file, Thinking About the Drafting.]

The Hysterical Fears, and My Answers to Them:

The people will elect a pop star or a footballer Hysterical nonsense! Consider the last Presidential election in Ireland. The candidates included a pop singer (a fairly serious pop singer, running on a conservative Catholic platform), and a law professor. The pop singer got only 9% of the vote. The majority of the people of Ireland elected the law professor as their President. We like to tell jokes about the Irish, featuring their supposed perverse logic (the Irish make most of them up!) - should we expect the people of Australia to be more perverse than them?

Candidates will only be able to campaign if they are supported by a political party. It will therefore be more likely, not less, that we will get a politician as President this way than if we leave it to the politicians. Some truth in this one - though it's completely contrary to the previous fear, and some people seem to believe both at once! Consider Ireland again - the last-but-one President, Mary Robinson, was supported by the Labour Party and had Fianna Fail's preference recommendation, and the current President, Mary McIlhenny, was supported by the Fine Gael Party. But in each case the winner seems to have had support across party lines, and nobody has suggested that either has shown any partisanship in the carrying out of her duties. The same happens in Iceland, Austria and Portugal - people who have been members of parties are elected as President and promptly take on the role of figurehead and neutral arbiter.
Perhaps the real fear here is that candidates will send subtle messages that they will be prepared to show bias towards a certain party in a crisis, and that people will vote for them because of that? I think most Australians will understand that they need to select someone who will be neutral and fair. They'll be electing a referee, not a team captain - they'll be very much aware of that, as the voters in other countries seem to be.

A directly-elected President may feel that s/he has more legitimacy as the Prime Minister, and there will be a contest for power between the two. This fear seems to be based on an assumption that we would make minimal changes to section 61 of the current Constitution, and have a section that says "executive power is vested in the President". I argue in Thinking About the Drafting that this would be a stupid thing to do, and that we should describe executive power as it actually works, but even if we persisted with a Constitution that said stupid things there are very good reasons why a President would not be able to take over the real executive power.
The fact that the Governor-General is not, in the present system, the real head of the executive, is not just a matter of convention. It is reinforced by hard law. To exercise most aspects of executive power you need to be able to raise money and spend it - and paragraph 51(ii) of the Constitution vests the power to impose taxes in the Parliament, and section 83 says that "no money shall be drawn from the Treasury of the Commonwealth except under appropriation made by law" - ie, by Act of Parliament. A study of English history shows that it was the similar provision in the Bill of Rights that transferred real power from the King or Queen to the Prime Minister. On a few occasions in the 18th and 19th centuries a King tried to appoint Ministers who did not have the support of the majority of MPs. Every time, the attempt only lasted a few weeks, and eventually Queen Victoria clearly conceded that the monarch could not do anything contrary to the advice of a Prime Minister supported by his colleagues in Parlaiment. (See my chapter on Cabinet Government.) The same would apply to a President of Australia - even if the Constitution was only minimally amended (which, I say again, would be stupid), the President could only take over the real executive management role if a majority of both Houses of Parliament went along with it, and how likely is that??
The worst thing that does happen in some of the "precedent" republics is that the President sometimes speak out on controversial issues in a way that annoys one party or another (usually the government). President Grimmson of Iceland and former President Robinson of Ireland were criticised for that, but then so was our former Governor-General Deane. In each case, the elected government continued in office and the reputation of the office of President or Governor-General survived undiminished or perhaps, in the minds of some, enhanced.

At least in a crisis like the 1975 one, a directly-elected President may act arbitrarily or hastily Why should a crisis be any worse with a directly-elected President? After all, there is absolutely no guarantee that a President elected by Parliament won't have secret ambitions to be a dictator or at least - as John Kerr clearly did - to do whatever is most calculated to generate publicity and make a mark on history. As long as conflicts over "supply" can arise between the Houses of Parliament, a recipe for crisis is already there under our current Constitution, and the same danger will remain under either model of republic. In fact an elected President is likely to have been "grilled" more thoroughly on his or her attitude to crisis resolution than an appointed Governor-General has ever been. Unlike Gough Whitlam, the voters will know what they are getting when they choose a President.

The election will cost too much. All elections are expensive - but that's a small price for democracy. If we took this argument seriously, we wouldn't have elections - we'd just invite the Chief of General Staff, or the CEO of BHP, to rule by decree! We spend money on elections, and on other things that symbolise our nation or our democracy, or simply on enoying ourselves (how much do New Year's fireworks cost?), so let's spend money on a process that symbolises our democracy and the sovereignty of the people. [And besides, election by Parliament will not be particularly cheap either, if Parliament has to be recalled specially for the "election" of a President.]

If all candidates are promising to be fair and neutral, what's the point of an election? Not such a hysterical fear, this one, though I've heard Barry Jones being quite hysterical about it in his superior way! ["A will say "Elect me, I'll be neutral"; B will say "Elect me, I'll be even more neutral", and C will say "Elect me, I'll be so neutral I'll be damn near invisible!""] But so what? If the people want to choose between several candidates, many of whom have been chosen by a political party as the acceptable face of the party, who is Barry to say they shouldn't have the right to?

Next file: Thinking About the Drafting, or
Back to the Republic Debate index page

Written by John Pyke, with a little help from DiDa!. Last edited 19th December 2003.

The people will elect a pop star or a footballer	Hysterical nonsense! Consider the last Presidential election in Ireland. The candidates included a pop singer (a fairly serious pop singer, running on a conservative Catholic platform), and a law professor. The pop singer got only 9% of the vote. The majority of the people of Ireland elected the law professor as their President. We like to tell jokes about the Irish, featuring their supposed perverse logic (the Irish make most of them up!) - should we expect the people of Australia to be more perverse than them?
Candidates will only be able to campaign if they are supported by a political party. It will therefore be more likely, not less, that we will get a politician as President this way than if we leave it to the politicians.	Some truth in this one - though it's completely contrary to the previous fear, and some people seem to believe both at once! Consider Ireland again - the last-but-one President, Mary Robinson, was supported by the Labour Party and had Fianna Fail's preference recommendation, and the current President, Mary McIlhenny, was supported by the Fine Gael Party. But in each case the winner seems to have had support across party lines, and nobody has suggested that either has shown any partisanship in the carrying out of her duties. The same happens in Iceland, Austria and Portugal - people who have been members of parties are elected as President and promptly take on the role of figurehead and neutral arbiter. Perhaps the real fear here is that candidates will send subtle messages that they will be prepared to show bias towards a certain party in a crisis, and that people will vote for them because of that? I think most Australians will understand that they need to select someone who will be neutral and fair. They'll be electing a referee, not a team captain - they'll be very much aware of that, as the voters in other countries seem to be.
A directly-elected President may feel that s/he has more legitimacy as the Prime Minister, and there will be a contest for power between the two.	This fear seems to be based on an assumption that we would make minimal changes to section 61 of the current Constitution, and have a section that says "executive power is vested in the President". I argue in Thinking About the Drafting that this would be a stupid thing to do, and that we should describe executive power as it actually works, but even if we persisted with a Constitution that said stupid things there are very good reasons why a President would not be able to take over the real executive power. The fact that the Governor-General is not, in the present system, the real head of the executive, is not just a matter of convention. It is reinforced by hard law. To exercise most aspects of executive power you need to be able to raise money and spend it - and paragraph 51(ii) of the Constitution vests the power to impose taxes in the Parliament, and section 83 says that "no money shall be drawn from the Treasury of the Commonwealth except under appropriation made by law" - ie, by Act of Parliament. A study of English history shows that it was the similar provision in the Bill of Rights that transferred real power from the King or Queen to the Prime Minister. On a few occasions in the 18th and 19th centuries a King tried to appoint Ministers who did not have the support of the majority of MPs. Every time, the attempt only lasted a few weeks, and eventually Queen Victoria clearly conceded that the monarch could not do anything contrary to the advice of a Prime Minister supported by his colleagues in Parlaiment. (See my chapter on Cabinet Government.) The same would apply to a President of Australia - even if the Constitution was only minimally amended (which, I say again, would be stupid), the President could only take over the real executive management role if a majority of both Houses of Parliament went along with it, and how likely is that?? The worst thing that does happen in some of the "precedent" republics is that the President sometimes speak out on controversial issues in a way that annoys one party or another (usually the government). President Grimmson of Iceland and former President Robinson of Ireland were criticised for that, but then so was our former Governor-General Deane. In each case, the elected government continued in office and the reputation of the office of President or Governor-General survived undiminished or perhaps, in the minds of some, enhanced.
At least in a crisis like the 1975 one, a directly-elected President may act arbitrarily or hastily	Why should a crisis be any worse with a directly-elected President? After all, there is absolutely no guarantee that a President elected by Parliament won't have secret ambitions to be a dictator or at least - as John Kerr clearly did - to do whatever is most calculated to generate publicity and make a mark on history. As long as conflicts over "supply" can arise between the Houses of Parliament, a recipe for crisis is already there under our current Constitution, and the same danger will remain under either model of republic. In fact an elected President is likely to have been "grilled" more thoroughly on his or her attitude to crisis resolution than an appointed Governor-General has ever been. Unlike Gough Whitlam, the voters will know what they are getting when they choose a President.
The election will cost too much.	All elections are expensive - but that's a small price for democracy. If we took this argument seriously, we wouldn't have elections - we'd just invite the Chief of General Staff, or the CEO of BHP, to rule by decree! We spend money on elections, and on other things that symbolise our nation or our democracy, or simply on enoying ourselves (how much do New Year's fireworks cost?), so let's spend money on a process that symbolises our democracy and the sovereignty of the people. [And besides, election by Parliament will not be particularly cheap either, if Parliament has to be recalled specially for the "election" of a President.]
If all candidates are promising to be fair and neutral, what's the point of an election?	Not such a hysterical fear, this one, though I've heard Barry Jones being quite hysterical about it in his superior way! ["A will say "Elect me, I'll be neutral"; B will say "Elect me, I'll be even more neutral", and C will say "Elect me, I'll be so neutral I'll be damn near invisible!""] But so what? If the people want to choose between several candidates, many of whom have been chosen by a political party as the acceptable face of the party, who is Barry to say they shouldn't have the right to?