Ken Parish has a couple of interesting posts on First steps to constitutional reform. In his latest he revives the proposal of David Solomon to Elect the Governor-General!.

A lot of Ken’s discussion has to do with the relationship between the President and the Prime Minister and the ‘elephant in the corner’ everyone is ignoring, the possibility of another crisis caused by a Senate refusal of supply. I have a different perspective, perhaps a surprising one for a Whitlam fan.

A lot of concern about direct election has been the prospect that Presidential power will weaken the democratically elected government and particularly the Prime Minister. As a born-again conservative believer in checks and balances, I welcome this. The idea that the possession of a majority in the House of Representatives, typically based on 40 per cent of the vote or so, entitles the PM to act as an elective dictator is not one that appeals to me. And looking at the support for minor parties in the Senate and the increasing numbers of independents and hung parliaments it seems that the same is true of the Australian electorate as a whole.

Our democratic system is strengthened by the fact that we have a democratically elected Senate as well as a democratically elected House of Reps. Neither is perfect – the Senate because each state has equal representation and the House because a constituency system overweights big parties. On the whole the Senate is better, but the House typically provides a majority that can sustain an executive government.

There’s an obvious problem if these two disagree bitterly, and at present such problems must be resolved by an unelected Governor-General, subject to near-instant dismissal by the PM. An elected President would have the legitimacy in resolving such a problem that John Kerr so conspicuously lacked.

More generally, if the elected President used his or her mandate to cause trouble for the PM of the day, for example by critical comment in the manner of Sir William Deane, or by exercising discretion with regard to the calling of elections, so much the better as far as I am concerned.

Update As usual, there’s lots of excellent stuff in the comments thread. A question of particular interest to me is whether it is worth trying to codify the powers of the Head of State before, or as part of, a shift to an elected presidency. Another question that interests me is whether there really are a lot of ‘conservative republicans’ out there. The ARM approach was based on the premise that there were, and that they represented the crucial swinging constituency. It seems to me however, that a model with a reasonably strong elected president would attract more in monarchist support than it would lose among conservative republicans.
PS Be sure to check the comments thread over in Ken’s blog, which also has lots of good stuff