The most plausible argument against a directly elected president is that a nominee of one of the major parties would almost certainly get up. If the President and Prime Minister were of the same party, the President would be even more a rubber stamp than the GG. If they were of opposite parties, there would be an increased risk of partisan deadlock. This is certainly undesirable, but is it a likely outcome?
This argument depends on the assumption that a large majority of Australians would vote for the candidate of their preferred party. How large a majority is needed? The evidence suggests that no more than 30 per cent of voters are ‘rusted-on’ Labor voters who would vote a straight Labor ticket in all elections, and similarly for the Liberals/Nationals[1]. That leaves 40 per cent who can be swayed either way.
This means
* An appealing independent candidate could win in a three-sided contest
* If one party chooses not to run a candidate, the other party’s candidate would almost certainly lose
So, given a widespread belief that the President ought not to be a partisan, I think it is unlikely that the major parties would run candidates and win the first time around. Once the norm of an independent presidency was established, it would be almost impossible for either major party, acting alone, to break it.
Ken Parish has more, repeating the point that we can, if we choose, have direct election without, or prior to, a Republic. He also has some nice points about experimentation in a Federal system. It’s fair to say we’ve been experimenting with different gubernatorial models lately, and not having a very high success rate.
fn1. In the last Senate election Labor got 34 per cent of primary votes, and at least some of these must have been swinging voters. Similarly for the coalition in 1998.
John Quiggin 
I don’t agree JQ,
Following Hollingsworth and Butler there has been a clear sae change in what Australians expect in their G/G and governors.
I am nor convinced that party nominees would get up. An Independent who appeard to have the integrity etc would romp home.
This may mean that either party would wait until final nominees were in and then ‘favour’ one of the said nominees.
This is far from the parties determining the candidate however. Even in this however the ‘preferred’ candidate may well get overlooked by the electorate because of the endorsement.
The flaw with this logic is that any independent nominee may be more likely to be favoured by one party over the other. Even in an election where no party-supported candidates contested the race, one would expect the coalition and labor to throw their support behind one or other of the candidates (as being most similar to that party’s viewpoints or alternatively their view of how the GG should behave).
Theoretically, both parties could speak against one particular independent candidate because he or she is counter to the interests of parliament in general, even if the person is objectively the best person for the job. For example, politicians might disparage a candidate on the basis that he or she would be inclined to be too presidential in office, thereby depriving the incumbent government of a whole bunch of good photo ops.
I imagine it would be difficult to win in a popular vote when parliament speaks against you.
So regardless, it would seem to me that any popularly elected GG would have to be at least somewhat partisan.
It depends on your voting system. Voluntary or compulsory? Preferential, 50% requirements (ie generally two elections) or simply highest-vote-wins?
Another option which might avoid having a politician elected is allow people to buy votes. Then we’re more likely to get some rich guy who is buying the right to live in a big house, have their face on coins and have no power. The proceeds could go to charity.
Pr Q piles supposition on supposition, in a vain attempt to revive the dead Republican dead horse:
Pr Q forgot to append the “and they all lived happily everafter” clause onto this appealing Republican fairy-tale.
I think that the good Professor has got a touch of the vapours after the shock of seeing yet another darling of the Republican movement bite the dust in ignominious fashion.
Does Pr Q have anything as vulgar as a concrete bit of empirical evidence to suppport his abstract logical speculations regarding the equity and efficacy of a direct-elective El Presidente?
All evidence of the behavior of modern elective-Presidential executive systems points to the opposite tendencies, ie the increasing:
partisanship of political spoils distribution
celebritisation of electoral competition
concentration of power in the executive
A bi-partisan constitutional monarchy avoids all this expensive nonsense whilst still keeping the real Head of State (the PM) under the watchful eye of Parliament.
I have a suggestion: make the Queen an (dual) Australian citizen. Then we could have an Australian for Head of State and be spared the expense and bother of creating yet another branch of government for the political class to squabble over.
In fact, the empirical evidence in parliamentary republics is strongly against presidential seizures of power. I know it causes most members of the political elite to leap on the nearest chair and shriek but can they point to a single example of a democratic parliamentary republic where the president has seized power from the prime minister?
Conflating parliamentary republics with presidential republics is not really a good argument.
The non-partisan parliamentary appointment has been tried. The French Third Republic used it. Clémenceau is on record as saying that when it came to electing presidents under that system he always voted for the most stupid.
Oddly, enough Jack, I do have a skerrick of empirical evidence lying about. Ireland (one wellspring of Australian republican sentiment, though not the source of mine) has an elected president and the office is nonpartisan.
While it’s true that the parties have become more ruthless in spoilsharing, the relevant issue here is the attitudes of electors. They’ve been increasingly willing to replace party nominees with Independents, for offices including MPs, Lord Mayors and so on.
What would a GG ‘run’ on? Being a good bloke? The only people I could possibly want as my Head of State would be a person that didn’t want to be elected. Otherwise, I genuinely fear it would be bloody Eddie McGuire!
If the fundamental role of the person is as the last recourse in a constitutional debate, then surely any vaguely partisan person would be inappropriate. And an election contest increases the likelihood of them being partisan. Only the major parties have the werewithal to run election campaigns, for one thing.
I can’t see what is wrong wth a 2/3 majority of both houses of Parliament as the selection tool. Possibly the candidates need to be selected with some public input, but to say that a parliamentary appointment is ‘undemocratic’ is absurd, given the pre-existing entrance qualification to be one of the selectors.
JQ,
I think you are expecting too much sense from voters. The US is a much better model than Ireland for the likely outcome of a directly elected president. In Australia, independents are a rarity. To expect one to win a presidential election is more than I can imagine.
Remember that it will be our current parliament of Labor and Liberal supporters who will create the electoral system – who do you think they will want to benefit from their system?
Your previous item “Republicans behaving badly” raises the question of whether Malcolm Turnbull could ever win a popular vote. We will find out the answer to that within the next couple of months. I expect he will get elected as a Liberal candidate, and that this will effectively be another test of the ability of a political party to get elected whoever they preselect.
Partisan identification may be declining but it is still significant. I suspect that although parties might not officially endorse candidate the major candidates would be loosely aligned with one party, and more generally with the centre-left or centre-right. The alignment between Labor and the ARM in the Constitutional convention is an example. As well the fact that a president has political sympathies will not make him/her a puppet of a PM, any more than Labor PMs follow ALP policies. What hold could a party or a PM have over a directly-elected president? Likely outcome would be the top four polling candidates on the first round being a populist right-winger, a left green, centre-left and centre-right. Bob Hawke to beat Tim Fisher in the run-off.
how about a direct election for the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate.
now that might reform Parliament
Those in favour of an elected president do not like the idea of politicians choosing the president. Those against, are concerned that the election method runs the risk of ending up with partisans in office (notwithstanding JQs explanation, which does not rule out this possibility).
An alternative model, which addresses both sets of concerns, would be to establish a presidential committee which would accept nominations from the general public and from these nominations choose a preferred candidate, based on a 2/3 majority of the committee, for ratification by the parliament. A 2/3 majority of this committee could also sack the president, subject to some restrictions to prevent this being done frivolously.
How would the presidential committee be formed? By randomly selecting, say 100, people, from the electoral roll (note that this would have ruled out Peter Garrett in the past – a decided advantage!). In this way the will of the electorate is represented (at least statistically) and the machinations of the political parties and politicians are effectively bypassed.
This combination of politics with a form of Lotto would be a peculiarly Australian feature, of which we could be proud.
If we are to have an elected President, presumably we’ll have (public) campaigning by the candidates?
What platforms are they likely to have?
How will having a popular mandate change their behaviour from that of a governor?
John
I’ve also blogged on this topic here, although it’s probably too early to christen me as a blog twin (or triplet perhaps). I argued that it isn’t necessarily the case that a direct election model would result in a party political hack being elected, quite apart from the argument you raise (swinging voters). That is, it depends on the method of nomination of candidates, and whether there’s any “preselection” process.
If you had a process of popular nomination folowed by short-listing by a bipartisan parliamentary committee, followed by a direct popular election between the 2 or 3 candidates short-listed by the parliamentary committee, then you would tend always to get non-partisan candidates. Thuswe would fulfil the otherwise apparently incompatible public aspiration to have both direct popular election of the president and a non-politician president.
CharlieB, in Ireland independents are a rarity as well – more so than in Australia. Rather than speculate on what a president might run on, we should look into the Irish example – as the best comparison. If Deane redefined the office as “reflecting the nation to itself”, then surely there ought to be enough stuff for a thoughtful campaigner to talk about in terms of broad national direction etc. I can’t see how you think the US is a better comparison than Ireland – given that they have an executive President and the Irish have a parliamentary system like ours.
why don’t we just go the whole hog and hold a presidential lottery among all the enrolled voters?
Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president but they don’t want them to become politicians in the process.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
I favour a model based on reality TV.
Direct election with a run off between first and second (let’s follow the Indonesian example:) every party can and or would nominate a candidate but it could be a rule that candidates must resign from any political party before hand. Leave it open to a Melbourne Cup field (perhaps set a minimum 10,000 signatures – as is done in some elections in the U.S – to nominate).
Candidates would run on their idependence and their articulation of the Aussie spirit – great occassion for patriotic speeches and singing – etc. etc. – bringing the country together :-!
It’s either that or we make the local matriarch of the Ngunnawal land the governor general when parliament sit’s in Canberra. When there’s something important in Sydney then we make the local elder of the Eora the Governor in residence, and so on round the country. Decentralize ‘im!
Given that we see Australia’s identity and spirit as increasingly intertwined with it’s Indigenous dreamtime we are going to increasingly confront the question of how to reconcile the contradiction between our identity and the respect shown to people on the ground .
Scot, your suggestion of random selection is a variation on a very old theme going back to (amongst other things) the ancient Greek city states, which used sortition or demarchy (random selection of citizens to serve on decision-making bodies) along with other democratic experiments. A good article on this issue is at:
http://www.constitution.org/elec/89demarchy.html
This is all based on the assumption that there are “Liberal” and “Labor” voters anymore.
Can any Republican point to one substantive institutional benefit that an elected President would have over the traditional arrangement of a selected bi-partisan, apolitical Govenor General?
Sure G-Gs have been a bit politicised over the past few years. But this would get worse when the parties get into fielding candidates for Presidential elections.
The idea that a nice independent could acquire the resources to mount a Presidential campaign is a pipe dream.
An elected President entails creating an autonomous third branch of government which would contest with Parliament for the allocation of resources and distribution of power.
This would lead to cop-habitation crises that have beset the US and France in recent years.
And if the President was powerless then what is the point of changing the present system, apart from gratifying the elites insatiable desire for symboplic, over substantive, actions in politics?
I’m with Scot McPhee, though the “reality TV” option is attractive. Anybody know how the reality TV Senate election candidates (sponsored by Channel 7, I think) are doing?
Jack, the traditional arrangement to which you refer does not exist. The appointment of the GG is in the personal gift of the PM
JQ – it is perhaps not quite so cut and dried as you put it. The arrangement is that the PM has informal talks with the Queen prior to his writing a letter recommending someone. This was part of Sir David Smith’s evidence to the Senate Committee on 29 July. http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/commttee/S7860.pdf
Jack – the republic is not a rational matter. It is emotional. Some people – a majority apparently – think the Queen is irrelevant to Australia. It is a question of identity. You may never understand this but intellectual reasoning is not appropriate in the way you want it to be.
The debate is really very confined. It is between two ideas: people elect versus parliament appoints. The latter has been rejected; the former will never happen.
But there are two other perfectly obvious permutations. Why not: people appoint? Why not: parliament elects? Neither has ever been discussed. The latter is (near enough) how Germany and Italy get their presidents and the former is the “Missouri Plan” which is how judges are appointed in Japan and in half the US states.
Willful,
What would a GG ‘run’ on? Being a good bloke?
On defending natural rights and protecting those under the authority of the Australian government from arbitrary government action.
Put a Bill of Rights in the Constitution and make the GG be the peoples representative in government to ensure the Bill of Rights is adhered to. The GG can veto any legislation that contradicts the Bill of Rights, and can initiate (or accept citizen questions/action) judicial oversight into the executives implementing of laws that arent adhering to the Bill of Rights.
The actions in Australia and the US in the last few years suggest that populations need a representative whose sole interest is in ensuring that peoples rights are not compromised by government.
That would also have the effect of those that are running for GG fight over who would ensure Australia is most free and has the maximum liberty.
As to a Bill of Rights, I wouldnt bother writing a new one, the NZ Bill of Rights is extremely modern, explicit and lacks feel-good items (which is a good thing). I would ask our uber-reasonable kiwi neighbours if we could put their Bill of Rights into the Australian constitution and if we could rename it to something more palatable like the “South Pacific Bill of Rights” or “Pacific Bill of Rights”.
Cameron Riley
I was a big fan of the Republican model that was put up in 1999. My objection to direct-election was a little different to most – I could live with political parties nominating candidates, I just couldn’t for the life of me imagine what the substance of the election campaign would be.
Given that the powers would presumably be codified and be the most minimal of tasks, the election campaign would be completely vacuous and meaningless. Debates over which candidate has the better ribbon-cutting technique? Or which one is the better Strayan?
Come on, who would demean themself to participate in that complete and utter non-event??