• An executive drawn from the majority in the House of Commons.
• The primacy of the lower house in legislation and supply.
• Disciplined political parties, necessary to secure the lower house for the government.
• The concentration of power in the Prime Minister and Cabinet, who control the executive through their offices and dominate Parliament through their leadership of disciplined political parties.
• A weak head of state who acts on the advice of ministers.

This model exists by convention in Britain, and was never written into its constitutional law. Nor was it written into the constitutional law of Britain’s colonies in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand as they were granted self-government. Each colony received a written constitution modelled on the eighteenth century British constitutional monarchy, not nineteenth century cabinet government. It was not until the Irish Free State Constitution of 1922 that the conventions of cabinet government were first codified in constitutional law in the British Empire, but in the colonial constitutions, executive power was always vested in the Governor, and the offices of Prime Minister and Cabinet went unrecognised, except by allusion. Similarly, when the Australian Commonwealth Constitution was adopted in 1900, it too, repeated the fictions of British constitutional monarchy.

Colonial politicians had no need of Bagehot or Dicey to explain to them what cabinet government was really all about, because they were already demanding its application to themselves at about the time that Lord Melbourne was explaining it principles to a very young Queen Victoria. Within a few years, the British government agreed with the colonists. From the late 1840s in Canada, and the 1850s in Australia and New Zealand, colonial governors were instructed to appoint ministers who had the support of a majority in the colonial lower house, and to accept their advice on all ordinary domestic matters. The path to full cabinet government was not always smooth because some governors were obtuse, and some colonial upper houses made life very unpleasant for the government of the day. Furthermore, the disciplined political parties which are necessary for stable parliamentary majorities were sometimes slow to emerge. Nonetheless, well before the turn of the century cabinet government was being practised, by constitutional convention, as assiduously in the colonies as in Britain (Ward, 1987, 3-11).

From about that time, however, Australia, my subject in this paper, began to diverge from the British model with respect to parliament and the government, though not with respect to the head of state. More specifically, as Britain reined in the House of Lords, Australia developed a tolerance for a much more activist upper house, as well as a more circumscribed role for the government than we find in Britain. In this paper I will discuss why this divergence occurred, and we can begin by looking at the upper house in Australia.

The Upper House:
The bedrock constitutional rule in a bi-cameral, parliamentary system is that the government must have the support, or at least the acquiescence, of the majority in the lower house of Parliament. Implicit in this rule is another, that the lower house must have primacy in government formation, because a government cannot be responsible to different majorities in two houses, if this were to occur. The rule of lower house primacy raises two dilemmas for constitution-makers or reformers considering an upper house in a bi-cameral parliamentary system.

The first dilemma can be stated as follows: What authority can be assigned to the upper house which will not empower it to destroy or disable a government which has the confidence of the majority in the lower house? With the sole exception of Italy, so far as I am aware, every parliamentary country with a modern constitution, a constitution that codifies the British conventions of cabinet government, answers this question clearly by stating that the government is responsible only to the lower house, and that this chamber has primacy in financial and other matters. Money bills are introduced in the lower house and may not be rejected or amended in the upper house. Furthermore, votes of the upper house on other legislation may be overridden by the lower house after some interval. Even British constitutional law, though hardly modern, trimmed the powers of the House of Lords in precisely this way in the Parliament Act of 1911. As a result, the upper house in the parliamentary model almost always has very limited powers of initiative, review, and delay, and it is not surprising that many countries have decided to forgo it entirely. As of 1993, only 15 Commonwealth countries had an upper house (Dale, 1993, 76-77).

The second dilemma raised by lower house primacy can also be stated as a question: What system of representation can be devised that will give the upper house a degree of legitimacy without replicating the lower house and opening up the possibility of redundancy? There are many answers to this question in parliamentary systems, none of them very satisfactory.

Australia answers these questions rather differently from others, although there are different reasons for this to be the case at the state and Commonwealth levels. Each of the Australian states entered the Commonwealth with its colonial constitution, and its bicameral parliament, intact. The task of the upper house, or Legislative Council in the colonial period was to check the anticipated excesses of popular democracy, represented in the lower house, the Legislative Assembly. To this end, the council was given coequal power with the assembly, save only that it may not initiate a money bill.

This is how matters were handled as the six Australian colonies became states, but two of them, Queensland and New South Wales, had nominated Councils, and in time state governments were able to flood them with members who would support reform. By this means, the Queensland Legislative Council voted for its own abolition, in 1922, and the New South Wales Legislative Council voted to remove its power to veto money bills in 1933, although it retained the power to amend or reject non-money bills. And from 1934 it was indirectly elected by members of both houses of Parliament acting as an electoral college.

The remaining four Legislative Councils, in South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia, were all elected, and whilst the franchise was very restricted in each case, and remained so well into this century, the houses had sufficient legitimacy to resist all attempts to restrict their powers. In time, however, they yielded to demands that they democratise their composition, and between 1950 and 1978 all of them, and New South Wales too, accepted the full adult franchise. Furthermore, the New South Wales, South Australian, and Western Australian Legislative Councils agreed to elections by proportional representation, so that one can credibly argue that these three upper houses are now more democratic than their Assemblies, which are elected by the alternative vote system in single-member seats. In an odd reversal of this pattern, the Tasmanian Legislative Council is elected by the alternative vote in single-member seats and the Legislative Assembly is elected by proportional representation.

Democratisation of the five upper house has had two consequences. First, their substantial constitutional powers, which were designed for the benefit of colonial elites, are now being exercised democratically and legitimately. Second, the fact that in each case, the two houses are elected in different ways for different terms has led to different majorities being formed in the two chambers so that state upper houses are rarely controlled by governments. There is a strong presumption that a government should not be forced out of office by being denied a supply of money by the upper house, and this is regarded as a binding convention in South Australia, but budgets have been rejected in other states, most recently in Victoria in 1947 and 1952, and the threat of a budget veto is still used for political leverage. In 1989, for example, the Labor government of Victoria was forced to withdraw three money bills (Bennett, 100) and in Tasmania the Cabinet was forced to amend its budget ("Political Chronicle," 1990, 353). There is, however, an inhibition about rejecting a budget, but not so about ordinary legislation. All five state Legislative Councils regularly reject or amend non-money bills.

Three states, New South Wales, South Australia, and Victoria, together with the Commonwealth, have constitutional mechanisms to try to resolve conflicts between the two houses of Parliament but they are so cumbersome and time consuming as to be almost useless. They take many months to work through and are inappropriate for money bills, where time is very important. Tasmania has a very weak resolution procedure in its parliamentary Standing Orders, and Western Australia has no resolution procedure at all. 1 Therefore, when a government finds itself checked in the upper house, there is no easy way for it to prevail.

Historically, Labour has suffered most from obstruction in the Legislative Councils but the introduction of proportional representation in three states has enhanced the possibility of non-Labour governments facing hostile Councils, too, with the balance of power being held my minor parties.

The fact that the government does not control the upper house can have a significant impact on the house’s behaviour. Barbara Page examined the periods between 1976 and 1989 when governments did not control the New South Wales upper house and concluded that ministers had to work harder at briefing, consulting, and negotiating with its members than before. Members of the Council came to see themselves as full-time legislators so that there was a doubling of sitting hours, a rise in average attendance, and an interest in a broader range of activities. Two standing committees were created in 1988, on Social Issues and State Development, and the resources available to the Legislative Council markedly improved (Page, 24-27). The New South Wales experience is being duplicated, to varying degrees, in other Legislative Councils, and Scott Bennett describes a new "upper house ethos" in which Councils are "no longer ridiculed as retirement homes for geriatrics or attacked as the haven of ultra-conservative politicians...." (Bennett, 71) Clearly, the bar has been raised for the government in state upper houses.

We find a similar pattern of upper house assertiveness in the Australian Commonwealth Parliament. When the Commonwealth Constitution was adopted in 1900 the Senate was endowed with substantial powers to protect state rights. It was the price that the populous states, New South Wales and Victoria, had to pay to the four less populous colonies to secure federation. Each state was given equal representation in the Senate, regardless of population, and the house was given extensive powers. It may not initiate or amend money bills but it may reject money bills in whole, and initiate, amend, or reject all other bills (Warden, 20).

The founders knew that a Senate with the power to block supply might clash with a Cabinet drawn from the other house, and in the very first session of the Commonwealth Parliament, the Senate twice rejected supply (Chaney, 168). In 1975 it forced a government out of office by refusing to vote on supply. But the government and the Senate have clashed much more frequently on non-supply issues, particularly since 1949, when the electoral system for Senators was changed to proportional representation. Whereas Representatives are elected by the alternative vote in single seat constituencies for maximum three years terms, Senators are elected by the single transferable vote in state-wide constituencies, with half the chamber, or six members per state, being elected every three years. Since 1949, governments have only controlled both houses in two periods, from November 1958 to July 1962, and from December 1976 to June 1981. This contrasts with the period 1910, when the Commonwealth government stabilised after a rocky beginning, to 1949 the government only lost its majority in the Senate in the years 1913-14, 1929-32, and 1941-44 (Warden, 1-2).

In exercising its powers, the Senate has not been behaved because the great majority of Senators vote as members of disciplined, national parties, not state delegates (McIntosh, 27), but sophisticated supporters of the Senate no longer make the case for a powerful Senate with state rights arguments. Rather, Galligan and Walsh, for example, argue a pluralist case; that the Senate is an essential part of a political system that benefits by fragmenting power, within the Commonwealth and between the Commonwealth and the states. Federalism, they believe, enhances democracy by providing several levels of participation. By this standard, what the Labour party, pining perhaps, for the powers of a British or Irish government, interprets as a flawed parliamentary system is not flawed at all because the dictatorial tendencies of the government are constrained (Galligan and Walsh, 6-8).

The Senate has used its independence from government to assert itself in structural ways. It organised itself in 1970 as an independent chamber, with a comprehensive committee system (Australia, 1992, passim). The most recent reorganisation, in 1994, saw eight pairs of new committees, each tasked with reviewing a cluster of subject areas. In each area a reference committee conducts special inquiries and a legislation committee considers bills, estimates, annual reports, and the performance of the executive (Evans, 25-6). House of Representatives committees, by contrast, have neither legislative nor estimates functions, and the Senate has a capacity to legislate and monitor the government which is unmatched by the lower house.

The Senate is also an intensely party-political body and governments find themselves having to negotiate with opposition parties in order to win Senate support for their bills. In 1992, for example, 15% of the Labour government's 270 bills hinged on the support of the Australian Democrats. After the 1993 general election the balance in the Senate lay with seven Australian Democrats, two West Australia Greens, and one conservative Tasmanian Independent, and the Cabinet's budget was thrown into disarray by Senate opposition (Murphy, 29). The Treasurer, Mr. Dawkins, was forced to accept substantial tax cuts, and in 1994 had to agree to a mechanism of formal consultations with the Democrats and Greens in preparing his budget (Australian Financial Review, 1993). The Liberal/National party coalition elected in March 1996 has been suffering, too, in the Senate, despite its overall majority of forty seats in the House of Representatives (Sydney Morning Herald, 1996a). Short by two votes of an absolute majority, it needs the support of independents or small parties to secure its legislation. Sounding rather like a Labour Prime Minister, the Coalition Prime Minister, John Howard, accused the Australian Democrats of "partisan obstruction for its own sake in 1996 (Sydney Morning Herald, 1996b), but the then Democrat leader, Cheryl Kernot, insisted that voters in the 1996 election "deliberately provided two competing mandates: one for the government to be changed and one for a balance-of-power check on that new government in the Senate." (Kernot, 1996, 11)

As in several states, there is a dispute resolution procedure in the Commonwealth Constitution that can be triggered when the Senate rejects one or more measures approved by the House. It calls for a double dissolution of the House and Senate, and a joint sitting of both houses if the election does not lead to a resolution of the deadlock. But there have been only six simultaneous dissolutions of the House and Senate caused by disputes over legislation, and only one of these, in 1975, led to a joint sitting, at which the Cabinet got its way. A double dissolution is not an attractive option to a government because it puts its own majority at risk, and as in the states, the resolution procedure is much too cumbersome to be of use in a supply crisis.

No other bicameral parliamentary system enables so much power to the upper house as we find in the Commonwealth of Australia and the states, and as we have seen, they have been energised in the past 25 years, using two elements of constitutional law. The first is clear constitutional authority, which is huge, even in New South Wales, where the Legislative Council may not reject supply. What began as a bulwark against democracy in the states and a defence of small states in the federation have become tools to constrain the power of the government. Second, all of Australia’s upper houses draw strength from representational legitimacy. They are all democratically elected and can claim mandates as authentically as government and the lower house.

There are no reforms of the upper house on the immediate horizon in Australia. There is considerable support in Australia for the proposition that an upper house should not be able to destroy a Cabinet which retains the support of the lower house, but the Australian Constitutional Convention which met from 1973 to 1985 could not resolve the issue for the Commonwealth (Australia, 1977, 56-8, 67-70), nor could the Commonwealth Constitutional Commission, which reported in 1988, although it made an interesting recommendation. It proposed that the House of Representatives should serve a maximum term of four years and a minimum of three, and that during the minimum term, the Senate would not be able to reject money bills. The double dissolution would be restricted to the fourth year of a Parliament and only a vote of no-confidence by the lower house could trigger an early dissolution (Australia, 1988, 12-16). This would have ensured that a government that retained the confidence of the House of Representatives could not be forced out of office by the Senate's rejection of supply in the first three years of a Parliament, but it would have to accept defeats on non-money bills during those years and the power to dissolve Parliament. The Labour government chose not to put the issue to a referendum in this form in 1988, however, and a much watered down proposal was rejected by voters (Ward, 170-71).

Labour continues to agitate for the elimination of the Senate's right to block supply, and given that the Coalition is now under great pressure in the Senate, it might be thought time for reform, but the Coalition remains committed to the position articulated by Senator Guilfoyle for the Shadow Cabinet in 1983:

In general terms, I believe that it is accepted that a government is entitled to expect the passage of normal budget and budget-type legislation and other legislation that is an essential part of its financial programme. However, there will be rare occasions when an opposition will feel compelled to reject or substantially amend such legislation, within the constitutional limitations of the Senate, where it is demonstrated to be capricious and arbitrary or vindictive legislation or where it creates new tax burdens of a retrospective kind (Chaney, 171).

What the Coalition fears is a reform of the Senate which would allow a Labour government to force a radical budget through Parliament with the support of the lower house alone.

The Government and the State Lower House:
Next I want to talk about changes in the lower house in Australia, and their effects on governments. Three conditions have led to restrictions being placed on the government’s power in the lower house in recent years: (i) bipartisan agreement that certain parliamentary reforms are in the public interest; (ii) the powerful influence of Independents in lower houses; and (iii) corruption and maladministration in state governments.

Bipartisan agreement has changed the relationship of the government to the legislature in two states, South Australia and Victoria. When they, like Western Australia and New South Wales, changed from three-year to four-year maximum parliaments to promote more effective efficient government, they took the view that it would make little sense to extend a parliament to four years for the sake of efficiency if a Premier were to remain free to call a general election at any time. In South Australia and Victoria, therefore, the four-year maximum term was accompanied by a three-year minimum. The Governor can now only dissolve the Assembly in less than three years if the Cabinet loses a vote of confidence or a vote on the supply of money (Ward, 1993, 177-181). The effect of this change is that Cabinets are expected to serve full terms if they can secure supply, but they may not resign, even if they experience major difficulties in passing legislation. They cannot dissolve Parliament to resolve their troubles, nor can they use the dissolution to take advantage of a favourable public mood, but Parliament remains free to dismiss them at any time by a vote of no confidence in the lower house, or a vote against supply in either house. This considerable limitation on the government’s freedom of action is why a Queensland’s Labour Premier, Mr. Goss, refused to accept a three year minimum when he sought a four year maximum term in 1991. The South Australian and Victorian model was, he insisted, an unworkable "cocktail of the Westminster system and the United States Presidential system." (Courier-Mail) But his narrower proposal was narrowly defeated in a referendum.

The second reason for parliamentary reform at the state level has been the appearance of a number of minority governments dependent for their majorities on the support of powerful Independent members of the lower house. For a while, in 1991 and 1992, four Australian states were in this position. In Tasmania, minority government was the result of elections to the Legislative Assembly by proportional representation, but elsewhere Independents were former party members who had resigned a party whip, generally after failing to secure re-selection.

Two state governments, in New South Wales and Tasmania, had to enter formal agreements with Independents and accept substantial changes in the way Parliament operates in order to secure the support of Independents. In New South Wales, three Independents forced a "Reform Charter" on the Liberal/National Coalition Cabinet of Nick Greiner in October 1991 (Maddox, 22-24). From that agreement emerged a constitutional amendment to require "independent and impartial" presiding officers in Parliament, 2 which is not the custom in Australia. The charter also led to changes in Assembly Standing Orders to provide time for Private Members' Bills, to require ministers to answer a minimum number of questions at Question Time, and to create estimates and legislation committees (Kerr, 20-23).

The most controversial reform in New South Wales was a constitutional amendment to entrench fixed, four-year parliaments in the constitution, with no minimum term. The amendment (Section 24) was approved by referendum in 1995. Only a vote of no confidence in the executive or the rejection of supply by the lower house can now trigger an election in less than four years. Both Labour and Coalition members in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly had serious qualms about this reform, fearing that a political crisis will occur if a Cabinet can neither work its programs through the legislature nor call for a dissolution and general election (New South Wales, passim). But Coalition and Labour leaders had both agreed to put the matter to a referendum when negotiating with the Independents to form a government in 1991, and they kept their word. The fixed term Parliament was subsequently approved in a referendum.

One immediate effect of the fixed term was that the New South Wales Liberal Premier, Mr. Greiner, was precluded from calling an election on the issue of his own leadership in 1995 when three Independents and the Labour party formed a majority to force his resignation because of allegations of corruption against him. He retired from Parliament and was subsequently absolved of criminal wrong-doing. 3

One reform which was sprung upon the Cabinet by the Independents during the committee stage of the constitutional reform bill has the unusual effect of allowing the Assembly to determine its own budget. The government had agreed that there would be a separate appropriations bill each year for the legislature, and the amendment provided that the Assembly may not be dissolved if it rejects this particular supply bill. It has the power, therefore, to bring government to a halt if it finds its own funding unacceptable. The Liberal Premier who succeeded Mr. Greiner, Mr. Fahey, insisted that this "amendment would destroy the Westminster system, a system that has always allowed Executive Government to determine the budgetary process," 4 but the Independents saw the proposal as necessary to Parliament's independence from government, and it was passed with Labor support. It joined the other measures I have described, all of which were designed to empower the New South Wales Parliament at the expense of the government.

In Tasmania, proportional representation provided an opening for the Independent Greens to enter the House of Assembly in the 1980s, and their five seats in 1989 forced the Labor party to negotiate a formal "Accord" with them in order to take office. The accord called for new parliamentary committees, reform of the legislative reference service, a register of pecuniary interests of members, public disclosure of election donations, and the "abolition of subsidised liquor to members!" (Howes, passim; Howard and Larmour, 1-12)

Labour’s relations with the Greens proved to very stormy, however, and a period of instability ended temporarily in 1992 when the Liberals won a clear victory in a general election, but after the 1996 elections, the government was once more at the mercy of four Greens and one Independent.

In Western Australia and South Australia, the other states with minority governments in the early 1990s, there were no "Reform Charters" or "Accords", but Independents had a great impact on parliamentary behaviour. In Western Australia, for example, where four Independents held the balance in 1991, the Assembly spent less time debating bills in the whole house and used committees more. The government, which controlled neither house, found only about 50% of its bills being passed in 1991 and 1992 ("Political Chronicle," 1992a, 244-9, and 1993, 260). In South Australia, John Bannon's Labour party, which was tied with the Liberals in the Assembly with twenty-two seats, retained power in 1990 by placing one Independent Labour member in the Speaker’s chair, and supporting another for the position of Chairman of Committees ("Political Chronicle," 1991, 321-2). Reduced to twenty-one seats in 1992, Bannon retained office by offering Terry Groom, who had just resigned the Labour whip, the Chairmanship of the Parliamentary Economic and Finance Committee. Three of the most powerful positions in the lower house were by then occupied by Independent Labour members not formally tied to the Labour party, though pledged to support the government on confidence motions and supply (Levy, 57-61). When Bannon resigned, later in 1992, his Liberal successor, Lynn Arnold, took office without an election by moving two Independent Labour members into his government and leaving the third, Norm Peterson, in the Speaker's chair ("Political Chronicle," 1993b, 407-8).

The third reason for parliamentary reform in the states has been serious cases of corruption, impropriety, or maladministration in Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia. Paul Finn writes that these "have provided us with a pathology of public governance in this country." (Finn, 51) Public outrage, fanned by the Opposition in Parliament, led in each case to a Royal Commission which found that parliamentary government was a major cause of government failure. The Commissions found that Cabinets do not adequately monitor the executive, that Parliament, whose procedures, agendas, finances and resources are dominated by the Cabinet, cannot adequately monitor the executive either, and that systems of public service accountability, in which officials are responsible to ministers who are ostensibly responsible to Parliament, are flawed.

In South Australia and Victoria, where the subject of investigation was the financial collapse of a State Bank as a result of reckless lending policies, the immediate problem was handled by selling the bank and reforming state auditing procedures, but the Queensland and Western Australian Royal Commission reports went much further to address system failure..

The Royal Commission in Queensland documented a major corruption scandal involving the National party government of Sir John Bjelke-Petersen, which led to a number of criminal convictions. It recommended an impartial Speaker, a comprehensive system of legislative committees, a Freedom of Information Act, legal protection for "whistle blowers", codes of conduct for ministers, a truly independent public service, and registers of political donations and business interests of ministers and senior public officials. It also recommended two new reform commissions, an Electoral and Administrative Review Commission (EARC) charged with overseeing reforms of Parliament and the executive, and a Criminal Justice Commission, to deal with criminal justice issues raised by the Commission (Queensland, 121-45, 370-72; "Political Chronicle," 1992b, 433).

In Western Australia, the name WA Inc. was attached to the state's involvement in a series of bad business ventures contracted by Labour governments after 1983 (O’Brien and Webb, 387-9). The Commission also found, as the Royal Commission had found in Queensland, "fundamental weaknesses in the present capacity of our institutions of government, including the Parliament, to exact that degree of openness, accountability and integrity necessary to ensure that the executive fulfil its basic responsibility to serve the public interest." ("Political Chronicle," 1993a, 256)

The Western Australian report presented a powerful critique of parliamentary government but its recommendations for reform amounted to a scattered series of suggestions, such as strengthening committees and the upper house. Bruce Stone concludes that the most important reforms exhibited, as in Queensland, a bias towards extra-parliamentary accountability mechanisms; a Commissioner for Public Sector Standards, a Commission for the Investigation of Corrupt and Improper Standards, an umbrella Commission on Government, modelled on Queensland's Electoral and Administrative Review Commission, and codes of conduct for ministers and public officials backed by an Ethics Commission (Stone, 25-7).

It is not yet clear what lasting effect these Royal Commissions might have, but the short term effect has been to open the executive to a degree of parliamentary and external scrutiny rarely experienced in a parliamentary system.

None of the three conditions which have caused state governments such great problems in the past ten years existed to force reforms in the Commonwealth House of Representatives. Indeed, the Commonwealth government significantly strengthened its domination of the lower house, the House of Representatives, under Labour in the 1980s and 1990s. Two examples from the House of Representatives Standing Committee which reported on the reform of house procedures in 1993 illustrate this conclusion (Blewett, 1-14; Smith, 12-13). Both Ministers' Question Time and parliamentary debates were mauled by Labour governments between 1983 and 1996. The average number of questions asked per day dropped from sixteen during Malcolm Fraser's Liberal/Country party coalition (1975-83) to about 10.5 per day in 1993, during Paul Keating's term as Labour Prime Minister, and the length of answers more than doubled, from 2.4 minutes in 1976 to 5.8 minutes in 1992. Speakers of the House exercised almost no discipline on ministers, who ordinarily answered questions with, as one commentator notes, "long monologues from prepared scripts, coloured with abuse, digressions and political point scoring."(Smith, 13) As Question Time was being eviscerated, the use of the guillotine to muzzle debate was expanding. The House of Representatives has no legislation or estimates committees so all bills are considered in committees of the whole house, 5 and during the Labour years, from 1983 to 1996, the use of the guillotine grew dramatically. Fraser's government guillotined 1.2% of its legislation, the Labour government of Robert Hawke (1983-91) guillotined 25%, and in one year, 1993, Paul Keating's government guillotined 80%.

The major reforms to emerge from the House of Representatives committee, after being watered down by the Cabinet, were designed to improve question time, with no significant effect that I can detect, and to change the committee stage of legislation. It was decided that the committee stage of non-controversial legislation should be considered in a second committee of the whole house, a "main committee", which may sit when the House itself is in session (Smith, 12). But no system of legislation or estimates committees was introduced, and no extension of parliamentary sittings beyond the present sixty days or so a year, fewer than any other major full-time democratic legislature in the world.

The government was clearly under no pressure to empower the House of Representatives. Indeed, as Neal Blewett, the chairman of the House reform committee explained,

Executive reluctance in Australia to countenance reform of the House of Representatives is conditioned by its experiences with the post 1970s Senate. It is little exaggeration to say that the House of Representatives is the victim of the very success of the Senate (Blewett, 11).

He was referring to the fact that since 1970, when the Senate reorganised itself into committees, ministers have found themselves facing formidable hurdles in that place. They now find themselves engaged in continuous diplomacy - or warfare - with an assortment of parties and committees in a Senate they do not control and they are not inclined to add to their problems by augmenting the powers of the House of Representatives in ways that are becoming routine in other countries, committee systems, for example.

Conclusion:
In my paper, "Trapped in a Dominion," I discuss the very conservative approach Australians have taken to the reform of the head of state, and my comments on the Commonwealth House of Representatives above suggest a very conservative approach to the reform of that house too. But in other ways, this paper describes Australians pushing the parliamentary model to its limits.

In most parliamentary states, a government in firm control of the lower house can prevail in the upper house too, albeit after a period of delay, but in Australia we see that an upper house with constitutional authority and democratic legitimacy can b every powerful too, and in the states, governments have been forced to make accommodations which limit their independence. No other parliamentary state has gone as far either in law or in practice, to make life difficult for the executive. But notwithstanding assorted difficulties, the Commonwealth and state governments in Australia almost invariably manage to govern effectively and legislative houses have learned how far to push their luck. No upper house has challenged the convention that the government is responsible only to the lower house, and in general they accept that the government is entitled to a supply of money and passage of most of its bills, understandings that fall short of being constitutional conventions. G.D. Short's study of the Commonwealth Senate in 1985 points out that the Senate passed 203 of the government's 226 bills that year. The government suffered some "significant defeats" but it also "had some spectacular successes as a result of its willingness to negotiate and compromise." (Short, 73-83)

What we see at work in the Senate is behaviour that Senator F.M. Chaney calls "a degree of enforced reasonableness," (Chaney, 170) enforced in the sense that unless the Senate restrains itself, governing is impossible. But reasonableness breaks down on controversial bills, and the debate over the respective rights of the two houses is energised every time the Senate and the government clash over a matter which one of them deems particularly important, as they did, famously, in 1975, when the Senate blocked supply and forced the Labour government of Gough Whitlam out of office.

Changes in Australian upper houses rest on firm constitutional foundations but this is not the case in the states. There the forces that have brought about reform in recent years have been largely fortuitous - corruption and maladministration, for example, and the vagaries of political life that let independents win a few elections. Whether these reforms can survive a return to "normalcy" is unclear. But Australia has shown that politicians can take the Westminster model quite a long way out of the mainstream and still make it work very well.

Footnotes:
1 Three constitutional procedures are used: the double dissolution, whereby both houses are dissolved simultaneously in hopes that a simultaneous election might reconcile the two, followed by a vote of both houses in a joint sitting or a referendum on disputed legislation. Tasmania's parliamentary Standing Orders call for each house to appoint four members to attend a conference to attempt to reconcile differences. *
2 New South Wales, Constitution (Amendment) Act, 1992, (No. 106 of 1992), and Sydney Morning Herald, 29 March 1995. *
3 Sydney Morning Herald, 21 March 1995. Greiner actually fell foul of the interim Constitution (Fixed Term Parliaments) Special Provisions Act, 1991, which set a fixed date for the subsequent general election only, but during that Parliament, in 1995, a constitutional amendment was approved to entrench the fixed term Parliament in the Constitution. *
4 New South Wales, Parliamentary Debates, 17 November 1992, col. 9044 and 18 November 1992, cols. 9246-47. *
5 Eight general purposes standing committees created in 1987 have no roles in legislation. *

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