Dr Scott Brenton
Background
In October 2008, Parliament House hosted a Contemporary Bicameralism Conference, assembling politicians, parliamentary officers and academics around the theme of Australian Bicameralism in Comparative Context. So how did Australia compare? From an international perspective, Australian bicameralism compared favourably, particularly against other Westminster-derived parliaments such as in Britain and Canada. Indeed, Australia’s system of government stands as a stable, working model for future democratic reform of their upper houses. Yet from an inward-looking domestic perspective, there was still a sense of illegitimacy attached to Australia’s upper house, the Senate. What is its proper role? As current and former members of parliament debated this question, it became clear that while the institution of the Senate has attempted to establish an identity in recent decades, the role of senators has not been clarified. The common sentiment was that senators just do committee work and that they do not have constituents. While senators disagreed it became clear that both members of the House of Representatives (hereafter referred to simply as members) and senators have different understandings of the work of their colleagues on the other side of Parliament House.
Yet if parliamentary participants are unsure of their colleagues work patterns, then how can voters know what their representatives, both senators and members, actually do? Only about 16 per cent of Australians report having had some form of contact with a federal member of parliament,[1] with the media providing a skewed focus on the party leaders and frontbenchers, often in the theatre of the House of Representatives during Question Time. With parliament sitting for less than a quarter of the year and questions without notice taking up only about one-and-a-half hours of each sitting day, this is not a particularly useful snapshot. Considerably less media attention is given to the Senate except when there is contentious legislation and crossbench votes are needed by the government, or when a parliamentary committee is probing a scandal or something sensational.
This superficial understanding of the work of politicians comes to the fore during recurring debates on the issue of politicians’ pay. Public perceptions of politicians are universally and overwhelmingly negative.[2] Thus, at a very basic level, this study is attempting to challenge some of those negative perceptions by quantifying the different types of work that senators and members do, while also exploring the diverse range of roles and responsibilities that they have, particularly away from the public and media gaze.
Previous research and basis of this study
While members of the House of Representatives have identifiable constituents, given the strict party discipline that exists in Australian politics and the diversity of large electorates, do they primarily represent a party or a constituency? If senators are not always directly representing their states, then who or what do they represent? Much of the focus in the political science literature has been on democratic institutions and the expected behaviour of representatives, rather than how political actors engage in democratic representation.[3] There is extensive literature comparing the powers and functions of the different houses,[4] but considerably less comparing the functions of the representatives within the different houses. With both senators and members representing people living in defined geographic areas (albeit of varying sizes) and sitting in houses with almost the same powers, do they actually differ in terms of their representative roles and responsibilities? The focus of this study is on the political actors and the work of politicians in carrying out their representative duties, by examining the similarities and differences between senators and members in terms of their understandings of their representative roles and responsibilities. This monograph will question who (or what) senators and members represent in contemporary Australian politics.
It is interesting to note that some of the most detailed work on the Australian Senate in particular has been done by ‘foreign’ scholars — Stanley Bach and Wilfried Swenden. American political scientist, Stanley Bach in producing the most comprehensive book so far on the Australian Senate, suggested possible lines of future inquiry, including the attitudes of senators toward the institution.[5] Thus, the focus of this monograph is on the political actors and their perceptions, but is broader in also including members. Swenden in his study on regional representation in parliamentary federations through second chambers, compared the Australian Senate and the German Bundesrat, and used questionnaires to examine how senators assess the Senate as a states’ house.[6] The questionnaire also explored aspects of the different party organisations and their nomination processes, as well as the senators’ relationships with other state senators and state party leaders, and their positions in relation to key bills.
Swenden found that a majority of senators perceive scrutiny of legislation as their most important function, followed by reviewing and improving government policies.[7] Of the six functions included in the survey, representing state interests did not feature among their top three priorities. However, Liberal senators valued the representation of state interests more than Labor senators, as did senators from the smaller states of Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania, compared to senators from the larger states.[8] Finally, state senators rarely meet with their colleagues from other parties, although Western Australian and Tasmanian senators were more likely to.[9] This study adopts a similar approach in surveying parliamentarians and seeks to further explore perceived legislative responsibilities and conceptions of representation, while once again also including members. However, this is not to suggest that conceptions of representation and the work of parliamentarians have been completely ignored in the Australian political science literature, with John Uhr, Marian Sawer, John Warhurst and previous parliamentary fellows Trish Payne and Gianni Zappalà among many others contributing to this growing field.[10] Rather, the distinctiveness of this study rests with the methodological approach and its comparative nature combined with the range of questions.
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