Citizens power of veto
I believe strongly that Australian citizens should have a means to over rule their elected representatives when it comes to the creation of legislation. I think our constitution should include a mechanism where by if enough citizens sign a petition objecting to a specific law then a referendum is triggered (perhaps in conjunction with the next general election) to consider repealing the law. A number of political parties notionally support this democratic initative including the LDP, The Australian Democrats and Paulines United Australia Party.
Whilst the Australian Labor Party does not advocate this type of reform they have at the federal level at least indicated that they will take petitions more seriously in future. Unfortunately rather than using petitions as a means to strike down bad laws they seem to want to use it to advance new forms of government intevention.
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I’ve always been a big fan of the system in place in a number of Swiss Cantons, which ties referendum rights to the size of government expenditures. In the typical canton, two expenditure thresholds are created, a lower one for optional referendum and a higher one for mandatory referendum. If the size of the government spending project exceeds the lower threshold (say .25% of the budget), citizen groups are given the right to collect signatures to force that spending item to be on the next general election. These signature requirements, incidentally, are quite small in general (typically on the order of 1%-5% of the population). If the size of the government project exceeds the upper threshold (say 1% or 2% of the budget), the bill must pass a mandatory referendum to become law.
As the oldest democracy on earth is stands to reason that the Swiss have a few things figured out.
and the only one, as well. the swiss are mortal, but for what ever reason their antecedents gradually created something quite like democracy.
it’s not going to happen in oz. there is not the culture and character to support it, much less force the creation of democracy.
Andrew Bartlett today notes that the other means of legislative review does not seem to be getting much work time this year. An optimist might suppose that this is because the Rudd government does not intend passing much legislation.
http://andrewbartlett.com/blog/?p=1917
Don’t see why a libertarian would be all that optimistic about the government passing minimal legislation, when there’s so much wrong with the existing legislation and regulation.
I’m all for governments doing no more than they have to, but surely we can agree there’s a lot that needs changing.
If activity meant a reduction in regulation then I might be inclined to agree. Generally it doesn’t.
It was for much of the Keating era.
I have more faith in Labor sensibly following that path than I ever did with Howard in charge.
I should also point out, I don’t care so much if the total “amount” of regulation is reduced (I’m not entirely sure what the measurement unit for regulation is), but I would suggest that at least half the regulation we currently have is counterproductive. Either find better alternatives if they exist, if not, then get rid of it.
Some of Nicholas Gruen’s work is beginning to convince me that finding better alternatives is probably more feasible.
I’m not going to quibble with the semantics. My last sentence in comment #4 was a cheap throw away line. We seem to be on much the same page.
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