Page 3739 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 22 November 2006
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Governor-General the power to disallow ACT laws. However, it retained the power of the Governor-General to suggest changes to ACT laws and it also retained the power of the commonwealth parliament to debate and pass a law which might overtake an ACT law.
The bill was, I think, a foreseeable consequence of the damage that the Howard government did to the office of the Governor-General in breaking with constitutional convention earlier this year. Just over 30 years on from the controversy surrounding the then Governor-General’s involvement in the events of Remembrance Day 1975, the current Governor-General was once again forced into the public arena.
Earlier this year the Howard government, as we know, instructed an unelected Governor-General to disallow a law made lawfully by a democratically elected parliament. That is the issue at stake here today. The Civil Unions Act 2006 was disallowed by a simple stroke of the Governor-General’s pen, repealing the act without this duly elected government having the merest opportunity to put its case to the commonwealth.
This action by the Howard government reignites an age-old controversy about the role of an unelected representative of the crown in the political affairs of a democratic state. The commonwealth threw 300 years of constitutional convention out the window and injected a new and worrying lease of life into an unelected office which has no business countermanding the acts of a democratically elected parliament. That is the issue at stake here.
Whilst the self-government act may give the Governor-General a bare power to disallow an ACT law, the mere existence of this power does not justify its exercise in such a summary way. This is particularly the case when constitutional convention has been for the crown not to interfere with the law-making activities of a democratically elected parliament.
It is a matter of considerable regret to this side of the house that the government has chosen to involve the Governor-General in this way. The commonwealth had at its disposal a number of means for dealing with this matter, means that did not involve the Queen’s representative.
I will not go further in chiding the commonwealth for the way it has chosen to act in this manner. There will be ample time to reflect on that. But I think it is important that we take the opportunity today to call on the commonwealth parliament to remove the possibility of the Howard government, or any future government, adopting this approach again.
The constitutional and legal framework in which the Queen’s representative must act is a framework often overlooked because of the reluctance over the past 200 years for the Queen’s representatives to become embroiled in controversies of this nature. But the convention is worth revisiting today. So what is the convention? The convention is that only members of this parliament, the ACT Legislative Assembly, can claim a legitimate mandate to represent the views of the people of the territory in relation to territory matters. We and only we can legitimately claim that mandate.
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