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All the states have adopted four-year maximum parliamentary terms without much fanfare, and yet at a federal level Australia has stayed at three years. Is it time for Australia to just bite the bullet and extend the term?
To debate that very question in today’s Friday Fight we have former senator Margaret Reynolds arguing against the idea and political columnist Rachel Withers making the affirmative case.
How long is the federal parliamentary term? Three years, you might say, noting that is what the Australian constitution decrees.
Alas, you would be wrong: the average length of completed Parliaments is just two years and 130 days — 235 days short of three years, thanks to the fact PMs can dissolve them at a time of their own convenience, and often do.
Many of those final 130 days are a write-off: once there is less than 12 months on the clock, election speculation begins and the focus turns from governing to campaigning, implementing to promising. What else could explain the Albanese government’s recent “pledge” to wipe 20% off HECS debts should it win the next election, despite having six months left in this term?
When looked at that way, our 2.35-year terms seem a bit of a joke, an unserious duration for an unserious country, unwilling to back its choice long enough to let the winner have a real go.
It’s well past time we extended and fixed our parliamentary terms — or at the very least extended them, so we only have to play the “when’s the election going to be?” game every four or five years, instead of every three.
The reasons for increasing our terms are well established, discussed every time the idea is raised — and it’s been raised in royal commissions and constitutional conventions and joint standing committees since the early 1900s. The three-year term is an anachronism, designed to match the colonies at Federation; all states and territories have since moved to four. Three is also short by international standards, with fixed four- and five-year terms far more common.
Longer terms, it’s said, would allow governments to break out of the three-year cycle in which their first and third years are spent thinking about votes. Politicians could engage in more long-term thinking, embarking on the unpopular but necessary reforms neither side will currently touch, too concerned by what it will mean for an election that always seems to be around the corner.
A longer electoral cycle would give voters time to feel the effects of a policy and make an informed choice at the following poll. Business leaders often argue it would provide more certainty for them, but it would also provide greater certainty for non-profits, healthcare workers, students, parents, media outlets…
Less frequent elections would mean less taxpayer dollars spent on elections — 2022’s election cost a whopping $522 million, with the $75 million paid out to candidates only set to increase under Labor’s donation reforms. Less frequent campaigns would also mean less campaign fatigue, and fewer months of our lives enduring campaign memes, which are somehow even worse than regular political memes.
It could even improve the quality of our public discourse, with less focus on short-term point-scoring — though I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.
The most valid reasons for keeping terms shorter relate to accountability, with some arguing longer reigns make politicians less answerable to the people. The fact that voters repeatedly reelected the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government should put to bed any notion that elections are about accountability, with the elections of the 2010s treated mostly as naked exercises in shameless vote-buying.
None of the arguments I have put forward are particularly new. So perhaps the best reason to extend (and ideally fix) the term is so we can have fewer of these debates — both the speculation as to when the election will be, and the discourse as to whether we should increase the length. The Australian political class spends a depressing amount of time obsessing over our term settings (it’s come up multiple times this year), time that could be better spent focused on the Parliament before us.
It will, of course, take a referendum to amend the constitution to amend the term — an undesirable prospect after what happened with the Voice. But there’s no reason it couldn’t be run in parallel with the next election, whenever that may be, with both major party leaders having expressed support for the extension.
Let’s stop wasting a third of our lives on election speculation, and even more of it on rehashing this tired debate. We’re already being 235 days short-changed. May we never waste another day on it again.
Read the opposing argument by Margaret Reynolds.