Saturday, September 27, 2008

Parliament

I recently went to Canberra, Australia’s capital (for the record, they do in fact spell it ‘capital,’ unlike Washington, D.C. which is ‘capitol’). I was in Canberra to attend the Australian-American Fulbright Commission’s Enrichment Seminar. This was a three-day seminar, but I stayed a few extra days to take in more of the city.

Canberra (emphasis on the first syllable: CAN-burra) is in many ways similar to Washington, D.C. When negotiations were taking place for Federation (that is, the uniting of all Britain’s Australian colonies into a single independent country, which occurred in 1901), a major sticking point was the location of the capital. The contenders were Sydney and Melbourne, which were rival cities and couldn’t stand for the other to have the honor of being the capital. If Sydney was chosen, the colony of Victoria would be unlikely to join. On the other hand, if Melbourne was chosen, New South Wales would stay separate. The solution was to build a new city as the federal capital, in a location roughly between Sydney and Melbourne. Thus Canberra was born.

Canberra is the heart of the tiny Australian Capital Territory, or ACT. As cities go it is fairly small, with a population of roughly 350,000. It was a planned city, and that is obvious. The Fulbright Commission drove us up to a lookout on Mt. Ainslie and we could clearly see how structured Canberra is. It was 1927 before the city was ready to take over as Australia’s capital, so Canberra is quite a young city.

Until recently Canberra suffered a poor reputation. A common joke was that the only good thing about living in Canberra was that all your relatives lived interstate. This hasn’t gone away entirely. A few of us were talking before class started one day last week and one of my classmates said, “A week in Canberra! You’ll die of ennui.” (That is, boredom.)

As it turned out, I could easily have spent another two or three days in Canberra. The first two and a half days were packed with events for the Fulbright Enrichment Seminar, and then I took in Floriade, which is the spring flower festival, the National Gallery, the Australian War Memorial, the Royal Australian Mint, and part of the National Botanic Gardens. I fully intended to make it to the National Museum, but never made it there.

One of the highlights for me was our visit to Parliament House. Opened in 1988, it’s sometimes referred to as “New Parliament House” to distinguish it from Old Parliament House. (Old Parliament House was built to be temporary, but it was used for sixty-one years.) The Fulbright Commission took us there for Question Time, and happily we were given good seats in the central gallery.

Question Time is unlike anything that happens in American government, and I guarantee more people would watch C-SPAN if we had something similar. On the other hand, we got an interesting take on the downside from one of the Prime Minister’s aides. He told us that Question Time is what people see on TV and it leaves them with a negative view of government. For the record, therefore, Question Time is only an hour and a half, four days a week when Parliament is in session, and the rest of the time government continues in a more sedate fashion.

To facilitate understanding, I’ll give a brief summary of Australian government. It is a parliamentary system, modeled on the British system. The upper house is the Senate and the lower house is the House of Representatives. Don’t let the fact that they have the same names as U.S. houses of Congress fool you into thinking it’s a presidential system like ours.

The House of Representatives, like the British House of Commons, is the seat of real power, so I’ll focus on that now. The most important person is the Prime Minister – since January of this year, the Honorable Kevin Rudd. (Side note: the official business, such as the seating chart we were given, notes titles. Once a person serves as a minister they are forevermore known as “the Honorable.” On the other hand, this is a country where Parliament House was built into a hill so ordinary people can walk on the roof of government. Sometimes, Australia is a land of contradictions.) The Prime Minister is the leader of the ruling party in the House of Commons. There is never an election for Prime Minister.

Ministers are chosen from the ruling party, which currently is the Australian Labor Party. Usually Aussies spell it ‘labour’ but this name was taken from the American Labor Party decades ago and thus uses American spelling, which I think is an interesting factoid. The role of a minister is most easily compared with the secretary of a Cabinet department in the U.S., but it’s an inexact comparison because ministers come from the House of Representatives. Other representatives, those who aren’t ministers, are known as “backbenchers.” Ministers sit on the front bench, or in this case rows of seats, while all others are behind them.

The opposition, currently the Liberal Party of Australia, sits on the other side of the room, with a few Independents and Nationals in between. When we were there the opposition had just shuffled its leadership, choosing Malcolm Turnbull as the new leader of the opposition. Quite unlike U.S. government, the opposition has a shadow government. There is, therefore, a shadow minister of the treasury, and so on. The main role of the shadow government, as far as I can tell, is to point out exactly what they think the government is doing wrong.

We were escorted to our seats and given a handy seating plan and list of members. Down below we had a straight view to the Speaker. His job during Question Time is to moderate, and even though he’s a member of the government (that is, the ruling party) I found him to be quite fair. Occasionally he would call out such things as “The Member for Flinders will withdraw” or “The Member for Herbert is warned.” He also gives the floor to the next person. Names weren’t used once; representatives were always referred to by title, as in “Member for Flinders” or “Minister for the Treasury.” In the center of the room was a table with two podiums and microphones. On the left sat the Prime Minister, with the ministers behind him and the Labor backbenchers behind them. On the right was the Leader of the Opposition, with the shadow ministers behind him and the Liberal backbenchers behind them.

Two kinds of questions tend to get asked during Question Time: those from the opposition and those from the government. The opposition naturally takes the opportunity to grill the government, asking ministers to defend their positions and hoping to trap them into something that will make a good news headline. The government backbenchers also ask questions, which basically give the ministers a chance to talk about what a great job they are doing. One question came from an Independent, and while his was slightly critical he didn’t use it to attack the government, and in return Kevin Rudd gave him a very polite answer. Polite, I assure you, is rare during Question Time.

Question Time had just started when we arrived, after thorough security screening which, to my regret but not surprise, meant my camera had to be left behind. As we filed in, the Prime Minister was answering a question about the economy. This was shortly after the disaster on Wall Street so economic woes were at the forefront of government worries. Kevin Rudd said something that caused all members of the opposition to laugh as if on cue. It was quite startling, but turned out to be common on both sides. Laughter, discontented murmurings, and resounding cries of “hear, hear!” are common and happen in such tandem that I hardly would have been surprised to see cue cards.

As the Liberal representatives laughed, Rudd said that the economy seemed to be “a matter of some hilarity” for the opposition. This caused discontented murmurings, most of which were impossible to make out from the viewing gallery. One woman was louder than the others, however, and I distinctly heard her reply, “No, you are!”

Welcome to Question Time.

The Minister for the Treasury was one of the more colorful characters. Rather neglecting the issue at hand, he gave a passionate speech about how the Leader of the Opposition is selfish. Turnbull, in his view, isn’t interested in what’s best for Australia, he’s interested in what’s best for himself. Warming to the subject, the Minster for the Treasury declared, “You could almost see the self-righteousness wafting out of him as he quoted himself.”

I wasn’t kidding when I said more people would watch C-SPAN if our Congress had Question Time.

Most of the questions focused on the economy, the environment and climate change (this one was big for the government backbenchers asking questions that allowed ministers to discuss how wonderful they are, to resounding calls of “hear, hear!” from Labor backbenchers.) One of the final questions dealt with binge drinking among young adults, which is a growing problem here. It pleased the government to no end to inform the House that an independent report commissioned by the previous government suggested a higher tax on pre-mixed bottled drinks known as “alcopops,” an action already taken by the current government. This provided a handy opportunity for the government to accuse the opposition of standing for getting young girls drunk.

During most of the time a government minister was speaking, one of the opposition backbenchers was making a “yap yap yap” sign with his hand. On occasion the person speaking would go on too long, ranting, and their microphone would get cut off. The Minister for the Treasury, after listing some of the excesses of the opposition, taking care to emphasize every word, finished a speech with a rousing, “and they should be condemned!” Spontaneous laughter continued to burst forth from both sides.

We left when Question Time ended, as did most of the representatives. Then we were whisked off to the Ministerial Section for a meeting with the Prime Minister. He is, of course, an extraordinarily busy man, so this was quite an honor for us. We waited in a meeting room, and all stood up as he entered. It was a brief meeting, but we all found Kevin Rudd to be quite personable. He shook hands with each of us, introducing himself simply as “Kevin.” Then he spoke for a minute on the importance of Fulbright, which was the first treaty signed by Australia and America. He also discussed the closeness of Australia’s relationship with America, which won’t change no matter who is elected as the new president; he called Barack Obama to offer his congratulations once Obama was officially chosen as the Democratic candidate, and was quick to add that a couple weeks before he had congratulated John McCain. Following this a photographer took a group photo in front of his official entrance. On the way out to the courtyard for the photo one of the other scholars asked him about coral bleaching, which is what this scholar is studying, and was pleased to inform us afterwards that Kevin Rudd knows what coral bleaching is and is aware of the problem. (Coral bleaching is a loss of color in corals due to a stress-induced loss of photosynthesizing algae. This can kill the coral.)

Afterwards the Prime Minister’s aide took us up to the roof, where we got a lovely view, and some of us took the opportunity to listen to his insider view on Parliament. That was when he lamented the skewed view of politics that Question Time creates, and he said that the Liberal Party will try to blame economic woes on the government, while the government notes that they’ve only been in power nine months so a lot of the problems can be traced to the previous government. Some things in democracies are truly the same everywhere.

It was an afternoon I’ll never forget. Meeting the Prime Minister was a great honor, and I’m still chuckling over “You could almost see the self-righteousness wafting out of him as he quoted himself.”

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