Powers of the Head of State in an Australian Republic

John Kilcullen
Copyright (c) 2000, 2004, R.J. Kilcullen.


On this question see paper "Australia and Parliamentary Orthodoxy" by A.J. Ward, who argues that the conventions of Responsible Government (see above) could and should be written into the Constitution, and that if that is done the powers of a President will be so limited that the dangers of an elected presidency will vanish.

The danger of an elected President (or Governor-General, or whatever the head of state is called) is that the election of President will overshadow the election of the House of Representatives and that the President will have more political standing than the Prime Minister. This would weaken the electorate's influence over the actions of Government and over the Parliament (see "Democracy in Australia", sections on choice between packages and on Prime Ministerial Government). Hence many people who took this danger seriously supported the proposal defeated in the 1999 referendum, namely that the President be elected by the Parliament, and not directly by the public. (Another argument for this was that, under the model proposed, Parliament would be less likely than the electorate at large to elect a political party nominee, or someone wealthy enough to pay for a massive campaign.) However, that model had serious problems (again, see Ward's paper, toward the end).

To prevent an elected President from taking over the executive Government, it has been suggested that the President's powers should be codified, that is, that the Constitution should lay down clearly what the President may and may not do. Complete codification might well be a difficult task. But it might not be necessary. It would be enough for the Constitution to say what the President may NOT do, leaving undefined the things he or she may do -- or (since negatives can often be expressed as affirmatives and vice versa) to specify some of the things the Governor-General must or may do but not try to spell them all out. The main points needed to preserve responsible government are:

These two points (or even the first by itself) would, in my opinion, be enough to ensure that House of Representatives elections would continue to control the actions of the Executive Government.

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