The presumption behind this discussion is that the House of Representatives represents the majority. In fact, almost every government we have ever had received a minority of the vote. The Senate is the more representative house as it is elected by proportional representation. Even the fact of each state having the same number of senators does not override this representative character. The majority of seats in the House of Representatives rarely the result of a majority of first preference votes.

Labor has to get over the Senate’s blocking of Supply in 1975, as history tells us that the Australian people understand that the Senate is the more representative House and that they will always defeat referenda undermining the Senate.

We need four-year fixed terms for the House of Representatives, fixed eight-year terms for the Senate, acceptance of the Senate’s right to block Supply, the replacement of the double dissolution provision with a referendum of the people on any legislation passed by one House and not by the other and the constitutional entrenchment of proportional representation for Senate elections. If the Senate blocked Supply, the people would vote on the issue on a referendum. If they agreed with the Senate, the House would face an immediate election. If they agreed with the House, the Senate would face an immediate election for al senators. In both cases, the newly elected MPs and senators would serve only for what remained of the four-year or eight-year term.

The chances of this package in the current political environment are zero.

Why not simply adopt Montesquieu's recommendation of separation of powers with a separate legislature to make the laws, executive to enforce them and judiciary to interpret them. Having a legislative body also choose the government is a conflict of interest. The Westminster system should be jettisoned.

You can't advance democracy but we can advance from it. Westminster is a long way from fair.
The present system of paying insane amounts of Taxpayers' money to a bunch of unaccountable incompetents is criminal in anyone's language except our Courts'.

Democracy? What a quaint concept.

Again with the simplistic sanctification of Gough's government.

We live in a federation of states and those states would not have joined together if they were not offered state representation. The majority of states, and just by pure coincidence, the majority of voters in those states (I was one of them) voted Labor in the House in the double dissolution election and hedged our bets by voting Liberal or Democrat for the Senate.

When Gough went off the rails our Senators denied Supply. Gough started dealing with Khemlani, 'our' GG sacked him. Separation of powers worked just fine.

If the Labour Party of the time had been more circumspect, less beholden to all its conspiracy theories and aware of the political climate Gough may not have been humiliated. To demonstrate their inability to adopt the concept that we live in a federation we can add the 'unrepresentative swill' comment made by Paul 'the Impaler' Keating.

To that Labor myopia we can add the inability to embrace wholeheartedly the business sector as the employer and creator/distributor of wealth which is why Labor will always be the second party.

To rid ourselves of the these and many other problems please visit my blog.

www.opening-democracy.com

It was simply really.
Gough was acting illegally by trying to borrow from Kemlani without the
approval of the Executive Council.
He would not compromise and neither would Fraser.
That was it, the GG did his job.