These sort of apparently legal-technicality-exploitative 'hypotheticals' can be interesting, can't they?

Where is Geoffrey Robertson when you need him? Nowhere to be seen!

So I guess it is incumbent upon me to suggest some reasons why the Governor-General would be justified in taking the unorthodox course of resetting the currently running electoral clock.

I'd start with the matter of the defective alteration of the Constitution that is the inserted placitum (xxiiiA) to Section 51 thereof, a defective alteration that has gone seemingly un-noticed since 1946. The Social Services referendum of 1946 did not meet the 'double majority' requirement of Section 128 of the Constitution, and was wrongly declared as having passed.

I'd start here because Section 61 of the Constitution places a statutory obligation upon a Governor-General with respect to the maintenance of the Constitution. Where statutory obligation is imposed, the issue as to justification for action does not even arise. Even in the absence of advice from her Executive Council, the Governor-General is both entitled and obliged to act to maintain the Constitution.




The Governor-General's acting to effect a removal of a defect would look like maintenance of the Constitution in my book.




Given that either of the realistically likely electable alternatives on offer to the Australian electors at these elections each can be seen to have political-egg-on-face with respect to this issue, why should the Governor-General not place before the Australian people a conscripted 'team' having no such egg-on-face or conflict of interest to oversee the rectification of this Constitutional defect?

It would be as dispassionate and impartial an exercise of Vice-Regal authority as is imaginable. One dictated by statute, and simply consisting of the placing before the Australian electors a choice of a collection of candidates who did NOT ask for the job of sorting this, and maybe other messes, out, while at the same time leaving before them all of the usual suspects clamouring for the job they have between them so consistently fallen down on.

Why not?

Forrest, yes of course the notion of stopping the clock and surprising the parties was a tongue-in-cheek idea, as it is never going to happen.

But it is an interesting idea worthy of logical consideration. In a way, it would be good if the GG could threaten to do this if the campaigns became too silly or boring and it was evident that the populace was just not tuned in or treating both parties with contempt, which...er....is just what's happening now!!

Afterall, an idea would have to be REALLY ridiculous to be more ridiculous than what we are now seeing in our federal political sphere. I mean, how ridiculous is the complete absence of discussion on peak oil / liquid fuel security or real sustainability? How ridiculous is our economic system that is based on never-ending dog-chasing-tail continuous growth? How ridiculous is it that a government could do what Rudd did with immigration – not mention it in the election campaign and then greatly boost it as soon as he got into power to a record high level much higher than the previous record high level without any consultation or publicity??

Whatever the case, I think that we really do need a mechanism that would get the big parties to properly address the things that really matter in sufficient detail, and to be held to account as sticking to their promises or assertions when in power.

Notwithstanding what happened to Whitlam, I think that the role of the GG should be much more significant in keeping the government and aspiring political parties on the right track.

The GetUp challenge to the constitutional validity of the 2006 legislation that changed the closure of the electoral rolls from seven days after the date of the writs back to what it had, prior to 1983, been closure on the day of issue of the writs, went before both the High Court and the Federal Court yesterday.

As of 10:55 AM today, no decision has yet been posted online. Here's my Google search: http://twitpic.com/2bo9z3

There may indeed be another reason, quite apart from any decision of either court, for the Governor-General to reset the electoral clock. It could relate to the seemingly non-statistical disappearance from the electoral rolls of 47,579 17-year-old provisional electors between 30 June 2010 and 22 July 2010.

It would appear to me that there are, apart from sheer error on the part of the AEC in the publishing of the respective figures, only two possible explanations for these disappearances from the 17-year-old cohort of the rolls: one is that they all turned 17 between 30 June and 22 July, the other is that those enrolments were found by the AEC to be in some way unsubstantiated or improperly effected (or, of course, some combination of these two explanations) by the time the rolls closed. This post I made to the Article 'Electoral roll makes a mockery of election' explains it more fully:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=10712#178530

From that post:

"Even if every 17-year-old in the population
had effected provisional enrolment, the most
one could expect to see turn 18 over such a
period would be around 14,000 persons."

59,831 17-year-old provisional electors were shown as being enrolled, nationally, as at 30 June 2010. This represented only around one in four of the 17-year-old cohort of the population.

On the face of it, there may be a problem with the rolls that warrants investigation. Investigations sometimes take a little time. An attempt to tamper with an election?

A correction.

My post of Thursday, 5 August 2010 at 11:34:39 AM, states, in the fourth paragraph:

"... two possible explanations for these
disappearances from the 17-year-old cohort
of the rolls: one is that they all turned
17 between 30 June and 22 July."

It should have read "......: one is that they all turned 18 between 30 June and 22 July."




Just by way of amplification of my previous post, the AEC figures for the close of rolls on 22 July 2010 that show only 12,252 17-year-olds as being enrolled, themselves require a comment. Whilst this number, 12,252 provisional electors, was it to represent persons who would turn 18 by polling day, might not be statistically improbable was the whole of the 17-year-old cohort of the population to have effected provisional enrolment prior to 30 June 2010, the fact is that only around one quarter of that cohort were shown as being enrolled as at that date. This means, if indeed the 12,252 provisional electors shown in the CoR figures are ones shown on AEC records as turning 18 by polling day, that there are around four times as many provisional electors in this sub-category as would be normally expected. An explanation is necessary.

The figures I am using are downloadable from this web page: http://www.aec.gov.au/Enrolling_to_vote/Enrolment_stats/elector_count/index.htm

Should the court uphold the GetUp challenge, it would seem as if the Governor-General would have to restart the electoral clock from scratch, not merely allow the disputed applications for enrolment onto the rolls, for from among the 100,000 or so applicants for enrolment that lodged between the end of business on Monday 19 July and that of the following Monday, the 26th, may have been some persons who otherwise would have intended being candidates.

The Governor-General may be thus given even more reason to restart the electoral clock than just that of her obligation of maintenance of the Constitution.

Interesting times for the Governor-General.

Yesterday, in my post of Thursday, 5 August 2010 at 11:34:39 AM, I posted this Twitpic of a Google search using the term 'High court challenge+Getup' in pages from Australia: http://twitpic.com/2bo9z3

Yesterday, also, in my post of Thursday, 5 August 2010 at 3:09:54 PM, to Ludwig's topic 'Wyatt Roy', I posted this link to a page that was right down near the bottom of the first page of the Google search for which I have already posted a Twitpic link above: http://australianconservative.com/2010/08/fraud-and-the-election-high-court-challenge/

Here is a Twitpic of the same Google search done again just after 6:00 AM today: http://twitpic.com/2bwwdv . The web page to which I linked in my post to the 'Wyatt Roy' thread is now the top search result on Google!

Interesting, in an oblique sort of way, in relation to assessing the possible influence of OLO discussions upon MainStreamMediaWorld and the internet. I guess the question is, does this show how many, or alternatively, how few, have clicked on sites shown in such Google search as I conducted over the last day? And, of those howsoever many or few viewers of Professor Flint's article, how many got the link from OLO?

I would have thought, with its claimed membership of over 350,000 persons, and the extreme topicality of the High Court challenge, that any of the GetUp pages would have been attracting far more hits than anything that OLO viewership could generate at present. Could the OLOverse be bigger than GetUp? Who could audit the GetUp membership, I wonder? The Australian Electoral Commission, perhaps?




I also wonder as to whether the Governor-General, of Her Excellency's own motion, may require the High Court in its consideration of the constitutionality of the roll close legislation to also consider the constitutionality of the exclusion of the permanently resident British subjects from the electoral rolls. They would make up the bulk of the allegedly missing 1.4 million electoral enrolments.

Breaking news:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-election/getup-high-court-win-overturns-howards-electoral-laws-20100806-11m31.html