‘The Pledge’ by Barry Jones
At the first election to the Commonwealth Parliament in 1901, 15 Members of the House of Representatives and 8 Senators were chosen with the support of Labour organisations in each state. There was then no national party structure. Adopting the name (and spelling) Australian Labor Party (ALP) dates from 1908.
The Labour movement had lacked enthusiasm for Federation, concerned that hard-won reforms in some colonies before 1901 might be weakened in a Federation.
It is very likely that when the 23 Parliamentarians describing themselves as Labour convened in Melbourne, then the nation’s capital, many, perhaps most, had never met before. However, they decided to operate as a Caucus, working together on common national objectives, not as representatives of, say, Queensland or Victoria.
Adoption of ‘The Pledge’, or ‘tied vote’, was a very early decision by the Labour Caucus of the Commonwealth Parliament in 1902: that after a motion to oppose or support specific legislation had been carried then all members would vote the same way in divisions in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The practice of a tied vote for MPs probably repels most voters, if they knew about it, but in practice it contributes to political stability. In my 26 years as a Labor MP, I cast only four ‘free votes’. (The UK House of Commons had 25 free votes 2015-24).
Each year, hundreds of Bills are introduced, and I could not pretend to have fully understood even a majority of them, certainly not in detail, particularly many line items in the Federal Budget, which probably exceed two thousand.
On policy, I was certainly a net beneficiary of the Caucus Pledge. There were more dissenters in Caucus from my policy positions who were locked into supporting them in Parliament than there were measures that I didn’t like, or had not thought through, that I had to vote for.
And the Pledge can be a valuable protection against corruption or even excessive pressure. An MP representing seats with high employment in coal, tobacco or mining would have come under intense pressure to cross the floor to represent local interest and keep her/ his vote on contentious legislation.
Such MPs are protected if and when they say: ‘I’d like to oppose this Bill but I can’t. I promised to abide by the decision of Caucus. I can’t get out of it.’
The Liberal Party is more flexible in theory about voting ‘the party line’. In practice, defections or abstentions are risky for ambitious MPs.
In the May 2022 Federal election, Fatima Payman, No. 3 on the ALP Senate ticket for Western Australia received 1681 primary votes ‘below the line’, a total of 00.1% of all votes cast. She was elected, as the last of six Senators, on the 57th count, despite not having reached a quota because of the ‘exhaustion’ of preferences.
Before nominating, she had signed the pledge that she would abide by a Caucus vote on legislation. She did not participate in the Caucus debate on a Greens’ resolution on Gaza. Caucus voted to oppose, but Payman crossed the floor to support it.
After being suspended from Caucus, then resigning from the ALP, she received very generous – and soft – media coverage. In August she appointed Glenn Druery as her Chief of Staff. Druery was notorious as ‘the preference whisperer’, who mastered the art of harvesting preferences under the former ‘group voting option’ for the Senate and some state upper houses. His successful picks had always been elected at the expense of ALP candidates.
Payman then ambitiously created a national party, Australia’s Voice with herself as Leader. It would be based on policies, yet to be determined, which were ‘bold and balanced’.
Glenn Lazarus (Queensland) and Jacky Lambie (Tasmania) were both elected to Senate on Clive Palmer’s UAP ticket, but after settling in to Parliamentary life, understanding a fresh set of issues and engaging with other senators, they broke free of Palmer. Similarly, Lidia Thorpe (Victoria), elected as a Green, broke with her colleagues and became an independent.
With its almost North Korean discipline it is very rare in the Australian House of Representatives for a debate to have any impact on whether a bill is carried or lost, but it does happen in the Senate.
However, even in the Senate outcomes are far more likely to be determined by negotiations behind the scenes. In December 2024 52 bills passed the Senate in one day, without debate.
Typically, speeches in the House are delivered to a handful of MPs, most of them awake, as an MP reads the dot points she/he has been given in a monotone, then leaves the Chamber, because the next MP to speak, from the other side, will have had no interest in what was said before.
The systems of ‘one, two and three line whips’ as used in the UK House of Commons has much to recommend it. Whips in the major parties, notify their MPs of forthcoming votes (generally held at a set time – not immediately following a debate).
A one-line whip means ‘a vote on the XYZ Bill will be held at a particular time, and your attendance is requested.’ A two-whip means ‘your vote is necessary and you must request permission of the Whip to miss it’. A three-line whip means ‘your attendance is essential and failure to vote to support a position agreed by the Parliamentary party will lead to disciplinary action’.
Jeremy Corbyn, interestingly, voted against the party line 428 times.
Suggested recommendation:
That the UK system of one, two and three-line whips should be advocated in principle as a means of opening up political decision-making, and potentially improving the quality of debate.
This proposal, by ART Director Barry Jones AC, is supported by the Accountability Round Table as part of its push for better accountability to and in Parliament.