Glenn Milne on four year terms

He's a bit of a pro-Labor hack, but as is done in the blogosphere, you put differences aside when you agree with someone. And in this case, Glenn Milne has a few good points to make.

So the issue is dead. Again. Or is it? Some in the government are now pointing to a compromise that may cut the Gordian Knot on four-year terms. To understand the compromise you first have to go to the historic objections.

The main one is this: the Constitution says that Senate terms have to be twice that of the House of Representatives. That means lower house MPs serve three years and senators six. So, if four-year terms were introduced for the House of Representatives, senators would suddenly get eight years.

Politicians in this country are - rightly or wrongly - held in such low regard that the electorate will not wear giving them more power in the form of guaranteed longer terms.

Exactly - this is a point I raised earlier. The terms are a good length at three years, for they are long enough for a government to push through with its promises and make a case for another year, yet short enough that they know there's never an election too far away.

Bennett begins by noting that voters rejected a constitutional amendment at the 1988 referendum on four-year terms for both the House of Representatives and the Senate. His analysis of the reasons for the defeat makes for interesting reading: "Frustratingly for advocates of the longer term, however, the Hawke government confused the issue by including in the proposed change a reduction of Senate terms to four years as well as a provision for simultaneous elections, the latter of which had been defeated on three previous occasions.

"Voters could not pick which of the three aspects to support or reject, for they were required to vote YES or NO for the entire package. Voter opposition to changes to the Senate term, and to simultaneous elections meant that fewer than one-third of the electorate was prepared to support the change.

"The ploy of linking a proposal that had quite a deal of bipartisan support to matters that were extremely contentious had failed, pushing the four-year term model aside for an indefinite period."

The lesson here? Keep referendums simple. The more you complicate the issue, the more Australians will revert to the old saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Which is why we voted to keep the monarchy even though a majority of Australians would've voted for the Republic if the choice was a simple "yes/no" on the monarchy.

If we are going to have a referendum though, we can't afford to not tie in Senate and House term lengths. Australians are almost certainly not interested in going to the polls every 3 years to elect their local House of Reps candidate, and also every 4 years for half the Senate. Elections in 2007, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016? When you've also got a state election every four years, and local council elections? It won't work particularly well, and logically the same goes for every 4 years in the House and 6 in the Senate. The US mid-term elections (2002, 2006 etc) suffer from far lower than normal voter interest and general apathy. Compulsory voting and low voter interest are never a good combination.

Thus, the referendum question needs to be along the lines of:

"Do you support either:

a) Keeping the current 3 year federal House Of Representatives and 6 year Senate terms; or
b) Extending the terms to 4 years in the House Of Representatives and 8 years in the Senate?"

Due to the aforementioned low regard that we hold our politicians in, I can't see Australians voting for any extension in political terms, despite the idea appearing to hold the tenuous support of both major parties.

I was hoping that readers could leave their opinions on term lengths in the comments. Four years for both houses? Three years for both houses? Three and six?