"Sir John Howard" <pmjwhowardj@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:9229c389-7484-49f1-9b26-9afd394bc24b@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Friday goes the same way as PM: it's cut out
>
>
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/friday-goes-the-same-way-as-pm-its-cut-out/2008/03/07/1204780065485.html
>
> LABOR'S lofty ambitions for parliamentary reform have collapsed,
> victim of an old-style political blame game over an outbreak of rowdy
> behaviour in the House of Representatives last month.
>
> In a major backdown, the Federal Government yesterday dropped its plan
> to have Parliament sit for an extra day a week to give backbenchers
> from all sides of politics more time to raise local issues and
> introduce private members' bills.
>
> The Government's leader of the house, Anthony Albanese, said he had
> written to the Opposition Leader, Brendan Nelson, cancelling the plan
> because of deliberate disruption of the first Friday sitting last
> month by Coalition MPs.
>
> Coalition MPs brought a cardboard cut-out of Kevin Rudd and defied
> repeated warnings from the Speaker to highlight their concerns that
> the Prime Minister would not attend Parliament on Fridays to answer
> questions.
>
> The backdown came as the Opposition revealed it had been about to
> start a High Court challenge to the procedures the Government had
> introduced for the Friday sittings.
>
> Legal advice to the Opposition from Tom Hughes, QC, says the
> Government's move to defer quorum calls during the Friday sittings
> breached the constitution and meant the sittings would have been
> legally invalid. But Mr Albanese said the Government would not allow
> the Opposition to bring the Parliament into disrepute with its
> disruptive behaviour.
>
> He said the antics by Opposition MPs would have been unacceptable in
> his son's year 2 classroom and the Government would go back to a four-
> day sitting week with less time for private members' business.
>
> In his letter to Dr Nelson, he accuses the Opposition Leader of
> reneging on a personal assurance given during the first Friday sitting
> that Coalition MPs would not engage in disruptive behaviour.
>
> "It is unclear to me whether that breach of faith was unprincipled or
> whether you were simply unable to control your own political party,"
> Mr Albanese said in the letter.
>
> But the manager of Opposition business in the house, Joe Hockey, said
> the decision was a humiliating backdown for the Rudd Government.
>
> "It illustrates that they would rather cancel a sitting day than have
> proper scrutiny," he said.
>
> Labor's move to drop the Friday sittings suggests it may have been
> concerned that the Opposition's accusations that Kevin Rudd was a part-
> time parliamentarian had the potential to damage the Government
> politically over time.
>
> It may also reflect the fact that some of its own MPs were less than
> enthusiastic about the extra day of sittings.
This is what happens, Sir John, when a bureaucrat becomes PM. He tries to
run Parliament like a bureaucracy. KRudd is used to bludgeoning the public
service because they work for the Govt. The Opposition, however, doesn't
work for the Govt. KRudd therefore got a response that he didn't
anticipate,
although anyone with enough real-world experience could have done so.
The idea of Friday sittings was to give backbenchers more experience.
Maybe
this idea had merit, maybe not. The only way it could have worked was to
have bipartisan sup****t. KRudd didn't seek this. Oddly enough KRudd makes
decisions when he should consult others and forms committees and gabfests
when he should be making decisions. Go figure.
Albanese said the idea could be revisited at some stage. I think it will
be
revisited, but only as a cynical exercise in political expediency -
perhaps
not too different from the first time around.
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