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0 pointsvacri13y ago0 comments

What are you on about? That's part of politics, whether the grandstanders are in your own party or not.

But you've highlighted an excellent point - you're making it sound like parliament is ineffective, when they've passed more bills in 2012 than any other year in the last decade. In 2012 they passed 207 bills. In 2011 it was 188, and for the rest of the prior decade it hovered between 140ish and 180ish. Despite being a minority government, they are passing a lot of legislation - more than ever before. Hardly paralysed by 'endless negotiation'.

http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Statistics/stat...

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jacques_chester13y ago· 1 in thread

In all sincerity, "number of Acts passed" is a terrible metric. Like measuring the success of a new plane design by how many tons are being added per year.

2011 and 2012 are outliers for a simple reason: the Carbon tax was being first passed into law and then frequently amended.

The Australian Constitution requires that legislation dealing with appropriations / taxation only deal with that subject. Historical judgements by the High Court mean that every new tax is broken down into lots of little interlocking Acts with very narrow purposes, to prevent a whole scheme being knocked out in a High Court ruling.

You'll find a bump in 1999 Acts because of the GST, for example.

vacriOP13y ago

It's not that terrible a metric. Sure, it doesn't say much for the quality of the bills (what does, anyway?), but it does show that work is being done and parliament isn't 'paralysed', as the media would have you think.

Looking at the list in my link, you'd have to be extremely one-eyed to call that list biased towards carbon tax bills. But even if you do carve out those bills (though I'm not sure why they don't count as work), the year is still on the high end of the normal range.

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