ACA tonight did a day in the life of Howard. Followed him around for 24 hours. It would of humanized him to many of that audience. It was a good decision to do it I think. Will be interesting to see if Rudd does it too.

Bangladesh has a constitutional provision for the caretake agreements where a non-party caretaker government is put into place. The President (GG in our system) basically made himself head of the caretaker government, established a state of exception and then a state of emergency.

The problems with conventions is that they have no force of history or practice. They are defined by the sovereign agreeing to perpetuate that convention and consequently are perpetually at the whim of the sovereign.

Cam,

That does seem to be the case. It's a pretty big loophole in our system which, technically, is supposed to prevent such things from happening.

As your Bangladesh example shows, it only takes one mad enough Wally to take advantage and the whole thing falls over.

Lyn,
It sure is a fraught time for the bureaucracy. I see that Tiernan and Menzies say in the Introduction that:

elections are a fraught time for public administrators in Westminster-style political systems. For the duration of the ‘caretaker period’ — the period between the calling of an election and the return of the existing government or the commissioning of a new government—public servants must tread a careful line: they must be seen to be apolitical; although they may be required to brief the government’s political opponents, they must maintain the policy status quo and ensure administrative continuity until the election result is known. In this context, they must administer policy, provide advice and manage programs in a highly charged and adversarial political environment in which key actors—ministers, ministerial staff, shadow ministers, the Opposition, its staff and journalists—can be expected to have varying degrees of familiarity and appreciation of the application (and nuances) of the practices and procedures developed to regulate how a government should operate once an election is called.

Those balls are not easy to juggle since caretaker conventions apply during the most intense time of adversarial politics—when both major parties have the potential to retain or gain government. Minor slips and inexactitudes are exploited by both sides. There is intense pressure on public servants to justify their decisions regarding perceived support or partiality for the incumbent government.

Gary,

Before I read this I had a vague idea of how risky a period it is and was also aware of some of the problems with manipulating the public service for partisan purposes. Just hadn't put the two together.

Apparently democracy is fragile, but this is a clear illustration of how fragile it is. We take so much for granted.

When I read this I was thinking about the million dollars a day ad campaign, but Cam's example makes you wonder. We already have a state of emergency on remote Aboriginal communities - how hard would it be to declare another one on the drought for example?

It put the public service in a whole new perspective for me.

Lyn, State of emergency has definitely become an electoral device. Australia has had the children overboard immigration emergency, Australia and the US has had the GWOT electoral emergency and more recently the Aboriginal children.

It is definately a way of making the politics unitary (and here). The executive ends up dominating the politics of the issue under emergency as the opposition usually agrees and joins some kind of war cabinet. This removes any liberal deliberation or competition over policy on the issue - hence the politics become unitary.

The Washington System has caretaker conventions too though it isnt called that. The Republican legislature adhered to it when they lost government in 2006 and didnt pass several bills. They actually got panned for not passing the bills (ie not doing their job) in the media. When in reality they were adhering to the caretaker conventions. It really puts the system at the mercy of the reasonableness of the politicians. That is proving less and less trustworthy these days as politicians realise they can get away with breaking conventions without popular backlash.

Cam,

Interesting. So all you have to do is declare something a state of emergency (or an exception?) to sidestep conventions. Am I right in thinking that more and more stuff has been left to ministerial discretion recently? The two together could pretty much stuff conventions altogether, couldn't they?

Lyn, I dont think conventions require a state of emergency to be broken. A simple statement of sovereignty can break them, and it is not necessarily the executive. There was this convention in the Senate recently which was busted by majority and not necessarily executive assertion.

Emergency removes the liberal in democracy/republic. Whereas convention is a statement of mutual sovereignty which I think is a very different process.