Should Australia have four-year terms?

Well, Monday came and went and we're only slightly closer to getting an election date, after Cyclone Alfred threw "the government's plans into disarray".

By not asking the Governor General to dissolve Parliament yesterday, Albo has locked in a Budget (25 March) and effectively ruled out an April election, given the minimum 33 days of campaigning required plus a couple of long weekends (Easter/ANZAC Day) that scuttle the rest of the month.

Odds are that this government will now serve a full term—so a 17 May election, the last possible date. When asked for the nth time about whether the voters care about when the election will be held, Albo said:

"[Of] course they don't [care]… I'm focused on helping Australians, not focused on votes, and you know that I did get a bit frustrated with people continuing to [ask]," Albanese said. "I think governments should serve their full term. We're governing, and we're governing in a way that's completely put politics aside. We're just about helping people because that's what people expect and that's what they deserve."

Look, that's fair enough. The only untruth is the claim that he isn't "focused on votes", given that the primary job of a politician is to win re-election, not to govern. That politicians "operate within the constraints of a competitive electoral market" and respond to incentives in the same way as you or I do is a cornerstone of the theory of public choice, as much as they like to claim otherwise:

"More than anything else, politicians need to win elections. Granted, if we surveyed them most probably would not volunteer that they consciously try to maximise their chance of reelection. But what they tell us they do is beside the point. For whatever they say they do, those that don’t work to maximise their odds of reelection will less likely stay in office. As two scholars recently put it, 'legislators who indulge their preferences at the expense of their constituents' preferences put themselves at a competitive electoral disadvantage.' According to an enormous array of empirical studies, legislators who change the way they vote and ignore their constituents' preferences regularly lose their jobs."

I find this all very interesting, so I thought I'd get into a bit more about why there's a need to speculate week in, week out, as the election deadline approaches: Australia's flexible three-year federal terms.

Australia's three-year terms

Albo's solution to being bombarded about the election date for more than a year now has been to express his support for four-year terms, arguing that:

"I think that our terms are too short with just three years. Our view, our long-term policy, and we've put it to the Australian people, is for four-year terms, but I don't anticipate that happening any time soon and I think that's unfortunate."

Albo has support not just from opposition leader Peter Dutton, but also business leaders like CBA's Matt Comyn, who recently called the three-year election cycle "defeatist", despite the fact that his own board also answers to its shareholders every three years (does a nation need less of a voice than a bank?).

But this isn't the first time the potential for four-year terms has been raised. In fact, Australia has had three-year maximum federal term limits since federation, with the two options tabled at the time being the current model and a four-year variation. The latter was defeated because of the Senate:

"This decision was arguably influenced by a desire to harmonise the House terms with the already settled six-year term of the Senate, rather than by any serious objection to four-year terms in principle."

To move from three- to four-years, if so desired, would require changing how the Senate works. At present, Senators get fixed six-year terms from 1 July to 30 June six years later, and half of them are up for re-election every time a general election is called (they still serve full terms).

If the Senate wasn't changed – and I'll add that a referendum to amend the Constitution is needed to do it – we could end up with a costly, confusing situation of separate elections for the House and Senate. It just wouldn't pass muster.

That means Senate terms would have to shift from the current six years to either four or eight. Both come with their own set of trade-offs:

• Four-year terms would amount to a double dissolution every election. It would also remove the uniquely Australian feature of only half the senate being elected each cycle, which can act as a check on one-party or dictatorial ambitions in the event of an overwhelmingly lopsided election.
• Eight-year terms might come across as self-serving for a group of politicians that already enjoy relatively long terms. Moreover, voters might cringe at the possibility of giving future rogue senators in the vein of Lidia Thorpe and Fatima Payman, who secured very few votes and were only elected because they were originally on the ticket of another party, an extra two years.

Either option is likely to ruffle more than a few feathers, and when the Hawke government put the first option to a referendum in 1988, it was resoundingly defeated in every state and territory.

Finally, switching from three- to four-years would actually do nothing to stop the election speculation that so frustrates Albo. The only way to resolve that would be to switch from maximum terms to fixed terms, a legislative option that was recently suggested by Senator Pocock. But doing so could jeopardise another feature of Australian politics—namely, the ability of the Governor General to dissolve the House and trigger an early election.

As usual, it's all about trade-offs!

Is three years long enough?