Terms of endearment

Four-year fixed terms? Political foes love it

ON nearly every issue under the sun, Richard Marles and Sarah Henderson disagree.

But the two political rivals have found some common ground — they want fewer elections.

The Labor frontbencher and the Liberal MP have supported the push for fixed four-year terms following a weekend phone call between Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.

“Fixed four-year terms is a pretty straightforward change that would help bring some predictability to politics,” Mr Marles told the Geelong Advertiser.

“It’s working at state level here in Victoria. It won’t fix a bad government, but it would help ease the constant election cycle.

“It doesn’t need to be a controversial change. It’s something that could be done fairly easily if Malcolm Turnbull joined us to make this a commonsense, bipartisan change.”

The Australian people would ultimately be the final judge on the introduction of fixed terms due to the need for a referendum.

But past performance has not been encouraging for proponents of change. The Hawke Government went to the people on the matter in 1988, one of four issues canvassed in the mega-referendum, and more than 67 per cent respondents backed the status quo.

However, the four-year term proposal did not have bipartisan support at that time, with then Opposition Leader John Howard opposed to the suite of changes.

Prime Minister Bob Hawke was criticised at the time for not advocating the case for change more vigorously.

“This proposal was obviously put to the Australian people a long time ago and has recently been reexamined by the Member for Banks, (Liberal MP) David Coleman, who has done some good work in this area,” Ms Henderson said.

“I think the proposal of fixed, four-year terms has a lot of merit.”

Most federal governments last roughly two years and six to nine months.

The first Hawke term was notably truncated when Mr Hawke called an early election in late 1984, while the Gillard government lasted nearly three years despite a precarious grip on power due to the hung parliament.