Beavering down under

We've been beavering away - searching for any kind of law which prevents government from lying to the electorate and gives the people direct legal action. Surprisingly - we think we've come across such a thing in Australia.

The statute we've found takes it's basic principle from the Trades Descriptions Act - you can't make a statement purporting to be a statement of fact, which is inaccurate or misleading to a material extent. The state of Southern Australia have applied this to election campaigns ! Can you imagine what would happen if we had the same law here ?

All well and good - but we still need to establish a contract or obligation between us (the people) and the Government and then get past Parliamentary Sovereignty (technically, Parliament is the highest court in the land, the source of all law etc. etc.) which means they're immune from prosecution.

These guys have been running the show for a while now (300 plus years) and have evolved a highly sophisticated set of smoke and mirrors that gives us the illusion of accountability via self-regulation (for example the independent investigation of MPs). But as we've discovered from the Parliamentary Commissioner - there are some critical gaps ;

1. There's no independent investigation of Ministers (the Government)
2. Independent investigation is a beautiful thing, but it ain't much cop if you have to report to the very people you're investigating and rely on them for sentencing.

Fact is, the combination of both these points and Parliamentary Sovereignty means effectively, our only legal redress is at the General Election once every four or five years.

Now that can't be right - if I employ an agent on a 5 year contract and he breaches one of his fundamental obligations (such as honesty to me) - there's no court in the land which would say I'm stuck with the guy until the five years are up !

Our current thinking is starting to smell like we may have found a blueprint for accountability but need to find a way of making it apply to the government, not just elections. The problem is, to legally overcome "Parliamentary Sovereignty" we've got to ask Parliament to vote for it. One of the comments you posted said something along the lines of "asking turkeys to vote for Christmas". We agree - you've only got to check out the interview with Lord Pendry to see how entrenched the notion of Parliamentary Sovereignty is.

I suppose a law banning misleading or misrepresentative statements in elections would be a good start in any case - when we interviewed Professor Conor Gearty (our guru/oracle on constitutional law) he certainly thought so.

If you've any thoughts/ideas - comment or e-mail us. We're gonna need all the help we can get. In the meantime, we'll be digging into the history and context of the statute we've found and trawling through the law libraries here for anything half relevant.

Martin Bell OBE (and ex MP) will have much to say about this - we'll be posting his interview early next week.