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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

> The case of Peter Mandelson, who resigned from the Lords in February after revelations about his friendship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, drew renewed attention to the upper chamber and the problem of lords behaving badly.

But Mandelson wasn't a hereditary noble. His example is an argument for abolishing the House of Lords entirely (which I agree with in any case) but not specifically for ejecting hereditary nobles.

> Labour remains committed to eventually replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is “more representative of the U.K.” If past experience is anything to go by, change will come slowly.

Why does the House of Lords need to be replaced at all? Most countries are gridlocked enough with one chamber of parliament.

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>Why does the House of Lords need to be replaced at all? Most countries are gridlocked enough with one chamber of parliament.

Depends how it is designed. The australian senate, before 2015 or so, used to contain enough fun cooks that legislation had to get broad support to make it through. It was a pretty decent check against the beige dictatorship. But since they updated the voting rules to prevent the cool minor parties from holding the balance, its just been a massive rubber stamp. I loved seeing randos from minor parties getting to grill public servants on whatever their constituents were complaining about, particularly firearm legislation.

> The australian senate, before 2015 or so, used to contain enough fun cooks that legislation had to get broad support to make it through. It was a pretty decent check against the beige dictatorship. But since they updated the voting rules to prevent the cool minor parties from holding the balance, its just been a massive rubber stamp

Current numbers in Australian Senate: Government 29, Opposition 27, Crossbench 20, 39 needed for majority. So if the opposition opposes a government bill, the government needs 10 crossbench senators to vote for it - if the Greens support it, that’s enough; if they oppose it, the government can still pass the bill if they get the votes of the 10 non-Green crossbench senators (4 One Nation; 3 independents; 3 single senator minor parties)

I can’t see how this is by any reasonable definition a “rubber stamp”

The Australian parliament is weird but it kind of works.

Members of the House of Representatives ("lower house") are elected via preferential voting and each member represents a single electorate (there are 150 electorates), all of the electorates are roughly proportional population wise (there is an independent body that draws up the boundaries), however the geographical area covered by each electorate can vary greatly. For example in the State of New South Wales there are dozen of electorates covering the various suburbs of Sydney and one massively sized electorate covering a huge rural portion of the same state where population density is very low.

The Senate (Upper House) is fixed there are 12 members for every state and 1 member per territory. This means that Tasmania which is a fraction of the population of New South Wales has exactly the same number of Senators. There are about half a million people in Tasmania compares to 8 Million+ in NSW. So relatively speaking your upper house vote has way more power if you live in a smaller state.

The senate also uses transferable vote with a quota system. The quota system and "vote transfer" makes it a little weird and it is why minor candidates can percolate up and end up a senator despite relatively small primary vote.

"Crossbench"

The Greens voted with the LNP to change the senate voting rules, pulling the ladder up behind them. They are just a third leg of the major parties.

Wheres my Australian Motoring Enthusiast? Wheres my Shooters Farmers and Fishers rep? Even the "Libertarian" (formerly Liberal Democrats) party had the occasional flash of brilliance.

Paymen was voted in with the ALP and probably wont rate reelection.

The only halfway decent crazy crossbench we have right now is Lambo, and shes only good like 45% of the time. Lidia thorpe can be good quality but shes like Paymen, and wont be reelected solo.

Heaps of these crossbenchers are only there thanks to Climate 200 funding, which will vanish the second that bloke achieves his goals or gets bored and wanders off.

>I can’t see how this is by any reasonable definition a “rubber stamp”

Labor shops everything to the LNP or Greens, and chooses the one they can more easily bully into compliance. LNP does the same when they are in power.

Gridlock can be good if you get a daft leader. Those things do happen.

Does House of Lords have any real power today?

Sort of. They can and do amend bills, but they can't overrule the Commons on anything the latter regards as important.

"Important" is quite a high bar in this case though if the House of Lords is insistent enough to actually vote something down. The cost in terms of parliamentary time for the government these days of using the Parliament Acts is very high (especially for things which government would normally do via secondary legislation), and it also requires at least a one year delay; by extension the potential political cost to the government of using the Parliament Acts to pass something unpopular or controversial is set at a high enough bar that it's an effective veto.

This feels like quite a sensible safety valve to me.

With a very small number of exceptions, including changing the maximum duration of Parliament from 5 years.

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