Without “Bipartisanship” Have Referendums to Change the Australian Constitution Ever Succeeded? An Unnoticed Success, Several Near-Misses, and the Struggle to Explain Why Referendums Fail

Abstract

That bipartisanship has been required for referendums to change the Australian Constitution to succeed is regarded widely as axiomatic. But the idea of bipartisanship as a necessary condition of success is relatively new; in the first half of the twentieth century, party opposition did not loom large in accounts of why referendums failed. And for good reason. As this article shows, the importance attached to bipartisanship is based on a misreading of the record from 1906 to 1951: first, because there is one referendum—the 1946 referendum on Social Services—that passed without bipartisan support; second, because several other referendums came close to passing, despite lacking bipartisan support; and third, because bipartisanship allows for the minor party in a coalition to be opposed provided the major party is in favour—one reason why commentators have misread the success of the Social Services referendum. Whether or not bipartisanship has been necessary, it has never been regarded as sufficient. Attempts to identify more than one factor in the success of referendums have proliferated. But attempts to measure their relative importance—either in particular referendums or across referendums as a whole—have not got us very far.