It’s hard to tell if it’s incredibly thrilling House Of Cards shit or just overly complicated and very dry political shit, but the circumstances required for Malcolm Turnbull to enact a double dissolution election have happened, after the Senate voted down a bill to reinstate the Australian Building and Construction Commission.
What does this mean and why does this matter? Bear with me here because there’s a lot of fancy and possibly made up words involved.
A double dissolution allows the Government to request that the Governor General dissolves both the Senate and the House of Representatives. To request a double dissolution specific ‘triggers’ need to occur, the trigger in this instance being that the houses failed to agree twice on the ABCC bill.
The bill has been voted down once before but the trigger was very nearly not met when the Senate ran out of time to vote for a second time on the bill, but, with the help of the Governor General, the Government prorogued (a real word, I checked) the Senate for extra sitting time.
Why would Turnbull want to try force a double dissolution? Two possible reasons: the first is that his popularity is tanking and it would be better to go sooner while people are still a bit relieved he’s not Tony Abbott, and secondly, if the Senate voted the bill through just to stop a double dissolution he then gets a bill that he wanted to pass anyway.
Turnbull promised last month that if the bill was indeed blocked a double dissolution election would be called, meaning in all likelihood we’ll be heading to the polls July 2nd.
Source: ABC.
Photo: Getty Images / Stefan Postles.
