RESOLVING ISSUES THROUGH PARLIAMENT: FROM CONFLICTS BETWEEN PEOPLES TO CONFLICTS WITH TECHNOLOGY
The Editor’s note
Sri Lanka’s three decades of brutal civil war are not attributed to flaws in its system of democratic representation; but reform to that system is seen by contributors to this issue as one of the keys to the country’s recovery and reconciliation process. It also emerges here in solutions to problems with representation in New South Wales, Canada and Montserrat. The terrorism and conflict
which have caused so much suffering and loss of life in Sri Lanka since the 1980s dominate the views of the country’s government and opposition Members who write in this issue’s special Profile on Sri Lanka to mark its Parliament’s hosting of this year’s Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference. Few Commonwealth countries have experienced the level of conflict that Sri Lanka has; although thankfully no terrorism has yet produced anything close to the natural destruction inflicted on Montserrat by its volcano. A current proposition in
parliamentary strengthening advocates measures to make Parliament and its Members more effective representatives of the people so they identify conflicts early and work with the people and
the government to implement effective solutions. The underlying theme of the articles in our Sri Lankan Profile shows that sometimes no amount of democratic reforms early in a dispute will satisfy a terrorist element intent on escalating a conflict. The Profile also reveals dissatisfaction with proportional representation, a voting system that its advocates say improves the representation of minorities and therefore prevents their political alienation. Sri Lanka introduced
proportional representation before the conflict began and used it again as part of its democratic reforms in 1987 which devolved some authority to elected provincial councils to satisfy the publicly avowed separatist goal of the terrorist movement. These reforms failed to stop the conflict; but Sri Lanka’s parliamentary leaders write in this issue that they remain committed to parliamentary democracy and its reform to enable the country to develop and prevent it from falling back into the violence spiral. In New South Wales, violence
was not the issue that Premier Hon. Barry O’Farrell, MP, and his government sought to correct with a reform to its democratic
84 | The Parliamentarian | 2012: Issue Two
system. The Premier opens this issue with an account of why election financing rules were changed so campaign financing contributions comes only from the state’s voters. He explains how the state is seeking to do this, including overcoming the challenge facing legislators and regulators dealing with money: how to control the flow of a resource that moves freely through the electronic world. The impact of that virtual world
is being felt in politics in a variety of other ways as well. In one area, the media, it has exposed certain United Kingdom media practices to highly critical parliamentary scrutiny. Lord Black of Brentwood, a Member of the U.K. House of Lords with a high-level media background, writes here on a new Commonwealth Press Union Media Trust report on legislation and other measures used around the Commonwealth to curtail freedom of expression in the media. These measures can damage the “established” media of print and broadcasting; but they can’t control the “new” media of internet-based bloggers and social networking sites against which the established media must compete. Governments considering action against the established media risk damaging the ability not simply of
print and broadcasting to inform the people, but also of the people to have access to responsible and reliable professional sources of political and parliamentary news. Citizens who have only bloggers and social media fanatics to rely on for news will not have a balanced – or often even accurate – perspective on their own governance. Hon. Tim Uppal, PC, MP,
Canada’s Minister of State responsible for democratic reform, tackles a particular aspect of the social media issue as he describes plans to reform part of Canada’s historic democratic process – the ban on publishing election results while voting is still going on in different time zones. The ability of Canada’s election administrators to prevent the established media from influencing election results in this way has been destroyed by the internet. Mr Uppal re-examines the issue, including whether knowing the results from an earlier time zone actually does affect the results in other parts of the country. In Montserrat, Prof. Sir
Howard Fergus, KBE, PhD, a former Speaker of the Legislative Council and de facto Deputy Governor, looks at the latest constitutional reforms introduced in a United Kingdom overseas