By Dr Joo-Cheong Tham
In its 1974 decision, Buckley v Valeo, 424 US 1 (1975), the United States Supreme Court infamously ruled that:
the concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment.
Decades later, Buckley remains powerfully influential with the Supreme Court in McCutcheon v Federal Election Commission stating last year that:
No matter how desirable it may seem, it is not an acceptable governmental objective to ‘level the playing field’, or to ‘level electoral opportunities’, or to ‘equalize the financial resources of candidates’.
In McCloy v New South Wales [2015] HCA 34, the High Court emphatically rejected the approach of US Supreme Court as to the illegitimacy of political equality or fairness as a legislative objective. On the contrary, under the Commonwealth Constitution, ‘(l)egislative regulation of the electoral process directed to the protection of the integrity of the process is … prima facie legitimate’.
Central to the conclusion that political equality and fairness are legitimate legislative objectives was the High Court’s insistence that political equality was a constitutional principle. Yet, the latter was hardly necessary for the former conclusion. If elections are to be ‘free and fair’, it would seem absurd to deny Parliament the ability to regulate with the view to advancing electoral fairness, regardless of what the Constitution said about political equality. As McLachlin CJ and Major J observed in the Canadian Supreme Court decision in Harper v Canada [2004] SCC 33 — a decision favourably cited by the joint judgment and Gageler J:
Common sense dictates that promoting electoral fairness is a pressing and substantial objective in our liberal democracy.
Not only does logic fail to bind these two aspects of the High Court’s judgment in McCloy, they also carry quite different implications in terms of legislative ability to regulate elections. The High Court’s ruling that political equality and fairness are legitimate legislative objectives permits Parliaments to regulate elections for these purposes; political equality as a constitutional principle, on the other hand, will constrain the ability of Parliaments to regulate elections, even in situations when the purported justification is one of equality and fairness.
This post sounds a cautionary note on the elevation of political equality as a constitutional principle in McCloy. It does so by posing three questions, questions that alert us to the fact that political equality as a constitutional principle does not necessarily result in the realisation of political equality and, in fact, poses risks to the democratic project. Continue reading