Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
and her Cabinet and, by convention, the governor-general is obliged to follow the
advice of her ministers.
The prime minister
First among the monarch’s ministers, the prime minister is not mentioned in the
Australian Constitution. The prime minister is the chief executive who leads the
government in the executive and in the legislature. In the executive, the prime
minister is the head of the Cabinet and can draw on the resources of her own
department (Prime Minister and Cabinet [PMC]). Through her ministers, the prime
minister is indirectly responsible for all the actions of her government. But, as
weshallsee,thisprincipledoesn’ttranslateneatlyintopractice. 10 Finally, prime
ministers have the power to ask the governor-general to dissolve parliament, and in
recent times prime ministers have asserted their power to declare war.
Today, the prime minister is also the leader of a formally organised political
party and, by convention only, drawn from the House of Representatives. The
evolution of political parties and their impact upon legislative politics has influenced
the practice of the prime ministership. The prime minister has either large
or total discretion in selecting her Cabinet and has the luxury of relying on strong
party discipline when advancing her program in the legislature. Further, prime
ministers will bring this partisan perspective, and their responsibilities as a partisan
(party) leader, to virtually all aspects of the prime ministerial role.
Powers of the prime minister
We can see that the explicit power and, even more so, the potential influence
of the prime minister extends from the executive and the bureaucracy to the
legislatureandtoherownparty.Itisnosurprisethenthattheroleoftheprime
minister is poorly defined in Westminster systems like Australia. Few specific
rules, laws or handbooks of practice have been written about the role. Instead,
roles and responsibilities are in part a product of tradition and convention and in
part a product of the prime minister’s own creativity. A prime minister’s capacity
to exercise all of this power is influenced not only by the official rules, or even
conventions, but also by other political actors’ perceptions of her power. Strong
prime ministers may expand their role into new domains or appropriate powers to
themselves that were previously executed by other ministers, actors or institutions.
They can do this because the role is not codified and in circumstances where other
actors’ perception of the prime minister’s personal authority is high enough to
overcome internal resistance.
10 Jennings 1966.
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