Speaker of the Australian House of Representatives

Speaker of the House of Representatives
The Speaker's chair in the House of Representatives
Incumbent Anna Burke (acting) since 22 April 2012
Style	The Honourable (Diplomatic) Madam/Mister Speaker (within the House)
Appointer	Elected by the House of Representatives
Inaugural holder	Sir Frederick Holder, KCMG 9 May 1901
Formation	Constitution of Australia 9 July 1900
Website	aph.gov.au/speaker

The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the presiding officer of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the Parliament of Australia. The presiding officer in the upper house is the President of the Senate.

The current Speaker is Peter Slipper. Following his election to the speakership on 24 November 2011, he stood down from the Liberal National Party to become an independent MP. His election came as a result of the resignation of the previous speaker, Labor's Harry Jenkins, Jr. On 22 April 2012, Slipper resigned as Speaker following allegations of sexual harassment and fraud. Deputy Speaker Anna Burke is acting as Speaker.

The office of Speaker was created by section 35 of the Constitution of Australia. The authors of the Constitution intended that the House of Representatives should be as nearly as possible a replica of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom.

Election

Section 35 of the Constitution provides:

The House of Representatives shall, before proceeding to the despatch of any other business, choose a member to be the Speaker of the House, and as often as the office of Speaker becomes vacant the House shall again choose a member to be the Speaker.

The Speaker is elected by the House of Representatives in a secret ballot. The Clerk conducts the election. The first Speaker, Sir Frederick Holder, sat as an independent after his election as Speaker. Unlike the Speaker of the House of Commons in Britain, the Speaker continues to attend party meetings, and at general elections stands as a party candidate.

There is no convention in Australia that the Speaker should not be opposed in his or her constituency, and three Speakers (Groom in 1929, Nairn in 1943 and Aston in 1972) have been defeated at general elections. Because the Speaker is always the nominee of the governing party, there is no expectation that a Speaker will continue in office following a change of government. While the Opposition sometimes nominates one of its own members for Speaker after a general election, this is understood to be a symbolic act, and party discipline is always followed in any ballot.

Most Speakers have been senior backbenchers of the party holding office at the start of a new Parliament, or at the time of the death or resignation of an incumbent Speaker. Four Speakers have been former government ministers (Watt, Groom, Cameron and Sinclair), one a former Parliamentary Secretary (Martin), and one (Snedden) both a former minister and a former Leader of the Opposition. Two were former state premiers (Holder and Watt).

There is no convention in Australia that Speakers should resign from Parliament at the end of their term: two Speakers (Makin and Scholes) have become Cabinet ministers after having been Speaker.

Origin

The name "Speaker" originates from early times in the United Kingdom House of Commons. "Mr Speaker" was a description rather than a title, the speaker being the Member of Parliament chosen to speak for them to the King. The first recorded use of the term "Speaker" was in 1377. During earlier times when the King was very powerful, he would usually only call the Parliament together in order to get it to agree to levy taxes. The Speaker would report parliament decisions to the King, which proved to be dangerous if it was not what the King wanted to hear. It was not uncommon for early speakers of parliament to be beheaded, with another being "murdered". The traditional token reluctance shown by a Member on being elected Speaker dates from this time, when a Member’s struggle not to be physically forced into the Chair could have been completely genuine. The practice in the House of Representatives that the newly elected Speaker is escorted to the Chair by his supporters derives from this tradition.

Role

The Speaker's principal duty is to preside over the House, although he is assisted in this by the Deputy Speakers and a panel of Acting Speakers, who usually preside during routine debates. The Speaker must maintain order in the House, uphold the Standing Orders (rules of procedure), rule on points of order, and protect the rights of backbench members. The Speaker is assisted by two deputies, both also elected by the House: the Deputy Speaker and Second Deputy Speaker, the latter of which must be elected from an opposition party. The Speaker, in conjunction with the President of the Senate, also administers Parliament House, Canberra, with the assistance of an administrative staff.

Australian parliaments are notoriously rowdy, and the Speaker frequently exercises the disciplinary powers available under Standing Orders. The Speaker may summarily order a Member to excuse him or herself from the House for one hour. For more serious offences, the Speaker may "name" a Member: he says "I name the Honourable Member for X," following the House's convention that Members are always referred to by their electorate. The House then votes on a motion to suspend the Member for 24 hours. (The House also had the power to permanently expel a Member, but this happened only once, in 1920 – the member was Hugh Mahon. Under Section 8 of the Parliamentary Privileges Act 1987, the House no longer has the power to expel a member from membership of the House.)

Impartiality

Although Australian Speakers are supposed to behave with reasonable impartiality, they see it as part of their duty to support the Government of the day in getting its business through the House, and generally rule in favour of the Government on the frequent points of order raised by Opposition members. Speakers are regularly accused of favouring the Government, and on occasion motions of dissent in the Speaker's rulings or motions of no confidence in the Speaker are moved. These are always defeated along party lines.

On the other hand, the Speaker is not an active political figure like the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. He or she does not take part in debates in the House, does not vote in the House except in the (rare) event of a tied vote, and does not speak in public on party-political issues (except at election time in his or her own constituency). He or she is expected to conduct the business of the House in an impartial manner, and generally does so.

There have been several memorable clashes between Speakers and the governments that caused them to be elected:

• In 1929 Speaker Sir Littleton Groom declined to come into the House and cast a vote in committee when his vote would have saved the Bruce government from defeat. As a result he was expelled from the Nationalist Party and defeated in his constituency at the subsequent election.
• In 1975 the Whitlam government refused to support Speaker Jim Cope when he named government minister Clyde Cameron for disrespect to the Chair: normally this would have resulted in the minister's suspension from the House. The Speaker resigned on the spot. This is the only circumstance where a Government had failed to support a Speaker after a Member had been named.
• In 1982 Speaker Sir Billy Snedden refused to insist that an opposition frontbencher, Bob Hawke, retract an allegation that the Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, was a liar. Snedden stood his ground despite furious demands from government members that Hawke either be made to retract or be named. The Hansard of the day's sitting shows that Sir Billy refused to put the question that 'the honourable member for Wills (Hawke) be suspended from the services of the House' so that Parliament can function for that day.

In addition, a notable occurrence in 2011, a Speaker survived being countermanded by the House. After a contentious debate on carbon pricing in which the Speaker Harry Jenkins declared a "general warning" for all members, Liberal MP Bob Baldwin interjected and was named by the Speaker. The Government accordingly moved that he be suspended, but Baldwin was supported by the Coalition, independent MP Rob Oakeshott and WA Nationals MP Tony Crook. The resulting vote on suspending Baldwin for 24 hours failed 71–72. Convention would normally have required the Speaker to resign, but the House of Representatives immediately thereafter approved a motion of confidence in the Speaker, and as a consequence, Speaker Jenkins continued in office.

Independent and non-government speakers

Precedents for independent MP speakers are former LNP MP Peter Slipper who is the current speaker in the hung parliament resulting from the 2010 election; Frederick Holder who was initially elected for the Free Trade Party at the inaugural 1901 election, serving as an independent while speaker until his death in 1909; and in the Senate, Labor's Mal Colston became an independent and Deputy President of the Senate following the 1996 election. In the previous hung parliament elected at the 1940 election, the United Australia Party's Walter Nairn was speaker during the Curtin Labor government that was formed in 1941. Opposition MP Carty Salmon initially served as speaker for the first federal Australian majority government, the Andrew Fisher Labor government, resulting from the 1910 election. At the 1913 election, Labor's Charles McDonald was offered retention of the speakership by the incoming one-seat-majority Commonwealth Liberal Party, but declined – later however, after Labor's return to government at the 1914 election, McDonald regained the speakership until the subsequent election despite the mid-term change to a Nationalist Party government.

Perquisites

George Mackay as Speaker (1932–1934), wearing the full traditional dress.

A Member elected Speaker is entitled, while Speaker, to the title 'The Honourable', which, with the approval of the Sovereign, may be retained for life. This privilege is usually only given to those who have served as Speaker for three years or more. The immediate past Speaker, Harry Jenkins, was the first Speaker to ask that "The Hon." not be used in reference to him, while also making clear that he was not attempting to set a precedent for future speakers; he was simply not personally comfortable with the title.

Following the Westminster tradition inherited from the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, the traditional dress of the speaker includes components of Court dress such as the black silk lay-type gown (similar to a Queen's Counsel gown), a wing collar and a lace jabot or bands (another variation included a white bow tie with a lace jabot), bar jacket, and a full-bottomed wig. The wig available for use by the speaker was used by Herbert 'Doc' Evatt when he was a High Court Justice (1930–1940) and was donated to the Parliament by Evatt when he was elected to the House in 1951. The wig is currently on loan from the speaker's office to the Museum of Australian Democracy. Another addition, though only for the most formal occasions, includes court shoes and hose. The dress of speakers has often variated according to the party in power, but is determinate on the personal choice of the speaker. All Labor party speakers have worn normal dress of a business suit, following the example set by their first speaker, Charles McDonald.

The Speaker, currently, no longer wears the full traditional dress. However, there is nothing stopping any given Speaker, if they choose to do so, from assuming traditional court dress or anything they deem appropriate. Billy Snedden (1976–1983) was the last speaker to do so. The Labor practice resumed from 1983 until the election of the Howard Government in 1996. The new speaker Bob Halverson chose to wear the court dress of the speaker upon his election in April 1996, returning to tradition by wearing the full traditional dress but without the wig. Speaker Ian Sinclair chose to resume normal business dress during his brief term in 1998. However the gown, albeit of a simpler academic style, returned with the election of Speakers Andrew and Hawker. Speaker Jenkins resumed Labor practice from 2007 until the election of Peter Slipper in late 2011. Speaker Slipper went one step further to restoring the traditional dress by the gown and the QC's bar jacket underneath his business attire. Slipper has also taken to wearing a white long tie or bow tie, in a variation from the lace jabot or bands. Slipper then returned to wearing the wing collar with white bow tie and bands on the occasion of his first formal procession into parliament.

List of Speakers

#	Name	Party	Term in Office	Comments
1	Hon. Sir Frederick William Holder	Independent (formerly Free Trade Party)	9 May 1901 – 23 July 1909	Elected to parliament as a member of the Free Trade Party, contested subsequent elections as an independent. Died in office.
2	Hon. Dr (Charles) Carty Salmon	Commonwealth Liberal	23 July 1909 – 30 June 1910
3	Hon. Charles McDonald	Labor	1 July 1910 – 8 July 1913	First time in role.
4	Hon. Sir (William) Elliot Johnson	Commonwealth Liberal	9 July 1913 – 7 October 1914	First time in role.
	Hon. Charles McDonald	Labor	8 October 1914 – 13 June 1917	Second time in role.
	Hon. Sir (William) Elliot Johnson	Nationalist	14 June 1917 – 27 February 1923	Second time in role.
5	Rt. Hon. William Alexander Watt	Nationalist	28 February 1923 – 12 January 1926
6	Hon. Sir Littleton Ernest Groom	Nationalist	13 January 1926 – 11 October 1929	Defeated in his own seat.
7	Hon. Norman John Oswald Makin	Labor	20 November 1929 – 16 February 1932
8	Hon. George Hugh Alexander Mackay	United Australia	17 February 1932 – 7 August 1934
9	Hon. Sir George John Bell	United Australia	23 October 1934 – 19 November 1940
10	Hon. Walter Maxwell Nairn	United Australia	20 November 1940 – 21 June 1943	Continued as speaker when the Curtin Labor government formed in 1941. Defeated in his own seat.
11	Hon. John Solomon (Sol) Rosevear	Labor	22 June 1943 – 21 February 1950
12	Hon. Archie Galbraith Cameron	Liberal	22 February 1950 – 9 August 1956	Died in office.
13	Hon. Sir John McLeay	Liberal	29 August 1956 – 31 October 1966
14	Hon. Sir William John Aston	Liberal	21 February 1967 – 2 November 1972	Defeated in his own seat.
15	Hon. James (Jim) Francis Cope	Labor	27 February 1973 – 27 February 1975
16	Hon. Gordon Glen Denton Scholes	Labor	27 February 1975 – 16 February 1976
17	Rt. Hon. Sir Billy Mackie Snedden	Liberal	17 February 1976 – 4 February 1983
18	Hon. Dr. Henry (Harry) Alfred Jenkins, Sr.	Labor	22 April 1983 – 11 February 1986	First Speaker whose son was a later Speaker.
19	Hon. (Gloria) Joan Liles Child	Labor	11 February 1986 – 28 August 1989	The only female Speaker to date.
20	Hon. Leo Boyce McLeay	Labor	29 August 1989 – 8 February 1993
21	Hon. Stephen Paul Martin	Labor	4 May 1993 – 30 April 1996
22	Hon. Robert (Bob) George Halverson	Liberal	30 April 1996 – 3 March 1998
23	Rt. Hon. Ian McCahon Sinclair	National	4 March 1998 – 10 November 1998
24	Hon. (John) Neil Andrew	Liberal	10 November 1998 – 16 November 2004
25	Hon. David Peter Maxwell Hawker	Liberal	16 November 2004 – 12 February 2008
26	Hon. Henry (Harry) Alfred Jenkins, Jr.	Labor	12 February 2008 – 24 November 2011	First Speaker whose father was a previous Speaker.
27	Hon. Peter Neil Slipper	Independent (formerly Liberal National Party)	24 November 2011 – 22 April 2012	Elected while still a member of the Liberal National Party, but resigned his membership on the day of his election. Stood aside following harassment and fraud allegations.
28 (Acting)	Hon. Anna Burke	Labor	22 April 2012 –	Acting as Speaker after Peter Slipper stood aside.