We are pleased to announce the publication of our latest paper co-authored by GLaD research team members, Dr Sean Mulcahy and Prof Kate Seear, entitled ‘“The tribunes of the people, the tongues o’ the common mouth”: Parliamentarians as representatives when scrutinising laws’ and published in the journal Law and Humanities.
The paper was first presented at the Law and Humanities Roundtable in Verona, ‘Shakespeare at Large: Law and the First Folio’, which was held on the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio in 1623 in the place where Shakespeare set his plays Romeo and Juliet and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The Roundtable invited reflections on intersections between Shakespeare and the law.
Our contribution to that Roundtable and resulting publication considers the relationship between Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus and contemporary Australian parliamentarians. Based on interviews with parliamentarians and parliamentary staffers, it explores how parliamentarians approach and grapple with their role as representatives of the people when undertaking human rights scrutiny of proposed laws, in relation to the tribunes, the quasi-parliamentarian characters of Shakespeare’s play. It also reflects on how parliamentarians’ representative character inflects their scrutiny of legislation. As we conclude:
Publics influence parliamentarians and their human rights scrutiny practices in several ways. First, many argue that representatives – as opposed to senators – are ill-suited to the work of human rights scrutiny because they are more directly driven by the interests of the people they represent. However, others argue that this makes them more attuned to the human rights impact of legislative measures on the people affected. Second, the competing demands of representatives may compel them to compartmentalize their work, separating their representative function from their parliamentary role in human rights scrutiny. Yet, these roles blur and parliamentarians not only represent but influence public opinion, including on human rights issues. Third and finally, in seeking to influence, representatives may deprioritise abstract human rights and emphasize material popular concerns and may also privilege popular opinion over expert evidence.
We find that expert and public opinion need not be diametrically opposed; both are necessary to inform political decision-making, and both are unstable categories that are subject to vagaries and contestation. Just how politicians listen to expertise and public opinion in the context of parliamentary human rights scrutiny bears further consideration.
The paper was further developed whilst Sean was a visiting scholar at the Department of Law and Criminology at Sheffield Hallam University, as part of its strategic partnership with La Trobe University. We thank all those who provided feedback throughout its development and acknowledge the interviewees who gave so generously of their time to be part of it.