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Comment by dane-pgp | Hacker News Reader

> a symbolic minor depoliticised role is better to me

There would be no harm in directly electing such a person, and it would be good to prevent the government of the day using its majority to elect a president who just rubber-stamps whatever they want.

The advantage of having a directly elected president, is that they can act as a check and balance against a government which concentrates executive and legislative power into the hands of one party and effectively one person, the Prime Minister.

By limiting the president's powers to just vetoing legislation and resolving confidence/dismissal issues, these levers of power would be available for use, sparingly, and in a democratically accountable way. In return, parliament would have the ability to impeach the president or call a new presidential election. This would prevent the president from interfering unduly in the day-to-day running of the country.

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This is something I just fundamentally disagree with. There are far more examples of good democracies with indirectly elected presidents and far more examples of directly elected politicised presidents, than would let me be optimistic for your model.

Plus, I think you misunderstand the role of a symbolic president, they are not meant to be the arbiter of fit laws passed in vote by parliament.

I wasn't arguing in favour of a purely symbolic president, but I should have made that clear at the start of my reply, I apologise.

The kind of role I was imagining is one that could have a legal continuity with the GG role (and could keep the same name), but their mandate would come from the people, and not the monarch.

My point was, by limiting their power, they would be very different from a US style executive president, and ideally (if the government of the day was doing its job properly) this president would indeed find themselves only performing symbolic/ceremonial functions.

If you gave an elected official outside of parliament the power to veto legislation they would have a lot more power than the governor general now wields in practice.

While royal assent is technically a power held by a GG they don't actually wield it in practice, once that power were given to an elected office then the elections would become about the use of that power and the role would be very different.

Yes, I think this is what I wanted to say.

I would say that if someone has a power and chooses to never use it, that is itself a political act (one which is biased towards the governing party).

Giving this power a democratic mandate and legitimacy may make the role "very different", but that doesn't mean the constitutional dynamic would be worse.

The non-use of the powers of the GG is an essential part of the structure of the governments of Canada & Australia and of course it is a political act, the bias towards the parliament is intentional, the parliament is supreme.

I feel it is self-evident that the new dynamic created by an elected GG would be worse. If you have a person at the head of government whose only job is to say no to things and resolve constitutional disputes they are left with only those tools to differentiate themselves from other candidates.

That creates an incentive system for this person to veto and manufacture constitutional strife in order to create a profile for themselves. It is a role built specifically for political arsonists.

That seems to rely on the school of thought that "there's no such thing as bad publicity". Perhaps you're right, and someone could be skilful enough as president to create crises, despite their limited power, and also trick people into thinking that the crises are someone else's fault, and still somehow able to take the credit when they solve these crises.

On the other hand, I think such a belief requires one to hold quite a low view of the public and democratic processes generally. You might say that experience supports such a low view, but I would counter that it applies equally, or more so, to the status quo, where all power is held by the prime minister, who has every incentive (and much greater ability) to create these crises (especially just before elections) and tell the country that they have to unite behind the government to survive.

The fact that such a strategy is already possible under the current system just confirms to me that there needs to be different roles, held by different people, with different incentives, to stop these extreme edge cases. I think that what is self-evident is that concentration of power leads to abuse, while diffusion of power leads to moderation and representativeness.

I think this is a bit of a mischaracterization of my position but I do think you are arguing in good faith. I don't have a low view of the public or democratic processes, I have a high view of it!

I look at the American political system and imagine a version of it where the president was the president but did not in fact operate the executive, that person's only job was the power of the veto - it seems like a nightmare.

The idea that a PM has some incentive to manufacture a crisis is true I suppose, but that is a very high-risk strategy. Real-world experience indicates that popular support is a product of good economic conditions and the rare exceptions to these instances (i.e. GWB post-9/11) stand out because they are very extraordinary. (And usually end very badly!) Every political body at every level has the power to manufacture a crisis and benefit from it, but that isn't very effective because the electorate understands that they have the power to address the crisis, or prevent it in the first place so the existence of that dynamic doesn't prove much of anything from my perspective.

Sorry if I misunderstood your position, and thank you for clarifying it.

Personally I don't see why it would be a nightmare if the US president didn't operate the executive. I think voters would be a lot less worried about the "wrong" person getting elected if the president couldn't declare war or appoint SCOTUS judges, so this change might reduce some of the tribalism.

As you say, every political body has the power to create crises, and the electorate should quickly see through any deliberate attempts to create one, so there seems little risk that the minimal-president role I am suggesting would attract people motivated to cause trouble.

> By limiting the president's powers to just vetoing legislation

The Irish President cannot veto legislation outright. If they have concerns about the constitutionality of legislation, they can refer it to the Supreme Court for an opinion on its constitutionality; they do not sign the legislation while the Court opinion is pending, but if the Court upholds its constitutionality, they must sign, and then the law enters into force anyway if they refuse.

They also have a never-used power to refer legislation to a national referendum instead of signing it. They cannot exercise this power on their own initiative, only when presented with a petition signed by a significant minority of Parliament. They’ve never been presented with such a petition. If they were, they’d have discretion whether to accept the petition and refer the legislation to a referendum, or ignore it and sign it anyway.

I think, if Australia was to have a directly elected President, we should copy the Irish model and grant the President only this limited veto power. The GG’s current power of veto is rather pointless in that it has never been used and it seems unlikely ever to be used. It is hard to conceive of a scenario in which a GG could use that veto power and survive in their office.

India does this, but the President’s veto is both toothless (they can only refuse to sign a legislation twice) and rarely used (last two presidents haven’t used it).

However the president is a nomination confirmed by the parliament, so it’s not exactly the same thing. The Vice-President gets a vote split but that is also rarely used (once a decade maybe).

In my perspective, it adds additional bureaucracy, overhead, and administrative expenses for very little gain.

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