Let's be less precious about changing our constitution

Briefly, the problem with Scott Morrison signing himself up in secret to head a smorgasbord of ministries is that it makes a mockery of the idea of responsible government, which is theoretically the kind that Australia has.

The underlying principle is that when there's an enormous stuff-up you can't blame the monarch, because that would be treason, but you have to blame someone; and that someone is the responsible minister, the person on whose watch it all went pear-shaped. If you don't know who that person is, there's no way for the blame to be grounded.

That's the principle. In practice, there's nothing in the Australian constitution to prevent the PM of the day from being the Minister of Everything. Why would there be?

It's not as if the authors of the Australian constitution had any idea that this kind of thing could happen. It hadn't come up at any time in the 850-year history of English constitutional development thus far, and they can't be blamed for not foreseeing it.

The same goes for the last four or five or six constitutional trainwrecks. The founders didn't anticipate Joh Bjelke-Petersen, or Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam and Sir John Kerr, or Clive Palmer, or Twitter. The constitution is trying to run a Boeing 777X on the operating system of a Wright brothers biplane.

And this isn't unique to the nation's constitution. As managing director of Our Community, working for the Australian community sector, I'm unhappily aware of just how many charities and not-for-profits have been brought down by constitutional failures and, even more worrying, of how many others can go forward only by agreeing not to enforce what their constitution prescribes.

By that standard, the Australian constitution isn't the worst governing document in the country.

Have a look at the case notes produced by Queensland University of Technology's Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies. You'll find community groups by the dozen running aground, blowing up and sinking because they wrote provisions into their constitutions that worked perfectly until they didn't.

Recently, for example, Fred Nile's Christian Democratic party went into receivership because the constitution said that board members had to be voted for by 75 per cent of the electorate. As soon as a dispute arose, it was impossible to elect a board at all. The Australian constitution isn't quite that stupid.

You have to have some rules, yes. But all constitutions are unsatisfactory. All constitutions leave out important qualifications. All constitutions will sooner or later become millstones around your neck.

The first defence against getting undone by your own protections is for all parties to be reasonable about it. Most community groups have enough common sense not to push things to the limit. If there's a problem, everybody agrees to avert their eyes until it's been successfully shoved under the carpet again.

If nobody complains, it never happened. Which is perfectly fine and a great timesaver, but unfortunately not an option open to Australia as a nation which has lawyers with time on their hands.

The second (and very much second best) thing you can do about constitutional problems is fix them. This has two defects.

The first is that the process of shoving in fixes for individual problems eventually leaves your constitution an overstuffed hamper of trivialities that is still absurdly unprepared for the next unanticipated contingency (lawyers are always fighting the last war). The second is that constitutional amendment is unnecessarily difficult.

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In Australia, constitutional amendments generally go down. This isn't, thank providence, because we respect the wisdom of the nation's founders, the way the Americans do.

Hardly any Australians know their names, and nobody has ever regarded them as gods. No, constitutional referendums generally fail because Australians are suspicious that politicians are trying to put something over them.

The only way I can see to fix this procedural roadblock is to make constitutional referendums more like municipal elections and less like moral crusades. If we had, say, five or six motions on the ballot paper every three years, we surely wouldn't be driven to make such an almighty fuss over them. We want the Indigenous Voice to Parliament to pass, don't we?

Then we should have started breaking the ground about three elections ago, with some baby steps.

I would have begun with an amendment striking out the bits of the constitution that applied to the first Parliament only ("The Parliament shall be summoned to meet not later than six months after the establishment of the Commonwealth") just to establish the principle that the constitution is boring horseshit that can be greatly improved by regular review (this goes for community groups, too).

As for further changes, don't be too precious: if they don't work out, we'll change them next election. No biggie. If only.