Number37
Anyhow, have a Winfield 25.
- Oct 5, 2013
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I've told you what responsible government is with the definition from a constitutional law expert.
Obstructing responsible goverment by arbitrarily exercising reserve powers such as witholding royal assent is unlikely to make the monarch popular. The whole point of reserve powers exercised by the monarch and his/her representatives is that those reserve powers mostly operate in the background and operate as an incentive to appropriate behaviour by politicians in delivering a responsible government. The people have the ultimate say. A referendum can remove the monarchy fkr example and as I have said the monarch would have no choice but to give the royal assent to do so, if the decision by the people was made in accordance with the Constitution..
It is for this reason that a monarch would not obstruct responsible goverment by arbitrarily exercising the reserve powers and will therefore act mostly by convention. Refusing royal assent has only happened in Australian history because of drafting mistakes and hasn't happened in Britain since 1708.
Robert Blackburn, Professor of Constitutional Law at King’s College in London suggested in his paper "Monarchy and the Personal Prerogatives" 2004 that the monarch's granting of royal assent is now limited to due process and is a certification that a bill has passed all established parliamentary procedures. The Royal Assent cannot act as a veto power.
The current system has a number of checks and balances.
You left out the most important bit of responsible govt.
The responsible part comes from the ability of the people to elect members of parliament.
The responsible part is responsibility to the people.
Which has nothing to do with the monarch.
The people cannot force the monarch to do anything.
That's why we ended up with the Magna Carta.
I've already explained this to you.
The King said, he can do whatever the F he wants, because it is the divine right of a King to do as he wants.
The people said to the King, yeah sure you can have your divine right of a King, but we want something a little more concrete that entrenches some of our rights. Enter the Magna Carta.
What that should tell you, is that the people didn't have any power over the King, other than to threaten to chop his head off, and the King recognised that he would get his head chopped off, so he gave the peeps some of the things they wanted.
The King still to this day has their divine right. If they so choose, they could unwind the entire Constitution and nobody could do anything about it...except chop their head off and install a King that wouldn't be such a douche bag.
There is no power, in any Constitution, that would allow the govt or people, to overrule the King.
The only thing that a govt could do is sack the GG.
But the GG has the power to sack the govt.
Before the govt could get through the process to sack a GG, the GG would sack the govt.
In 1975 the GG (Kerr) locked the gates and turned off the lights so that the Whitlam govt couldn't present him with legislation.