Prorogation as Partisan Political Tool: The Australian Experience

The grant enabled Dr. Horgan to conduct a research trip, in 2012, to London for the purposes of consulting original documents and records  held by the UK National Archives.

Summary of the project:

Prorogation is a device routinely used in Westminster-style parliamentary systems when the governing party/coalition has largely completed its legislative agenda, and wishes to set out a new legislative programme. However, governing parties sometimes attempt to use prorogation as a political tool, by taking advantage of one of its essential features: the suspension of all parliamentary activity. Such attempts raise a question as to whether the Crown’s representative should, or indeed can, act to prevent such use of the Crown prerogative. The current project has three goals: first, to identify Australian precedents analogous to a recent Canadian case; second, to identify the factors that conduce to the use of prorogation as a partisan political tool; third, to examine the Crown representatives’ actions in these cases, the rationales for those actions, and the reaction of the UK Colonial/Dominions Office to the representatives’ actions, in order to better establish the extent of representatives’ discretion regarding the reserve power to deny advice to prorogue a parliament.

Gerard Horgan