In 1974 I travelled from Oxford to America for graduate study. I had discovered that politics was my thing. My declared intention was to learn how Britain's government worked by seeing how another country managed its affairs. Although I fell in love with the United States, I quickly lost faith in my goal. The institutions and the ways of politics in America and Britain were too different. For the next 20 years I felt rather a fraud as I attempted to teach comparative government.
In 1967 I came to Canberra and also fell in love with a country. But this was different. I found that as long as I was careful not to impose British answers, British questions proved remarkably relevant in my exploration of your governing ways. In 1967 very little had been written about the processes of Australian politics. For six months I watched Parliament in King's Hall [Old Parliament House] and I interrogated politicians, public servants and academics. I repeated the exercise in 1972. These visits produced a number of lectures and articles and broadcasts.
At the urging of the great Henry Mayer, I distilled these into The Canberra Model, published here in 1973 and in England a year later. The title was chosen simply because so much had been written about ''the Westminster model'' of parliamentary government and I wanted to explore how Australia, with its British roots, had evolved its own contrasting ways of managing affairs.
One of the first things Australia taught me was constitutional humility. My countrymen still tend arrogantly to assume that parliamentary democracy flows outwards from Britain. They do not recognise Australia as a co-equal innovator. The Australian secret ballot originating in Victoria in 1857 was, in all its detail, made the model for Britain's 1872 Ballot Act. Much more recently some variants of proportional representation, tested in Australian states, have been tried in Britain. You led the way with women's suffrage. You showed the world beneficent consequences of compulsory voting and you demonstrated an exceptionally successful federal system. The British have long needed to accept that the trade in constitutional ideas is a two-way affair.
I could not attempt a Canberra Model again today. The literature on the practices of Australian politics has vastly increased. It would take months just to read oneself into the subject. Moreover, the ways of Britain and Australia have drifted apart in the past 40 years, most notably in the growing power of the European institutions over British law as well as the increased role of select committees at Westminster.
Many of the questions dealt with in The Canberra Model still seem relevant today. I brashly ended the first chapter with a set of challenges. Forty years on, some of them remain worthy of comment
Parliament: How much has the federal Parliament reformed its procedures? Has the quality of debate changed? How much has the geography of the new building altered the relationships of the principal actors? I spent two months in 1996 on a Senate Fellowship in the freshly completed palace on Capital Hill. Its long corridors gave a fresh meaning to that familiar phrase ''the tyranny of distance''. But what has it done to the inter-relationships between the chambers and the members and the government?
Bicameralism: The 1984 change from five to six senators per state has much reduced the likelihood of any government having a working majority in the upper house. In fact, since 1984, no administration has sustained a clear numerical majority throughout a full parliament. Has this made politics more consensual?
Ministers and public servants: In my book I observed that ministers tended to spend six months of the year at home in their states and that, when in Canberra they tended to work from Parliament House. It did seem that physical separation from their departments diminished their control over their public servants. Is this still true? Has the balance of power between politicians and public servants changed? Paul Kelly tells me that power has moved towards the politicians.
PM and the cabinet: How far has the relationship between Australian prime ministers and their ministers evolved? The ''prime ministerialisation'' of government has been a striking development at Westminster in recent years. Has it been manifest here?
Federalism: It used to be said that if a federation was successful, its component members would become so unified that the need for the federation died away. However, in most successful federations, after the initial harmonisation, there has been a constant ebb and flow of power between the centre and the periphery. Gough Whitlam was, I think, a centraliser. But since then some states seem to have become more assertive. How far, over the past 40 years, have there been significant shifts in the balance of power between the federal government and the states?
Party balance: Over the past 70 years the electoral balance between Labor and anti-Labor has remain remarkably even. Malcolm Mackerras, who has done so much to simplify the interpretation of elections with those two devices - the preferred vote and the pendulum - has supplied me with essential data.
In the 36 general elections since the coming of preferential voting in 1919, the outcome of the nationwide preferred vote has fallen outside a 60-40 range only once (in the James Scullin disaster of 1931): in only four other contests (1929, 1943 and 1975) has it been outside a 45-55 range. In as many as 31 out of the 36 elections, the division has lain between 45 per cent and 55 per cent. In 12 of these the party gap has been very close - between 49 per cent and 51 per cent. I know of no other country that has had so balanced a two-party division over so long a period.
I know that the simplifications of ''the preferred vote'' distort the story. There have been ephemeral party splits and other parties have come and gone. Nonetheless, the essential stability of the party system has been one of the most striking features of Australian politics. What is the glue that has sustained this remarkable uniformity throughout a period of such far-reaching change? What national forces, constitutional, cultural or geographic are at work?
Volatility: In the 24 elections between 1922 and 1980, the swing in the preferred vote between one election and the next averaged 4.3 per cent. In the 12 elections since 1980 it has been significantly less - 2.5 per cent. Is this diminution swing an indication of greater stability in Australian politics? Is it attributable to more settled partisanship?
The timing of elections: For many years my life has been conditioned by the timing of elections, both in Britain and Australia. I have been desperate to know when the next election would take place - and, even more, when the date would be announced. For The Canberra Model I composed a neat chronology, showing the gaps between announcement, dissolution and polling day in every election from 1940 to 1972. The longest gap was 106 days in 1966 and the shortest was 33 days in 1940.
In Britain, with a five-year parliamentary term, we have had much more tactical playing about with election dates. In Australia a precedent has been set by the Prime Minister. On January 30, she gave 227 days' notice of a poll on September 14, a sharp contrast to the 41-day average in federal elections from 1969 to 2010.
The contrast between our countries has been because our five-year parliaments leave more scope for variability. The choice of date in Australia has been constrained by a traditional three-year expectation and by the expediency of avoiding half-Senate contests. Has the logic of election timing in Australia changed since I wrote about it in 1973? Has it ever had a crucial effect on the result?
Sir David Butler is an emeritus fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. This is an edited extract of an address he gave at the ANU on April 9 to mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of his book on Australian politics and government, The Canberra Model.
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