What exactly is it that a defeated government loses and its successor acquires? The question is typically answered by using the word 'mandate', which doesn't amount to much more than saying that in a constitutional democracy the elected government is, well, the elected government.
Governments, of course, like to pretend that there is much more to a mandate than that. Those faced with the prospect of negotiating legislation through an upper house in which they don't possess a majority, which is mostly the case in Australia at federal level, usually insist that their election victory conferred a right to expect that legislation arising from their platform will be passed. The people have chosen them, they argue, and therefore must want them to fulfill all their election promises, too. If MPs and senators vote against bills implementing those promises, they will be treating the will of the people with contempt and repudiating the outcome of the election.
There are several problems with this claim. Among them is the majoritarian assumption criticised in an earlier Eureka Street article by Max Atkinson: in parliamentary systems winning a majority of lower-house seats confers the right to form a government, but it doesn't follow that the preferences of a majority of voters possess any privileged moral insight that must be heeded.
For example, opinion polls routinely record majorities in favour of restoring the death penalty. Does that mean parliaments are therefore obliged to do so? Politicians in all the mainstream parties have rightly resisted that conclusion, chiefly for ethical reasons but also because stable government would be impossible if every item of legislation had somehow to be validated by the dictates of popular opinion.
The notion that a mandate to govern confers the right to implement all the policies in an election platform — a notion now being vigorously asserted by the Abbott Coalition Government, and which previous Labor governments have sometimes invoked, too — essentially regards an election as a referendum on a set of policies. This is inherently implausible and all politicians know that it is, however much they invoke, when in office, the magical 'mandate, mandate' mantra in the hope of browbeating opponents into supporting contentious legislation.
For one thing, treating an election as the voters' verdict on the platforms of the various parties assumes that when people enter the voting booths on polling day they are fully informed about what is in those platforms. Anyone who