We need to ask very carefully whether a country that currently has a fully elected national legislature should move backwards to a system in which a substantial part of Parliament is not directly elected by citizens.
Following the tabling of the Constitution Review Commission's report, which includes the draft Constitution, the Centre for Democracy and Dialogue is calling for deeper public scrutiny of several proposed changes.
Centre CEO Nilesh Lal says the organisation’s preliminary assessment is that the draft contains many significant and welcome constitutional reforms, addressing many longstanding weaknesses in the 2013 Constitution, particularly the concentration of executive power and weaknesses in institutional independence and accountability.
He says Dialogue Fiji made 22 substantive proposals in its submission to the Commission and their preliminary analysis finds that around 17 of those 22 proposals are reflected to some degree in the draft Constitution, including 12 that are substantially or fully reflected.
Lal says this is significant as many of the reforms they advocated were aimed at dispersing concentrated power, strengthening independent institutions and improving democratic accountability.
The CEO says the draft substantially reflects Dialogue Fiji's proposals to depoliticise constitutional appointments, strengthen the independence of the Public Service Commission, cap Cabinet at 15 members, limit a Prime Minister to two terms, strengthen the Bill of Rights and the test for limiting rights, strengthen access to information, strengthen judicial independence, constitutionally entrench the Public Accounts Committee with an Opposition chair, retain the four-year parliamentary term, restrict the use of expedited legislation, retain secularism and equal citizenship, and strengthen constitutional recognition of local government.
He says these are substantial constitutional improvements and the Centre believes they should be acknowledged and preserved.
However, Lal says their preliminary review has also identified a small number of potentially fundamental flaws and democratic regressions that require much closer scrutiny.
He says one of the most regressive elements is the proposed move away from the current proportional representation of electoral system to an mixed-member proportional system when the overwhelming evidence globally is that proportional representation systems are more representative and fair, and highly desirable for ethnically divided societies.
The Centre CEO says the proposed system is dominated by 26 first-past-the-post constituency seats and only 15 compensatory list seats.
He says the Commission describes its proposal as mixed-member proportional system, but the design is heavily majoritarian in effect.
He says the Centre has serious reservations about replacing Fiji’s existing national proportional representation system with a model in which almost two-thirds of elected seats would come from single-member constituencies.
Lal says this would represent a significant change in the way votes are translated into representation and warrants much deeper scrutiny, particularly in a multi-ethnic society with a history of exclusionary governance such as Fiji.
He says they are also concerned about the proposed reintroduction of unelected elements into the legislature through a 19-member Senate containing members appointed by political and traditional institutions.
They also consider the proposed reopening of the divisive debate about the common national identity of “Fijian” to be a significant concern.
Lal says their submission strongly supported retaining ‘Fijian’ permanently as the common civic identity of all citizens while fully protecting the distinct indigenous identity of the iTaukei people and the identities of all other communities.
He stresses reopening the common national identity risks weakening an important principle of common and equal citizenship.
Lal says the Centre would also closely examine provisions that give constitutionally entrenched political and legislative roles to traditional or ethnically defined institutions.
He says recognition and protection of indigenous rights, culture, land and traditional institutions are entirely compatible with equal citizenship.
The CEO says the question is whether those protections require unelected institutions to exercise substantial authority within the national political system.
He says its full assessment will distinguish between provisions that strengthen constitutional democracy, proposals that involve legitimate policy trade-offs, and provisions that it considers potentially regressive or harmful.
Lal says the Commission has produced a substantial body of work and many of its recommendations deserve careful consideration, but constitutional reform cannot be approached as an all-or-nothing package.
He adds that we should preserve the reforms that strengthen rights, accountability and institutional independence, while subjecting the provisions that alter electoral representation, the composition of Parliament, national identity and the role of unelected institutions to much deeper public scrutiny.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka says the recommendations in the report are not the final proposed amendments that will go before Parliament.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka says the recommendations in the report are not the final proposed amendments that will go before Parliament.
He says a Cabinet sub-committee has been deliberating on the Commission's proposed amendments over the past two weeks and making changes.
The Prime Minister says those changes will be the ones that make their way to Parliament.
