gillard total failure, page-61

nor i dare say are you.

section 40 is quite clear. the speaker only gets a CASTING vote in the event of a tie. the following is from senator brandis who i might add is a lawyer (sc) and also much more learned in these matters than your good self. he is not the shadow attorney for nothing. whats your qualification?

S. 40 of the Constitution deals with the manner in which voting in the House of Representatives is conducted:

?Questions arising in the House of Representatives shall be determined by a majority of votes other than that of the Speaker. The Speaker shall not vote unless the numbers are equal, and then he shall have a casting vote.?

s. 40 provides, in terms which do not admit of ambiguity, that the Speaker may not vote on the question before the chair, unless the numbers are equal, in which event he has a casting vote. The words in the first sentence of s. 40 make a clear distinction between an ordinary (?deliberative?) vote ? which is prohibited - and the Speaker?s casting vote.

To extend pairing arrangements to the Speaker would, in effect, be to treat the Speaker?s casting vote as if it were a deliberative vote, which is a plain violation of the prohibition in s. 40 (?The Speaker shall not vote??). A further and entirely separate reason why Mr Oakeshott?s position seems to me to be untenable is that pairing arrangements exist, by convention, between the Government and the Opposition. Quite apart from the constitutional hurdle posed by s. 40, it seems to me that there is an inherent conceptual difficulty about including an Independent member in the pairing arrangements, simply because there is nobody against whom to ?pair? him. In any event, that issue does not arise since, for the reasons I have outlined, an arrangement to give the Speaker a de facto deliberative vote would be inconsistent with s. 40 of the Constitution.

For the purposes of this advice, I take ?pairing? to be the practice whereby members proposing to vote on opposite sides of a question before the chair, abstain from voting so that their votes, in effect, cancel each other out; this is usually done in order to enable members to be absent from the House without affecting the result of a division. The pairing arrangements are made by the Whips.