Constitution of Fiji: Chapter 6 - Part 3: The Senate

Part 3: The Senate

• See main article: Senate of Fiji

Part 3 of Chapter 6, comprising Sections 64 through 66, establishes the Senate, or "Lower House," of the Fijian Parliament.

The number of Senators is set at 32. The term of the Senate is synchronized with that of the House of Representatives: a five-year term, or less, if the House of Representatives is dissolved sooner. Membership qualifications are the same as for the House of Representatives. Senators are officially appointed by the President, but his role is a mere formality, as Section 64 requires him to ratify the nominees of the Great Council of Chiefs (14), the Prime Minister (9), the Leader of the Opposition (8), and the Council of Rotuma (1). The Prime Minister's nominees generally come from his own political party or coalition. Except for the Prime Minister's party, the nominees of the Leader of the Opposition must represent every political party with more than 8 seats in the House of Representatives, in proportion to its total membership. Persons proposed by the Leader of the Opposition must have been selected by their respective parties, not by the Leader of the Opposition himself. If the event of the office of the Leader of the Opposition being vacant, the Prime Minister must adopt the role of the Leader of the Opposition in filling the 8 Senate seats, and must follow the same formula that would be required of the Leader of the Opposition. If a seat in the Senate becomes vacant through the death or resignation of a Senator, the vacancy is filled by the same party by which the former Senator was nominated.

The Senate has had a rather colourful history. It owes its creation and continued existence to the perceived need to balance the competing interests of Fiji's ethnic communities, as well as to accommodate Fiji's traditional chiefly power structure. To safeguard their interests, ethnic Fijians wanted a formal role for their traditional chiefs. A dominant built-in role for them was unacceptable to the Indo-Fijian community, but they were willing to accommodate the chiefly system in the framework of an "upper house," modeled on the British House of Lords. As part of the compromise of 1970, agreed upon by the main political parties representing the two major communities, a Senate was established with 22 members, with 8 nominated by the Great Council of Chiefs, 7 by the Prime Minister, 6 by the Leader of the Opposition, and 1 by the Council of Rotuma. As either the government or the opposition would almost certainly be led by an ethnic Fijian, the effect was to give the ethnic Fijian community a built-in two-thirds majority in the Senate.

After the revolution of 1987, instigated by ethnic Fijian nationalists, the Senate was expanded to 34 members. Indo-Fijians were outraged by the reservation of 24 Senate seats for nominees of the Great Council of Chiefs, giving them well over a two-thirds majority. One Senate seat was reserved, as before, for a nominee of the Council of Rotuma. A further 9 Senators were to be appointed by the President, after "consulting" with the Indo-Fijian and other communities. This extreme imbalance was one of the greatest grievances of the Indo-Fijian community, and in the constitutional review of the mid-1990s, all parties agreed to restore the 1970 model, with some changes. Reserving 14 Senate seats for nominees of the Great Council of Chiefs gave them the quota (more than a third) required to veto amendments to the constitution, while reserving seats for Government and Opposition nominees, the latter reflecting the political composition of the House of Representatives, guaranteed an acceptable, if not numerically equitable, measure of representation to Indo-Fijians and other minorities.

Interesting and perhaps significantly, the reform of the Fijian Senate coincided with, and had close parallels to, constitutional reforms in the United Kingdom which altered the composition of the House of Lords. According to reforms of the late 1990s, some 500 hereditary nobles elect 92 Lords from among themselves to exercise voting rights in the House of Lords; there are also some 600 Life Peers nominated by the Government and Opposition. Sir Paul Reeves, the former Governor General of New Zealand who advised Fiji's constitutional convention of the 1990s, was very familiar with the British constitutional reforms, and it is therefore not surprising that Fiji enacted reforms so similar to those of the United Kingdom. The 14 nominees of the Great Council of Chiefs correspond to the 92 Lords chosen from among the nobles, while the nominees of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition correspond to Britain's Life Peers (although, unlike Life Peers, they are term-limited).