Loss of Supply - Examples of Loss of Supply

Examples of Loss of Supply

• In 1909, the UK House of Lords voted against the "People's Budget", precipitating two general elections and the Parliament Act 1911, which limited the power of the Lords.

• In the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, the elected Senate wilfully delayed voting on a bill to authorize supply for the government, until the Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, should call an election for the House of Representatives. He was subsequently dismissed by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, on the basis of refusal to either resign or request a dissolution; his proposed course of action was instead to procure alternative supply money by non-parliamentary means. (Notably, Westminster convention requires the resignation of Government, or dissolution of Parliament, upon rejection of supply bills, which had not yet occurred—voting had simply been delayed. For this reason, among others, the validity under constitution conventions of the dismissal of the Whitlam Government continues to be debated to this day.)

• The defeat of Garret FitzGerald's government in a budget vote in Dáil Éireann in the Republic of Ireland in 1982; FitzGerald immediately sought and was granted a Dáil dissolution.

• On 9 March 2011, the Legislative Council of Hong Kong blocked a resolution for provisional appropriations, which, before 2011, had always been a matter of formality, pending the resumption of second reading debate and the third reading of the appropriation bill for the fiscal year from 1 April, which usually takes place in mid-April. Resolutions for provisional appropriations had never been voted by division until 2011. The government decided, on the following day, to table another resolution on 16 March, with the subhead for miscellaneous expenses reduced by HK$500m, merely for the sake of circumventing the requirements in Rules of Procedure that a negatived question cannot be tabled again.