So if we can welcome and good afternoon.
It's a pleasure to introduce to you speakers who are in Oxford working with us this time a visitor or academic visitor,
but always beautiful to have this Israeli studies discussion going on internally, as it were.
Dr. Tanaka, La Hora, Academic Research for the Year and Oscar de la Rosa, Ph.D. in law from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
She's also a certified lawyer. And most importantly, she's worked for 18 years.
She's has been working now 18 years in the States Attorney General Office at the Legal Counselling and Legislation Department,
a former research focussed on tort law in general,
and specifically on tort law as the enforcement mechanism by the state in cases of harm to public interests.
Her current research focuses on legislative produces in Israel in a comparative perspective.
In the title of her talk obviously derived from this is a a competition between members
of the parliament and governmental ministries on policy goals through legislation.
Israel is a case study to my thank you for coming. Thank you so much for inviting me.
I got the idea for this research project while working at the Ministry of Justice.
I was working with government ministries and with the Knesset, with the parliament on legislation,
and no one who has ever worked with the Knesset couldn't help but notice the very fierce competition between MPs and government ministers.
The Gmb's about policy outcomes.
The Government has its own policy, the employees have their own policy goals and they all want to make an impact.
And through legislation and I began asking myself what influences that competition and what are its outcomes?
And thus I reached the conclusion that I have to do a real research and not just so, not just along the way of working at the Ministry of Justice.
And that's how this project came into being. And this is the very general outline of the project, the very general questions I ask.
Well, the basic assumption is that there is competition between employers and then gmb's.
They all want to achieve the policy goals and they sometimes want to do it through legislation.
And the question is, first of all, what is competition through legislation?
What are its what is the meaning of this term and what are its characteristics?
And then what factors influence the competition and what are the advantages and disadvantages of competition through legislation?
Now, what I'm going to talk about is the work in progress.
I haven't published it yet and where I hope to publish it. So any question or comment would be most welcome.
I will show you some data that I have extracted from the National Legislation Database of the Knesset.
That's a search engine built by a department of the Knesset that contains the entire legislation of the State of Israel.
All the bills on the statutes, and if you are a Hebrew speaker, then you can search it very easily and online.
If not, then it's a bit more problematic.
And I also want to say that I was hoping I am still hoping to have a comparative perspective,
but getting it right and finding data, specific data on legislation in other countries is not an easy task.
I do have some general data. The only country which I have been able to find very specific data of decades of legislation is the UK.
So I'm going to show you towards it in some data as a comparison to Israel.
But despite that, what makes Israel a good test case, in my opinion,
is despite not having full comparative that I can I think I could say even at this
early stage that Israel is really I couldn't find parallel to what goes on in the.
Knesset in terms of legislation since 1949, we have had almost 43, 800 bills and 7000 statutes, which is a lot.
And I brought you as a preview or as a teaser, if you'd like data from the 20th when I said the last thing they said that dissolved in January.
And you can see for yourself the number of bills and the numbers of private members bills.
And this is unprecedented. I haven't seen anything like it.
And in the several countries that I've been able to retrieve, some dig down to.
Now, the Israeli legislative process is very simple because there's a unicameral parliament.
You don't have to go back and forth between House of Representatives or the Senate.
And I think what makes these really interesting is that you can find almost any political phenomenon, any kind of selection,
the candidates, a lesson method, any kind of political trick that refers to the political instability.
So we've had almost everything you can think of.
And also my I would call it my contribution to the perhaps the discussion about
legislation and what affects the competition between Nmps and government ministers is,
is what happens in Israel in terms of the struggle between branches of government.
I think it has it's very important to understand what happens in the Knesset, and I haven't seen much research on that particular question.
Competition through legislation is when both employers and EMS wish to give legal effect to a desired policy goal by a primary by primary legislation.
Now the government government ministers can do a lot of things to achieve policy goals other than through legislation.
But members of Parliament, usually they they can't they may supervise the government.
They may start a public debate on something.
But if they really want to change or to to be effective, then they have to legislate.
At least that's what I think in Israel.
And it can happen in several ways.
Sometimes they conflict. Okay, sometimes there's a bill that says cut, cut the allowance for the disabled.
And the government says the government says cut the allowance.
Of course the government is always in favour of cuts and the MP would say No, I propose a bill that says raise the allowance.
So that's completely that's conflicting policy goals.
But sometimes they compete for credit, not for policy goals because both the MPs and the government ministers propose the same policy goal.
But the competition is then who's the first to propose the bill and then who gets the credits.
Now, sometimes you only have a private member's bill because the government does not want to legislate,
does not want, as it says, I don't want to regulate this area, I don't want to interfere.
But the MP say no, we want to regulate.
So you only have you have conflicting policy goals, but only one bill, but that's still competition through legislation.
It is also important to note that one should make a difference between competition in initiation of the bills.
In proposing the bills, who gets the credit for proposing a bill on something?
But then it's a completely different matter. The competition for actually legislating the bills,
for going through the legislative procedure and turning making the bill become an act of parliament.
These are different incentives. These are different motivations.
And as it's worth mentioning, that government ministers have two sets of incentives.
One is their incentives as part of the government.
So they want to promote the government's policy, but then they have their own private incentives and their own motives for legislation,
because there are also political political personas in.
Of their party and independent of their government. So sometimes those incentives can conflict.
So it's important to to understand that you have competition between different players, the incentives,
what affects Coalition backbenchers and Opposition MPs, they may not be the same incentives and the same have the same effects.
And also it is worth mentioning at this early stage that it is usually unfair competition because in most
parliamentary systems government bills have some kind of formal advantage over private members bills.
We'll talk about it later.
What I found from the literature that I've read so far is that there are several factors that influence competition through legislation.
The first thing is what is known as agenda setting powers of the government and other veto players in the legislative process in many,
many, many countries in Europe and in other parliamentary systems.
The government has official agenda setting powers that give the government bills formal advantages versus private members bills positive powers.
That means that they have the power to promote government bills over private members bills,
negative powers, that sometimes they have the power to block permits.
Sometimes it's the reverse. Sometimes the parliament has. Parliament has the power to block government bills.
Partisan advantages. That means how the government uses its majority or the coalition to control the legislative process.
That's more important in case the government does not have many formal agenda setting powers.
If it has strong administrative powers, it doesn't need to use, you know, its political power.
But if it does not have strong agenda setting powers, then it needs to use the political mechanism.
Coalition agreements. Coalition discipline. Control of the Parliament through majority or coalition.
What is also important to note, and something that I intend to research later on,
is how does the approach of the next election affect the incentives to legislate or not to legislate,
both for government ministers and employees from Coalition and opposition?
Because at the beginning, after the elections, everybody's very happy, everybody's very enthusiastic and everybody's eager to cooperate.
But what happens when elections are looming and maybe people suddenly don't want to cooperate,
maybe they suddenly want to leave to finish what they've started?
Or maybe the government doesn't want employers to finish what they've started.
So this is something that is worth paying attention to. And of course, the different value of bills, strategic behaviour.
Not all bills are worth the same for the MP or for the Government Minister.
So there's this trade between them.
You you'll support me on this bill. I'll support you on this bill.
Promote this bill and I'll let go of this bill in return for something else, maybe.
So these are all things that are worth looking into.
I, I believe in the advantages of a competition in many areas, in many fields, in many markets.
And legislation is also a sort of a market.
So it's worth thinking about what are the advantages, what are the benefits of competition through legislation?
And I've put on some examples of what I think are the most noteworthy advantages of competition through legislation.
Obviously, governments in a parliamentary system they have or desire to have monopoly over public policy.
I mean, this is what they're elected for, to to establish a public policy and to execute their public policy.
But then competition helps to break that monopoly.
And breaking monopoly has has benefits. I also thought that sometimes you can define the situation as a cartel and not just a monopoly.
Because sometimes. The government and other influential private interest groups.
They all stand together and support this public policy with no competition from the private sector and not just the government.
So there's you can you can even talk about a cartel of public policy and private members bills
that compete with the government on that public goal that suggest a different policy goal.
They might help break that monopoly. And that has many benefits, as you can see.
Sometimes the government thinks that something to some policy issue is not important, but maybe it is to other people.
Sometimes the government is captured by the the government agency or the government
ministry is captured by the same entities that it is supposed to supervise.
And they, the government minister, only wants to implement policy that protects those entities.
And sometimes the public, the private member's bill can help the public understand that maybe it's time to look at the issue in a different way,
and maybe it's time to treat the those supervised entities differently in terms of information costs.
Well, sometimes private member's bill is bringing new information to the debate or they add new information.
And also sometimes it's it lowers the bureaucratic costs.
Anyone who's ever tried to pass a government bill through parliament knows how
difficult it is to get the government get going even before it reaches parliament.
How hard it is to get all the ministries and all the bureaucrats, you know,
agree to the bill and then agree to the amendments made to the bill during debate in Parliament.
And at least in theory, private members bills are supposed to be cheaper in terms of bureaucratic costs,
and there are also other benefits which are perhaps not economic, such as promoting cooperation between members of Parliament and their parties.
And also it gives the public a chance to get to know other political leaders than, you know, just the heads of the party.
But also competition through legislation has disadvantages.
We'll talk about it later.
When, when, when? I'll show you the data from Israel and how in competition for legislation in Israel, what are its disadvantages?
But it can overload the system if it's very if there are too many bills, it can really overload the system, wasting resources on minor issues.
That's always a question because like I said, if something might be minor to the government,
but not really minor in the eyes of the opposition or the public.
But the argument goes that, I mean, most major reforms, economic reforms or major regulations are usually government bills,
and private members bills are usually on technical or minor or minor issues.
Then why waste really? You know, scarce parliamentary really needed parliamentary time on on minor issues.
I think the most interesting argument against a competition through legislation is not just that the bypass is the public policy,
but it drives the government to regulate issues through other means.
Try to show you what happens in Israel and what our department personally has been doing the last few years in trying to avoid going to the Knesset.
Because if you think that you won't be able to get your bill through the Knesset, then you resort to other means.
I'll show you what happens. And also, of course, private members bills might also be a result of capture.
I mean, it's not just the government that is being captured by, you know,
evil private interest groups and lobbyists and peers can be captured just as easily and maybe even more easily so.
Let's talk about Israel.
Israel is a parliamentary democracy, which means the government enjoys and needs the confidence of the Knesset, of the parliament.
It has a small unicameral parliament, 120, in case I'll call them in case not in peace, if you don't mind.
Actually, it's between 80 and 90 in case they do all the parliamentary work.
Because as I will show you later, the government, the games and the games,
that is the deputy government ministers, sometimes between 30 and 40 government officials.
So it's only 80 to 90 in case they do the parliamentary work.
It's a very small parliament. Israel and now has 9 million citizens.
So it's a very small parliament. And since 912, since 2014, you need 3.25 threshold to get into the Knesset.
That was supposed to help the Knesset become more politically stable.
I'm not sure it has done what it was meant to do.
All governments since the establishment of Israel have been coalition governments.
What is important is the last three characteristics of Israel.
The control of the Ministry of Finance and of other ministries and of legislation is something that we'll talk about further.
But what really one has to know before we talk about the Israeli legislation is that since 1985,
the Ministry of Finance actually took control of Israel's economic policy,
and that has impact of the legislation of all ministries, not just the Ministry of Finance, because almost everything.
Israel is not a socialist economy anymore,
but it's still very centralised and it's still the government still has a lot of influence over what happens in the country.
You know that 93% of the land belongs to the state, for example.
So any reform on land or building or any reform that involves planning something
has to go through the state and thus has to go through the Ministry of Finance,
because almost any reform has effect on the budget or on the state's economy.
So this is very important when you talk about legislation, the attorney general in Israel that is this great controversy over his position in general,
not just the question of his involvement in the legislative procedure, but the process.
But what is important to understand that the attorney general holds with several hats.
One one of those hats is the head of prosecution.
I'm not going to talk about that. The other hat is the legal adviser of the government.
And as a legal adviser to the government,
the attorney general also advises the government on its position regarding private members bills and government bills.
Now, when I say advises the government, that is exactly the controversy.
Whether these are just opinions or advices that the government can, you know,
say, okay, we've heard you, we don't accept your opinion or is it binding?
We used to think that our opinions were binding.
Let the last few governments so differently.
But I will attempt to show you what what does it mean in terms of the legislative legislative process?
Okay. So I put here what I have written here is the formal general principles of the legislative process in Israel.
Most of it is found in the Knesset's rules of procedure.
You won't find it in primary legislation in an act of Parliament, and you won't find it in the basic laws that deal with government or Knesset.
It's all in that the rules of procedure, which are internal rules of the Knesset.
It's not that exceptional, that exceptional.
I mean, in many countries you can find the rules in on that legal level, not in an act of parliament.
But what really happens is as follows an MK decides that the.
He or she. They want to legislate something.
They've had a complaint. They've read about something in the paper.
They've met with some NGO or some private interest group that want to pursue some policy goal through legislation.
And they were convinced that it's a good idea that it would promote them, and that's a good policy goal.
So they write up or just take the bill that was written for them by someone else.
They write up a bill, they file it with the administration of the Knesset, and there it sits.
Now, most of them don't see daylight yet, but sometime the the the politics, they decide which bills they want to promote.
Okay. So they go to their praesidium, the chairman of the Knesset and his deputies,
and they give them the list of places they want to promote and the presiding.
They sit at weekly and they decide every week which bills to put on the agenda.
Also government bills and also PM bills. And what happens is that the government gets a week's notice of what PM bills are to be on
the agenda for next week on the plenum agenda and the Government's Cabinet for legislation.
That's a group of ministers and committee of ministers that it's their job to decide
what the Government's position will be on the on those private members bills.
And also what should the Government adopt government bills?
For example, if the Minister for the Protection of the Environment wants to promote Clean Air Act,
then the the this committee will decide whether the Government wants to adopt that as well.
So every week around 40 private members bills go to the plenum.
The government convenes on Sunday to decide what its position going to be.
When I started working for them in the Ministry of Justice, it was very simple.
Either the government voted to support the bill or to deny or to object to the bill.
In the last few years. What happened was that the government rarely objected, you know, to two bills.
Either they just took off bills from the agenda or they said, well, let's postpone the discussion,
let's postpone it for three months sometime in the future or support it under certain conditions.
But one can say that in total, the government does not support both Bill as they were written.
And without government support, a plan B cannot go go ahead because it needs support in the preliminary hearing.
It has to pass for four readings, not three.
And it needs government support and it's very rare for a PM, B, especially from the Opposition,
to proceed and become an act of Parliament without government support.
Now the Attorney General gives a legal opinion,
a legal review of every private member's bill and the government usually decides to go ahead with it, but not always.
And in many cases, when the Attorney General objected to a bill and the government decided to support it, and then it goes through to the Knesset,
if the government decides to support the PM b it passes the preliminary reading without
a debate before it reaches the plenum and then it goes through the next three readings.
There is a debate before the first reading in the committee and then in the plenum.
If the committee decides to vote on the bill and decides to support it,
it goes to the plenum and then it goes back to the committee for debate towards the second and a third reading.
And by the end, if the committee decides to vote in favour of the bill after all the amendments for the second and the third reading,
and if the plenum votes in favour, then it becomes an act of Parliament.
A government bill only has to pass three readings.
It usually begins at some ministry.
It is usually the idea it's from bottom up, so it's usually the ideas of the professionals of the ministry.
It is sometimes it's the. Idea is the policy that the Minister brings with him to the to the minister and ministry.
But usually it's the professional ideas of the professional people in the ministry and they suggest the legislation to the Minister.
He approves of it and then they write up a draft bill.
The draft bill goes through all the ministries and it passes the the Attorney-General
and a lot of changes and other amendments before it becomes a preposition,
the final preposition proposal of the Government.
If the government adopts the bill it becomes a government bill and it passes the first reading without prior debate.
It's automatic. And then the the the debate on the government bill.
This begins after the first reading tour, the second the third reading.
And then it's just like any other bill is passed in the same process and it becomes law.
It's, of course, worth it.
Obviously, bills cannot pass without cooperation of coalition parties and sometimes without the cooperation of opposition parties.
So there is, of course, a lot of politics, a lot of negotiations, a lot of give and take.
And that is what happens behind the formal, the form of the formalities of the copy.
Now, the government does not have any government does not have strong agenda setting powers in the legislative
process other than the requirement for three readings for government bills and four for peace.
It doesn't really enjoy much, many other advantages.
What is worth mentioning is what you see before you budgetary bills.
These are bills, private members bills that cost the state budget 6 million shekels and more.
That's around one one and a half million pounds, if you like.
And the government did not approve of the costs, did not give its consent for the costs.
So budgetary bill needs vote of the ascent of of the consent of at least 50 MP on every
reading in order to become an Act of Parliament and the presiding aims approval of a content.
That's also something that is only private members bills are subjected to and that at the present time will not allow for our bill to go to the
preliminary reading if it's racist or if it's undemocratic or if it it's against Israel being a Jewish state and the attorney general's position.
This this is also a major issue in the last few years because, as I've said, in many cases,
the attorney general objects to private members bills and they don't like it and
the coalition and peace don't like it and the government ministers don't like it.
So in the last few years, we only object if there is legal prevention,
which usually means that if the bill is unconstitutional, I'll talk about that in a minute,
or if there are serious legal difficulties,
which means that the bill is incompatible with the general legal theory or legal situation of of that particular area.
For example, we do have punitive damages in Israel, but if an M.K. proposes that in case of someone libelling or slandering someone else,
they should pay 2 million shekels as punitive damages.
Then that would not only be considered if not unconstitutional,
that would be considered as very a bill that has serious legal difficulties because that
is not compatible with the general theory on punitive damages in the Israeli tort law.
Okay. What the Israeli government does have is its partisan advantages.
The control of the Israeli government of the legislative process is done by the parties,
advantages by the control of the political institutions of the Knesset.
Vote of no confidence does not exist, practically does not exist anymore.
In the last 15 years or so, because in order to succeed in a vote of no confidence, the opposition needs to present an alternative government.
So it's not an effective tool on either side.
What is more effective in what is being used more and more in the in the last 15 years or so,
towards the end of the Knesset, is the power of the government to dissolve the Knesset.
And that is what Netanyahu has done in January.
That has been done previously in 2015 and also into 2013, when they feel that the government is losing its ability to control the Knesset,
the vote on dissolving the Knesset, and that stops in 2015.
It was done to stop a bill from proceeding the bill on Israel, the newspaper, Israel Hayom, for example.
Also, what is important to to note is that the government controls the Knesset by appointing the chairman of the Knesset.
I say chairman and not a person, because unfortunately most of them are men and the minister is the the MP and everybody.
Most of the men, only the the chairman of the state or the three committee is supposed to be someone from the opposition.
All others can be from coalition. Not all the time, but they have special powers in declaring the Knesset's rules of procedure.
They have specific agenda setting powers. They have a lot of influence over the legislative process.
So if the government controls the committee, it controls the legislation.
In that committee, a very important committee is the managerial committee, the Knesset committee, and it also lets coalition committees.
So the government has these advantages through its control of the of the Knesset.
And of course, when the government loses its control of the coalition or when the coalition discipline lessens,
then the government's control of the legislative process also lessens with it.
Okay, let's see some numbers. Some data.
Okay. Yeah. Okay.
So so I just this is just a table of the Knesset in terms of dates so that we would all see the dates of the Knesset, the first Knesset.
And in on I've included the Knesset were the 21st Knesset, although it really didn't do anything other than dissolve itself.
What you can see is that the life of the Knesset, it's I used to think that the Knesset said that we had elections every two, two years or so.
But but it's not we had you can see that elections were held until the what is it until the eighties.
They were held every four years in average. And then it began to to shorten.
But that is hardly the picture, the whole picture of of Israel's political instability.
If we have time, I'll show you more data regarding what it actually looks like, the political instability.
But I just wanted you to see what is important is to see the dates.
We have had 20 Genesis in 70, 72 years and let's get to the data on the bills.
So this is the number of the total number of bills submitted to the Knesset's Knesset's Praesidium, Perak Knesset.
So how many were just filed or submitted to the presiding?
And you can see I mean, the numbers are self-evident.
These are bills from all kinds of origin.
There's the private members bills, the government bills and CBS, that's committee committee bills.
There is a possibility of a committee as a group, the Knesset Economy Committee or a health and Social Welfare Committee to propose a bill of its own.
But the numbers are very, very small, like 20 bills, Preakness or something like that.
So I didn't I'm not going to waste time talking about them.
But you can. That's the last I said the 20th place.
That's where you can see the number for yourself.
And you can also see the change in the numbers, the success rate, how many bills became acts of classic.
So these are this is the success rate for government bills.
And also, you can see the grey line is the success rate, the percent.
And you can see that the success rate is dropping considerably from around 90% in 1949 to 57% in the last Knesset,
which is telling something I will will discuss that later on.
This is the success rate for a private member's bill.
Don't be overexcited about the 85 the success rate of this.
And what is it, the second or third?
I said, because if I'm not mistaken, the total number of bills was published was 13.
So if they had 85% success rate, that means very, very small numbers of bills that turned into law.
Yeah, 11, 11 bills. So and also you can see it was a11111 time, one night stand.
As you can see, there's a giant leap in the numbers of of of being bills proposed or filed or submitted to the presiding.
But the success rate is dropping and it yeah.
And to 4%. So most of these bills don't become acts of parliament.
I will show you later what happens to them according to stages of legislation.
And I mean, it's pretty, pretty interesting what this next slide shows you.
This is acts of Knesset by origin. Okay.
So the blue line is the show.
It shows us the number of the total number of acts of Knesset broken asset.
So the last one is 625 acts of the Knesset in the 20th going to said, okay, the one that dissolves in January.
And the grey data, you can see I put the number of PM.
So you can see that in some years in some Knesset, the number of parties,
the bill the acts of said that were originally in this is larger than the number of acts of Knesset that originated as government bills.
That's really interesting. And so far I have not been able to find any country that has any.
Is anything similar to that? Okay.
So the general success rate of bills, you can see that the Knesset has been has been able to legislate 80%,
90% of the bills in the fifties, but now only manages to legislate less than 10% of bills from all origins.
This is what happens to an legislated PM.
What happens to all this giant mess of private members bills?
Most of it goes untouched. It's not just that they try to legislate and they are unsuccessful.
88% of the bills are untouched.
They just sit quietly, lie quietly in the Knesset's archive.
Nothing happens to them from 90 and from 2015 to 2019, nothing happened to them, which is also very unprecedented.
If you look at the different stages of legislation, so the the orange data is the number of PM permits filed.
The yellow is not going through the legislative process at all.
And then you can see that also many private members bills are stuck, get stuck on the way in during the phase of the total, the first reading.
So they pass the preliminary reading, but they don't make it, they don't pass the first reading.
And then also some of them stop at the stage of the second and third reading.
They pass the first reading and they don't make it to the second and the third reading.
Government bills, most of them pass the first reading because it's normal, it's automatic, so they don't fail.
But what is interesting, I think if you look at the grey data,
then you'll see that more and more during the last naked government bills don't pass the second and third reading.
So they they somehow get lost in the process and they don't become active Knesset.
They just stay there.
Now, what happens to a bill that does not pass the legislative process and what happens to it after the elections?
If it's a government bill, it's a government bill.
A government will then the government has to ask the permission of the Knesset to really display the bill from if the
government wants to really dislike the bill and does not want to start all over again the first reading and everything,
then the government has to ask the Knesset's permission to really legislate from where it stopped.
So if it was stopped after the first reading,
the government would like to ask the Knesset the permission to stop the legislative legislative process from there.
And if it's PM B, then usually it has to start all over again.
So that's why you can see if you look at the Knesset archive, you can see the same bill with the only difference is the year because the bill says,
for example, I don't know, amendment number 25 to Consumer Protection Act 2011, 2013, 2015, 2020 probably.
So they just take the bill and they pass it on. They find it again with a different view and then it just lies there until the next election.
Okay, so what is interesting about these findings is I put my two conclusions in the head of this slide.
The Knesset is not very effective and legislature and what one can really see is a gradual weakening of the government.
And the Israeli government is slowly losing control of the legislative, legislative process.
And from the data that I have been able to information I've been able to find on other countries, this is not happening in other countries.
Now, what is interesting is that until the eighties,
the majority of the bills where a government bills now majority of the bills is private members bills.
And it is also interesting to see the decline.
Of the success rate is in decline. What is interesting to see is the the the historical decline.
I mean, the the the change the real change begun to to occur in the eighties.
I'm going to talk about that because it's important why that is.
But you can see that in every wherever you look at the what happens to the private members bills,
what happens to the government bills, what happens to legislation in general?
The eighties is the beginning of of of the change.
So so you can see that in the eighties until the eighties, 45% of bills passed the second and third legislation.
But starting from the eighties, it began to to decline.
And if you look at the government bills, that's even more interesting,
because you can see that the success rate of the government began to slowly decrease and then finally drop.
And that also began in the eighties and the nineties.
Now, these are the the general factors that one can think of is as explaining or influencing competition through legislation in Israel.
I want to talk I want to talk about. Those.
That's the last three, mostly the last three judicial activism and judicial review of legislation and the role of
the attorney general and the reaction to the Minister of Finance is control of the economy,
because these are things that I have not seen discussed very much in in literature.
And I think it's interesting. But also,
I want to talk to you about the eighties and the nineties as the key decades for competition
through legislation and to talk about these factors through the lens of the historical perspective.
Now, as you know, in 1977, the transfer of power from labour to law could begin, may happen is a variation of the word mahapatra, which is revolution.
I don't think they wanted to say revolution because it was not a revolution.
It was, you know, democratic elections. And there was no revolution involved, nothing like the French Revolution.
But perhaps to the people who voted, who were outvoted from the office, it felt like a revolution,
because I think that the trauma of the loss of power I'm not a sociologist,
but I think that the trauma of the loss of power by the Labour Party can explain a lot of what happened in
Israeli politics and also it can explain a lot of the changes that occurred in the legislative process.
Now the rise of judicial activism, of course, there's a lot of discussion about the judicial revolution.
That is the term that refers to the question of quantities of whether a bill is constitutional or not.
That is the revolution of the human rights, basic laws of the nineties.
But prior to that there was a rise of judicial activism,
which is the Court's growing interference in supervision of the government, not only in the areas of public law.
And this I can tell you as as a jurist, as a as a law scholar, not just in the terms of public law,
using a high court of justice on questions of public law, but also through expanding public authorities liability, for example.
That's also another channel the courts use to interfere more with government discretion and government's decision.
And both judicial activism in public law and judicial activism in private law occurred in the eighties.
They began to occur in the eighties.
Other things that happened in the eighties and nineties are changes to candidates election methods, notably, most notably primaries.
But not only that, and of course, the rise of the commercial media.
Until 1982, Israel had only one television channel, and the the emergence of commercial TV certainly had its impact on Israeli politics,
the constitutional revolution and the human rights basic laws.
Now, it's not that Israel had no protection of of human rights prior to those basic, basic laws and all the you know,
the old guard of judges and politicians are very offended and offended if someone says that.
But there can be no doubt that the introduction of the human rights basic laws changed legal and also political discourse about human rights.
And it certainly caused both the government and MP to introduce more bills that deal with human rights.
For example, the Equality for People with Disabilities Act and many, many others.
I mean, it's not I mean, Women's Equality Act that's something from the fifties,
but many, many bills would not have become would not have been proposed.
And there would be no acts of kindness it without this idea of human rights as constitutional rights,
which means that a bill they are perhaps superior to other rights and.
A bill of the Knesset or an act of the Knesset cannot encroach or dilute those rights
without facing without being proportional and for what is called proper purpose,
if you like. Okay. So what we can see since the eighties and nineties is changes in the balance of power.
Through the years the government weakens and the Knesset's committees, not a plenum,
is an arena for debate, but the Knesset's committee's strength strengthened.
You can see that in the growing number of amendments to the CAP which codify, you know, customs.
Customs are easily changed. The copies are not so easily changed to care for the Knesset through the procedure.
You can see other scholars have written about it, about the time the Knesset gives to pay bills at the expense of government bills.
You can see the reference to three books of research from 2000 to 1090.
I. My explanation for that is that it's a backlash.
It's a response to the of the Knesset, to the Minister of Finance's control of economic reform.
If you see this, all these changes go hand in hand with the splitting up of the economic arrangements bill,
which is the bill that goes along with the budget every year, contains the major economic reforms that the government plans for the next two years.
So if in the nineties and the early 2000, if that would be an enormous bill of 200,
300 articles containing all sorts of reforms that the Knesset would have to vote until December 31st or otherwise.
There is no budget and no time for debate and no time for deliberation.
The Knesset actually revolted against that, and they started splitting up the bill.
And more and more time is given to Knesset reforms and Knesset bills at the expense of the coalition and the government.
Even if the chairman of the committees are coalition members, it is very worth mentioning.
I'm not going to show you the beautiful graphs I've made of the political instability, maybe just one which I like in particular.
But what you can see is that although elections are held in average every four years, still the Israeli politics is very, very unstable.
Governments are growing larger, forming parties are becoming smaller.
And, you know, the parties and the lists, they just keep changing all the time.
You vote for a party and by the end of the Knesset, it has dissolved into three separate parties.
And you just I mean, it's quite a constituency because it happens.
This is my favourite graph. It shows you the number of the red one is the number of the MKs members of Knesset from the Forming Party.
Okay, so you can see that in the fifties Mapai had almost 50 MKs, but Likud had only 27 or 30 in the last Knesset.
But you can see what happens to the number of ministers and deputy ministers.
It's on the rise and that signifies weakness on the on the coalition of the coalition, not because if the coalition is strong,
then you can you don't need to by so many politicians and turn them into government ministers to ensure their loyalty,
primaries and vote seeking and all of that.
I don't have time to get into that.
It may be even, you know, almost obvious that if you have primaries, you have to you want to convince voters to vote for you by proposing more bills.
But look at what I found. I just you know, it's nothing.
It's not statistically meaningful, but I just wanted to see who was the most, you know,
the the MK with the largest number of bills written on him, and that's definitely from Hadash, which is a party that has no primaries.
They elect their employees by, yeah, a committee of some sort.
So he has been involved in a 350.
3500 bills.
One 1000 and 305 bills is number one.
Okay. So who's registered as one of the proposing increase in 3500?
But he's number one. So so in that he outranks all of the other members from primary parties.
Advantages and disadvantages. I really have no. Maybe just a few words.
What I think and what I think the data shows that the competition has advantages, but it also has severe disadvantages.
And I mean, overloading the system is you have to be there to fill it.
The constant pressure and the lack of meaningful discussion and the we call it horse trade.
This is what it has become in the last few years. Just, you know, you'll support me on this.
I'll support you on that. No discussion on the merits.
Again, it has many advantages. For example, Clean Air Act, isn't it?
Which is, you know, the the protection of environment.
It's not a government bill that was a private,
private member's bill because the government was captured by industry and would not legislate the Clean Air Act.
So that had to come from somewhere else. Like I said, Israel is not unique in the respect that it has.
This is this is the data from the UK.
So 32 acts of parliament in average the last 14 years, what, 150 bills per year and six members at a 188 getting in the Senate.
That means that were legislated and became act of parliament. 23 jobs out of 26.
I mean, this is a whole different universe, whole different number.
Okay. I have a few suggestions for change. I have not thought them through all the way.
I can only tell you that proposing a bill by a group of MKs is something that's been that's that's the way the Germans do it.
So a single MP cannot propose a bill.
Only 5%, at least 5% of of of the members of the Boulden style can propose a bill.
That is something that I will have to think about, because they're just, you know, ideas that I thought about the offer.
And we'll see what happens in the Knesset.
Number 23, we have apparently we are going to elections here February.
So we'll see. 23, 25. Oh, thank you.
Thank you very much.