What is the big deal that the Senate has not met for about a month or so, except, perhaps, that opposition members long to hear themselves and see their images reflected in the media?

Maybe Mr A. J. Nicholson, QC, the leader of opposition business in the chamber, has a more compelling argument, but he hasn't made it. Indeed, Ms Dorothy Lightbourne, who leads the Government side in the Upper House, has offered the better case.

It is true that four Cabinet ministers can be appointed from the Senate, in which case they may choose, when required, to originate legislation in the Upper House.

But, the Senate, by constitution and convention, is primarily a review chamber where bills, tabled and debated in the elected House of Representatives, are sent for a second look.

Useful process

This process is useful, especially when the chamber is comprised of thoughtful members, lacking the hardened edge of ambition for high political office or of being steeped in the partisanship of the political hustings. In such a circumstance, legislation is reviewed with intellectual depth, rigour and sensible distance, rather than the narrow effort at point-scoring, which is now too often the case.

The last time we arrived at such a maturity in the Senate was when P. J. Patterson experimented with the appointment of 'independent' members and named Mr Douglas Orane, the CEO of GraceKennedy, and Professor Trevor Munroe of the University of the West Indies to the chamber.

But back to Ms Lightbourne's fundamental argument that the Senate has not recently had new bills from the House for members to do their primary job of legislative review.

It is not that members have been totally idle. Indeed, a number of senators have been sitting on joint parliamentary committees that have been holding hearings on a raft of proposed legislation.

Bigger concern

There are a handful of private members' bills on the Senate's Order Paper, half of which are in the names of government members.

The argument, by Ms Lightbourne's aides, that the sponsors of these bills were not ready to proceed to debate, was apparently not refuted.

Mr Nicholson's bigger concern appears to be the absence in the Senate of that exercise in the expulsion of hot air, known as the State of the Nation debate. Then, it seems, speaking becomes an end in itself.

The question is not how often the Senate meets. On average, a United States state legislature sits for 60 legislative days a year.

What is important is what is done when the legislature meets - that it accomplishes substantive work rather than its members merely mounting soapboxes.

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