Most political business is done behind closed doors; the speeches and votes are mostly performance art.
There's a great deal of exchange between politicians in different countries -- the International Parliamentary Union, various politically-aligned groups like the International Democratic Union and so on. Plus exchanges for young aspiring politicians. So practices and techniques tend to pop up all over the world. Maybe the "Default to No" came from Australia, or Britain, or the USA. I have no idea.
Defaulting to no is just common sense. It's a lot easier to undo a no than to undo a yes.
In a similar vein to Heinlein's idea of creating a house of legislature whose only power it is to repeal laws, I have thought that one of the underlying problems we have with government is this one-way trap of legislation; once a thing is enacted, it pretty much stays enacted forever. There's virtually no equivalent way to get something off the books. It's no wonder we just have more laws and more laws and more laws; how would the opposite result occur?
Defaulting to no is just common sense. It's a lot easier to undo a no than to undo a yes.
Except that in that case, it wasn't no to the law but no to an amendment to the law. By saying no, they were actually agreeing to more things in the law. It would have indeed be easier to later on add "block a site by IP address" to the law… (though that still wouldn't have made sense)
I've read in various new acts saying "such and such section in this act does not apply/ is void/ etc". It's a purely cultural problem preventing this, not anything written in law as far as I know.
Certainly there's no technical problems with it, but there's clearly a practical problem with it. Laws are rarely simply removed. Clauses may be struck, future laws may rewrite (and inevitably expand!) past laws, but it's very, very rare for something to simply be unambiguously removed. When's the last time the government simply eliminated an agency, for instance? It's not zero, but it's one of those cases where simply the fact that one must hunt for an exception to argue against the point is something I'd cite as evidence for my point.
There's a great deal of exchange between politicians in different countries -- the International Parliamentary Union, various politically-aligned groups like the International Democratic Union and so on. Plus exchanges for young aspiring politicians. So practices and techniques tend to pop up all over the world. Maybe the "Default to No" came from Australia, or Britain, or the USA. I have no idea.