Australian Senate

The Australian Senate is the upper of the two houses of the Parliament of Australia.

The Australian Senate was created in the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, 1900. From a comparative government perspective, the Australian Senate is almost unique in that unlike the upper house in other Westminister system governments, the Senate is not a vestigal body with limited legislative power but rather plays and is intended to play an active role in legislation. Rather than being modelled after the House of Lords the Australian Senate was modelled after the United States Senate and was intended to give small rural states added voice in a Federal legislature.

Although the Prime Minister and the Government is answerable to, and selected from, House of Representatives (the "lower house") the two houses have almost equal legislative power. The only exception is that the Senate cannot pass appropriation bills or impose taxation. That equality in part is due to the age of the Australian constitution; it was enacted before the infamous clash between the House of Lords and House of Commons in 1909, which ultimately resulted in the restrictions in the powers of the House of Lords in the Parliament Act, thus it reflected the pre-1911 Lords-Commons relationship.

In practice, however, most legislation (except for "private member's bills") in the Australian Parliament is initiated by the Government, which has control over the lower house. It is then passed to the Senate, which may ammend the bill or refuse to pass it. In the majority of cases, voting is along party lines (see also: conscience vote).

There are detailed conventions and rules regarding situations in which the Senate and the House disagree. If the Senate repeatedly refuses to pass legislation initated in the lower house, the Government may either abandon the bill, continue to revise it, or call a double dissolution (election for both houses of Parliament) and attempt to pass the bill at a subsequent joint sitting of the two houses.

The voting system for the Senate has changed twice since it was created. The original arrangement was a first past the post block voting mechanism. In 1919, it was changed to preferential block voting. Block voting tended to grant landslide majorities very easily. In 1946, the Australian Labor Party government won 30 out of the 33 Senate seats. In 1948, partially in response to this extreme situation, they introduced proportional representation in the Senate.

As expected for a body intended to provide greater representation to smaller states, the Senate is quite unrepresentative; Tasmania, with a population of 450,000, elects the same number of Senators as New South Wales, which has a population of 6 million. Paul Keating called it an "unrepresentative swill". But the proportional election system within each state ensures that Senate is much more diverse than the lower house, which is basically a two party body. Because of this the Senate frequently functions as a house of review.

The size of the Senate has changed over the years. The Australian Constitution requires that the Senate be as near as possible to half of the size of the House of Representatives, and it has therefore grown periodically. Currently, each of the six States of Australia has 12 Senators, while the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory have two each. Normally, half of the Senate is contested at each election, for terms of up to six years, but during a double dissolution, every seat faces re-election.

Significant events in the history of the Senate include its role in the downfall of the Whitlam Government during Australian Constitutional Crisis of 1975, and the Howard Government's bribing of Senator Mal Colston to obtain a majority, enabling the passage of a great deal of controversial legisaltion.

Parties which currently have representation in the Senate: Australian Democrats, Australian Greens, Australian Labor Party, Liberal Party of Australia, National Party of Australia, One Nation.

Parties which have been represented in the past: Democratic Labor Party, Nuclear Disarmament Party... [free traders, protectionists, early incarnations of the liberal & national parites..]

The Australian Senate is the model of some in Canada, particularly in the Western provinces, who wish to reform the Canadian Senate to take a much more active legislative role.

References

John Uhr, The Senate and Proportional Representation: Public policy justifications of minority representation, Working Paper no. 69, Graduate Program in Public Policy, Australian National University, 1999.

The Senate web site: http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/general/index.htm