The Senate
The Australian Senate has 76 members: each of the six states elects 12 Senators, and the Northern Territory (NT) and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) each elect two Senators. The several other Australian Territories have very small populations and are represented by Northern Territory and ACT Senators (for example, Christmas Island residents are represented by NT Senators, while Jervis Bay Territory residents are represented by ACT Senators).
Senators for the states serve six-year terms, with half the Senators from each state being elected at each federal election. The terms of the territory Senators coincide with the duration of the House of Representatives.
The Senate is elected both proportionately and preferentially, except that each state has an equal number of seats so that the distribution of seats to states is non-proportional to the total Australian population. Thus, although within each state the seats proportionally represent the vote for that state, overall the less populous states are proportionally stronger in representation for their population compared to the more populous states.
In each state, political parties which are registered with the Electoral Commission present lists of candidates, which appear as a group on the Senate ballot paper. Independents and members of unregistered parties can also nominate, but they cannot appear on ballot paper as a group.
Voters can vote for the Senate in one of two ways. They can number all the candidates, as they would with a House of Representatives ballot: but since there may be 50 or 60 candidates on the ballot paper, few voters do this. This is called below the line voting. Or they can simply write "1" in a box indicating the party for which they wish to vote. This is called above the line voting. More than 95% of voters cast their votes above the line.
When votes are cast above the line, they amount to accepting whatever "1,2,3,4,..." sequence has been pre-nominated by that party-or-group for that state-or-territory. When an election is imminent, such details (multi-page) can be inspected at the electoral commission's website, http://www.aec.gov.au. Concise single-page sortable tabulations of these pre-nominations have been prepared by Ondwelle Publications for 3 selected states for the election of 21 August 2010: Queensland, NSW and Victoria. — Also available are: Victoria 2007 and Victoria 2004. The latter is of some interest because it illustrates how overly-clever strategic preference-advice can seriously backfire. As explained briefly on page 2, that is how S.Fielding (as candidate for a minor party antagonistic to Labor) ended up being elected thanks to Labor's own preference votes! — a serious matter because Fielding then sometimes held the balance-of-power in the Senate during his six-year term.
Read more about this topic: Electoral System Of Australia
Famous quotes containing the word senate:
“We have been here over forty years, a longer period than the children of Israel wandered through the wilderness, coming to this Capitol pleading for this recognition of the principle that the Government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. Mr. Chairman, we ask that you report our resolution favorably if you can but unfavorably if you must; that you report one way or the other, so that the Senate may have the chance to consider it.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)
“As the House is designed to provide a reflection of the mood of the moment, the Senate is meant to reflect the continuity of the past—to preserve the delicate balance of justice between the majority’s whims and the minority’s rights.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)