In the recent Australian general election all House (of Representatives) seats were up for election and just over half of the Senate seats (half of each state delegation & all territorials). From what I’ve gathered the newly elected territorial Senators take office on the same day the MPs (MHRs?) do, but the state Senators don’t take office until July 1st, 2011. :eek: Almost 11 months from now. Why is this? I knew that Senators had fixed terms and the Senate isn’t dissolved (barring exception circumstances) like the House is. So why hold insist on holding House and Senate elections on the same day? Why do territorial Senators get to take their seats right away? Australia’s going to have a minority government which means there’s a good chance that new elections might end up getting sooner than normal, possibly even before the new Senators take office. What happens then? Is it a House-only election? Or is the other half of the Senate up for reelection with winners waiting until 2013 to take office?
You answered your own question - there are fixed terms. Plus, this particular election was called very early, normally there wouldn’t be an election till November or so. Also, expense - it’s expensive to hold elections, and to hold them several months apart is just silly, better to have the senators wait.
Because there are different rules for state and territorial senators.
I’m actually studying that right now and I don’t have my notes with me, but from memory it’s s109 vs s128 and how you read them against each other. (There’s also the HCA rulings in the Territorial Senators Cases No 1 and No 2, but I really don’t have my notes here, sorry…)
I don’t know the answer to this. We do have seperate ballot papers so there isn’t any reason we couldn’t have a house only election, although I suspect the odds that either Tony or Julia can’t form government are really very small.
Senators for the states begin their terms of office on 1 July following the date of their election (Commonwealth Constitution, section 13). This allows the 72 state senators (12 for each of the 6 states) to have staggered six-year terms, with only half of them up for re-election every third year at a general election. The state Senate seats that were contested last Saturday are the ones that were filled at the general election on 9 October 2004 (i.e. terms commencing 1 July 2005 and ending 30 June 2011). The continuing state senators, who weren’t up for re-election last Saturday, are those who were elected at the general election on 24 November 2007 (i.e. terms commencing 1 July 2008 and ending 30 June 2014). The only time this “staggered” pattern is disrupted is in the event of a double dissolution, when all state senate seats are up for grabs. After the election the state senators who have been elected are divided up into two classes: “long term” and “short term”. The first six elected in each state get the “long term” seats; the last six get the “short term” seats. A “long term” senator gets a 6 year term; a “short term” senator gets only 3 years. All terms are backdated to the 1 July preceding the general election. The Senate is then back “in synch”.
Senate elections are nowadays always held with House elections, in order to save the cost of mounting separate elections. But there was a period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the two houses were “out of kilter”, and elections for them were held separately. I think the general feeling now is that separate elections would be frowned upon by the voters, who hate any idea of waste, and who would be required to vote at *yet *another election.
Territory senators are in a different category. They’re much newer, only coming into being in 1975. And there are only two senators for each territory, so if they were to be elected in the same way as state senators, and have staggered terms, there’d only be one elected every three years. That would make it impossible to have a PR system of voting, which is how the Senate vote works. Therefore territory senators’ terms are simply tied to the House: they commence after a House election and they expire when the House is dissolved or comes to the end of its three year life.
If, post Saturday’s election, the various deliberations between the two major parties and the independents do not produce a stable government, it’s likely we’ll have another general election. That would involve dissolving the House only. State senators’ terms would not be affected. Territory senators would have to stand again for re-election.
Cunctator, you wanna take my Legal Institutions exam?
Sorry, what he said and I was posting in a hurry from work.