Australian Election Primer, 2022 Edition

[halloranelder]

 Hello everyone, Uncle Random here.

 

This Saturday is election day in Australia. This post is a brief rundown on what's going on behind the scenes and a bunch of the "why"s and "wherefore"s.

 

If you are an Australian citizen over the age of 18 you are required to register to vote*. If you are registered to vote in Australia you are required to vote in this election.

 

* If you are an Australian citizen and leave the country for long enough, your registration will lapse. "Long enough" is a number of years.

 

To all the Americans yelling about being forced to vote, be aware that Australian voting laws are designed to make it as easy as possible to cast your vote, so for us it is not the onerous chore it can be in the US. In Australia, elections are required to be on a Saturday, polling places are plentiful (longest I've had to walk is 15 minutes), postal and early voting opened about 3 weeks ago, and employers are required to make sure their employees can vote on Saturday if they are working. 

 

So, all in all, an easy thing.

 

As per usual in Australia, this federal election is actually two elections in one. We will be voting for a new House of Representatives (also known as the Lower House) which has all 151 seats up for election. We will also be voting for just over half the Senate (also known as the Upper House), with 40 of the 76 seats up for election (the reasons why I will explain later).

 

In Australia the two elections can happened separately but rarely do. The reason for this is that the Senate has (mostly) fixed terms while the House of Reps has variable terms. There can be instances where an election for one house is required but not the other, but mostly this is avoided because it's cheaper to run them together, and also historic records show that holding the two elections separately usually results in the party that's in government to do much worse than normal. Since it's the party in government that chooses when the elections are held, they prefer not to do worse. :)

 

Members of the House of Reps start the job the moment their election is confirmed. With the election on Saturday, the vast majority of them will be confirmed by Monday. The first sitting of the new parliament must be within 30 days of the election, and the parliament automatically dissolves (and triggers the next House of Reps election) three years after that first sitting if it hasn't been dissolved earlier.

 

Four of the Senators (two for the ACT and two for the Northern Territory) follow the same rules as the House of Reps.

 

The rest of the Senators have fixed 6 year terms, starting on July 1 and ending on June 30 six years later. There are 12 Senators for each of the States (Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia) and six of each states Senators are up for election every three years.

 

So, that means 151 members of the House of Reps and 4 Senators will start their job within 30 days of the election, most likely within seven days of the election, and 36 Senators will start their job on July 1.

 

As I said, mostly the elections happen together, but... Senate elections cannot occur more than 1 year before the end of the term. As a result, if the next election was held on the last Saturday of June 2024 it would only be a House of Reps election, but if it was held on the first Saturday of July 2024 it would be for both Houses, since the next Senate terms ends on June 30 2025.

In Australia the Head of Government is the Prime Minister, and is not elected separately. The Prime Minister (or PM as they are usually referred to) is the leader of whichever party holds the House of Representatives. As a result, party politics means that the PM will tend to change over time, as the leader of the party changes. Quite often this happening will be beaten up in the media as "un-Australian" and "not the leader the people voted for" and all that sort of thing. However it is actually very Australian, as it's what has been happening for over 100 years now, and since they didn't vote for the previous PM, not having voted for the new PM doesn't really matter.

 

I will be doing two more posts, detailing how to vote for the two houses, and how your vote is handled.